A review by libra17
The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump by Alan I. Abramowitz

5.0

The Great Alignment is a detailed review of patterns of ideology, party affiliation, and voting patterns over about the last 75 years. There is a lot of information documenting the changes in all three pieces of the USA's political scene since the rise of the voting coalition that passed the New Deal. Throughout this, the tone of the book is neutral and mostly ignores the 2016 presidential election in the interest of laying out the facts about historical alterations in the patterns that had extreme influence on the 2016 election. The Great Alignment doesn't start examining the 2016 election in any substantial way until the last three chapters of the book, but those last three chapters use the information provided over the previous seven chapter to coherently and thoroughly explain the influence of a variety of factors on the election (negative partisanship, economic discontent, racial/ethnic discontent. etc). The only complaint I have with The Great Alignment was that - perhaps in an effort to maintain a neutral tone, it was considered too tangential, there was little data, or something else - some issues are only mentioned in passing, such as the influence of the Civil Rights Movement on party platforms (and, thus, voter affiliation), voting barriers, and the demise of the Fairness Doctrine. Overall, though, The Great Alignment is a great book for understanding how the modern electorate has come to be so polarized and the actual history of how that polarization has come to pass.