Over the last forty years, the Democratic Party has lost its grip on industrial areas that used to constitute the so-called “Blue Wall,” which were replaced by educated, cosmopolitan cities as the party’s chief voting bloc. How can we explain this new political equilibrium? Did the Democrats decide to move away from working-class voters to focus on the educated elite by offering different types of policies? Or, on the contrary, is the working class seeking out policies that are different from those it looked for in the 1970s? Longuet-Marx’s research project details the degree to which the evolving conditions and preferences of working-class voters—versus the parties’ changing ideological stances—account for their political realignment. It offers a unified framework for analyzing the interaction of political demand and supply resulting in political outcomes combining fine-grained electoral results with detailed candidate positions. It proposes a breakdown of observed political realignments into four elements: changing voter demographics and working conditions, changing voter preferences, changing party positions, and changing party discipline.
Beyond this study of the changing profile of Democratic voters, the data and conceptual framework developed in this research project and supported by the CPE grant are also instrumental in two other of Longuet-Marx’s research projects studying the connections between labor market institutions and electoral behavior in the US.
