From country club to Sam’s Club

Examining the roots of party politics realignment

In 2001, when Tim Pawlenty told the Minnesota State Republican Convention, “We are the party of Sam’s Club, not just the country club,” it seemed fanciful. The previous year, Al Gore beat George W. Bush among voters earning below $50,000 annually by margins of between one point for those earning $30,000-$49,999 to 20 points for those earning under $15,000, while Bush won by 12 points among voters earning over $100,000, according to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

In 2025, Pawlenty looks like a seer. Last year, Kamala Harris lost among Americans earning under $50,000 annually by two points, while Donald Trump lost by four points among those earning over $100,000. In “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP,” pollster Patrick Ruffini examines this realignment.

Education has replaced income as a strong predictor of an individual’s vote. CNN found that Bush beat Gore among college graduates by one point, while Trump lost to Harris by 13 points. More education means, on average, higher income, so the Republican vote is getting poorer and the Democratic vote richer. And, as income is correlated with race, the Republican vote is getting less “white” and the Democratic vote more so. The Roper Center found that the swing toward Republicans from 2000 to 2024 was two points among whites, eight among blacks, and 27 among Hispanics.

“[T]his is happening not because [the GOP’s] economic message has changed,” Ruffini writes, rather culture:

…is the key driving force behind these recent shifts. That cultural divide is between cosmopolitans and traditionalists, and, here, nonwhites and working-class whites stand together on the side of tradition.

Progressives stand on the other side. Ruffini notes that 70 percent of Hispanic and 69 percent of working-class voters think that America is the greatest country in the world, while 66 percent of “strong progressives” disagree. Fifty-eight percent of Hispanics and 57 percent of working-class voters say that racism comes from individuals, while 94 percent of strong progressives say it comes from structures and society. Among both Hispanic and working-class voters, 55 percent believe that “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard.” Eighty-eight percent of strong progressives disagree.

As cultural issues have come to the fore in American politics, these divides between the working-class/ethnic and progressive elements of the Democrats’ vote have widened, making working-class and minority conservatives more likely to vote as conservatives than as members of an economic class or ethnic minority.

Why are cultural issues gaining prominence now? Tension between the labor and liberal elements of the Democratic coalition is nothing new. Ruffini argues that the increase in the share of the population with college degrees in recent decades offered the possibility of a winning electoral coalition that catered to their concerns. But, drawing on Ronald Inglehart’s notion of “postmaterialism,” which postulates that as people get richer, they place less weight on economics as an electoral factor, Ruffini explains that these concerns are not only different from those of the working class, they actually reflect social and cultural beliefs largely antithetical to theirs. The concerns listed on the “In this house…” lawn sign, ubiquitous in swankier Twin Cities neighborhoods, “had little to do with the animating purpose behind the Democratic Party of yesteryear,” Ruffini notes; “the issues it raised were ones of identity…”

Democrats embraced this. Outlining the party’s electoral strategy in 2016, Chuck Schumer said: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” In retrospect, this was unwise.

This realignment is obliterating the politics of class, and the politics of race is, mercifully, following it into the dustbin of history. The happy prospect of a post-racial democracy does not seem to have occurred to progressives, but the United States is moving in that direction. For now, Democrats are bewildered by the declining potency of their two strongest cards: class and race. It requires frantic fanning to generate the flames of class or race antagonism that the party’s electoral fortunes depend on, which accounts for their increasingly unhinged rhetoric.

If the politics of culture has replaced them, the Democrats are on the losing side. An emerging Republican majority is now as likely an outcome as a Democratic one. To secure it, Ruffini argues that Republicans need a laser-like focus on the concerns of working-class Americans, which, he claims, might involve reexamining some of the core economic tenets of conservatism since Ronald Reagan. The future of American electoral politics could see the Democratic Party of George McGovern pitted against the Republican Party of Pat Buchanan. Even Tim Pawlenty didn’t see that coming.