The 2024 Election Marked The Culmination Of A Half-century Transformation In American Politics

Donald Trump’s sweep of the swing states and popular vote victory have left Democrats wondering why economic pessimism drove voters away from Kamala Harris, despite a “strong” economy. They’re also desperately trying to figure out how Trump managed to make inroads into Black and Hispanic working-class communities. 

Answering these questions is critical for the party to bounce back in 2026 and 2028. But they also miss the broader picture. 

The 2024 election represented the consolidation of a slow transformation in American party politics. In the mid-20th century, Democratic and Republican support was rooted in a particular combination of class politics and political geography, with Democrats’ emerging strength centered in blue-collar areas, especially in small cities and factory towns across the urban industrial North, and Republicans enjoying far greater success in middle-class suburbs. Over the ensuing 75 years, however, that electoral map has slowly, but inexorably, inverted, thanks to changes in the U.S. economy that have opened the door for cultural politics to drive Americans’ partisanship.

During the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrats slowly became the party of the (largely white) working classes, who were the intended beneficiaries of his plethora of New Deal programs. This relationship was cemented by an economy rooted in the industrial production of goods in cities, as well as the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 — which gave industrial workers the right to organize. This combination meant that American workers became part of an organized, politically coherent working class majority. It also meant that the Democrats’ new voters were geographically concentrated in northern, industrialized cities and towns.

The Democrats remained the dominant party in the U.S. until the 1950s. After the Federal-Aid Highway Act passed in 1956 — which made it possible to commute into the city for work — many middle-class, often ideologically conservative white people abandoned attempts to “defend” city neighborhoods and schools from the Black population, and instead moved to suburbs. This turned the suburbs into Republican strongholds, as issues like busing, school prayer, and sex education mobilized parents into the GOP.

Read More: History Reveals How Donald Trump Captured the Industrial Heartland—And a Path Forward for Democrats

The result was a class-based politics in the U.S. — perhaps for the first time. But from its inception, the relationship between class, geography, and party politics rested on two shaky foundations. First, the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 suppressed racial politics. Second, cultural issues like abortion had not yet become partisan and many weren’t even political. Instead, they remained scarcely discussed private matters. But as liberal social movements emerged and mobilized in the 1960s and 1970s, and conservatives organized their own counter-movement to oppose measures such as the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, legalized abortion, and more, these two preconditions broke down.

Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, the economic and organizational foundation of America’s class-based politics started to erode. Domestic manufacturing jobs began disappearing as companies increasingly relied on automation or moved production to countries where labor was cheaper. Unions came under sustained attacks from Republicans, as well as employers. The result was that many American workers, particularly those without a college degree, faced a decline in the quality of work available to them: the share of workers receiving “decent” wages (two-thirds of the mean wage for American workers) fell from 61.5% to 55% between 1979 and 2017. 

But even as the country shed manufacturing work, the economy witnessed extraordinary growth in professional and technological jobs as part of the new “knowledge economy.” These gains and losses, however, were not distributed evenly across space. While large cities benefited most from new knowledge economy jobs, the small towns dotted across the industrial Heartland — the former backbone of the Democrats’ coalition — suffered. 

In 2019, I visited three of these places: postindustrial cities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Indiana, which had all been part of the white, working-class, New Deal coalition. Like so many others places that were once integral to the Democratic coalition, two of these cities are now firmly Republican.

In Minnesota, the town I visited was still grappling with scars from economic decline. The community’s largest employer, which had been a union shop since its workers won a contentious labor battle in the late 1930s, went through multiple bankruptcies and layoffs in the 1980s and 1990s. Ultimately, in the late 1990s, it shuttered. When the good union jobs left, young people followed. The result is that the county has lost 20% of its population since 1980 and has aged at a much faster rate than the country as a whole.

The loss of the plant meant more than just economic decline for the town. It also changed the fabric of the community’s civil society. Although the union that had represented the workers at the defunct company still exists, it is no longer the political organization that it was during its earliest days, when it fought employers for workplace protections alongside engaging in activism and politicking to further protect the working class.

The result is that, much like in other similar places throughout the country, unionization no longer equates to working-class political socialization that helps bind workers to the Democratic Party. Instead, as one interviewee from Indiana explained, unions have become more of an “insurance policy,” in case something goes wrong on the job.

These changes have clear implications for contemporary politics. “When I was Democrat, the Democrat Party was for the workers,” explained a man I’ll call Keith, a retired, white union worker living in the small Minnesota town. “They’re not anymore, you know, that’s gone.”

Keith was one of many people who helped turn his community to the right in 2016, and helped keep it there since. After watching the economic and civic foundations of their community crumble, Keith and many others began to worry that their town was dying — and that no one was doing anything to help them. 

By 2016, the GOP had capitalized on this sentiment, offering residents like Keith something to blame for the plight of their town: immigration and Democrats pushing socialism. This ultimately drew many residents of this Minnesota town to the Republican side.

Read More: How Trump Weaponized White Rural America’s Shame

These postindustrial cities and towns explain why former swing states like Ohio are now solidly red, while former Democratic strongholds like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have become the ultimate swing states. 

If the turn to the Right across the American heartland had been the only change during this period, it might’ve spelled doom for the Democrats. Instead, though, a countervailing force has been developing over the last 30 years. Just as economic decline and cultural politics were driving industrial towns rightward, the burgeoning knowledge economy and cultural politics were driving suburbs leftward. The process began in some of the largest metro areas, places like Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago. More recently, distaste over Donald Trump’s politics have prompted Southern suburbs to begin to migrate toward Democrats.

Today, the number of knowledge economy workers — people who are more likely to embrace the Democratic Party’s socially liberal agenda — in the country’s largest cities and their surrounding suburbs continues to grow. As one interviewee from Belmont, Calif., a Bay Area suburb, told me in 2022, he thinks of the classic “Bay area liberal” as someone who is “pro-choice” but could be more “fiscally conservative.”

Taken together, the transformations in postindustrial communities like Keith’s and in affluent suburbs like Belmont mark a near-complete inversion of the political geography and class politics that dominated American politics in the mid-20th century. Many of the same working-class towns and cities that once propelled the Democrats’ coalition are now overwhelmingly right-leaning.

The opposite is true of many of the suburbs that were once Republican strongholds: they’re now the sites of greatest growth for the Democratic Party. Growing suburban liberalism has put Georgia, Arizona, and even North Carolina on the map for Democrats. Just a few cycles ago, Democrats didn’t even run in Georgia; and yet in 2024, the Atlanta suburbs were one of the few places where Democrats made gains.

This basic political geography means that Democrats might need to ask themselves a broader question as they look to rebound. Instead of asking, what might they do differently to recapture the working class votes necessary to win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and therefore the Electoral College, the question may be more, what kind of economy and civil society do they need to build to change and expand the political map?

Stephanie Ternullo is assistant professor of government at Harvard University. She is the author of How the Heartland Went Red: Why Local Forces Matter in an Age of Nationalized Politics.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.