The partisan political landscape today would never have been predicted a dozen years, or two dozen days, ago. And yet the current alignment, I would argue, is in line with the Republicans’ and Democrats‘ longstanding basic character as the oldest and third oldest political parties in the world.

As I argued in my 2019 book How America’s Political Parties Change (And How They Don’t), the Republican party has always been centered on a core group which has been considered, by its members and by others, as typical Americans, but who are not by themselves a majority of an always diverse nation.

The core group of Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans was white Northern Protestants, enough to win him 52 percent of popular votes in free states and almost all their electoral votes. Republicans’ protectionism, opposition to high taxes and foreign allegiances added support from immigrant and foreign workers in the early twentieth century,

Republicans’ regional base shifted as Eisenhower and Nixon won 50 percent of Southern votes in 1952-60, but Republicans didn’t get a higher percentage of the popular vote for Congress in the South compared to the North until 1992. At the same time, evangelical Protestants trended Republican, but the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich party’s base still tilted toward the affluent and highly educated.

But that Republican party is part of history. Unsuccessful presidential candidates like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum and the Tea Party movement were the harbinger, and Donald Trump, though winning only 46 percent of primary and caucus votes in 2016, was the wave of the future. Trump accelerated the movement of affluent college grads out of, and the movement of (the much more numerous) non-college and non-metropolitan whites into, the Republican party.

Only one of the party’s previous national nominees, the late Bob Dole, showed up at any of the three Trump conventions. But after comparing the Trump and Biden presidencies, millions of Hispanic and black non-college grads have followed their white counterparts into a Republican party that, for the first time since the Depression of 90 years ago, shows signs of outnumbering the Democrats.

And Republicans definitely out-enthusing Dems. A downscale party depends on high turnout, and Trump’s less-than-an-inch escape from assassination enthused a party in a nation which many citizens, since the death of the second and third presidents on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, have considered the beneficiary of divine guidance.

Since 1832, when Martin Van Buren organized its first Democratic national convention in 1832 to nominate Andrew Jackson for a second term (and Van Buren for vice president), the Democratic party has been a coalition of outsiders, disparate peoples not considered by themselves or others as typical Americans, but who when working together can make a mighty national majority.

In the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, it was a coalition of white Southerners and the immigrant masses of great Northern cities, split down the middle on civil rights, but able to stick together to vote for the economic interests of family farmers and unionized factory workers.

As the country changed, the Democratic coalition frayed. The Southern governors, big city bosses and industrial union leaders who dominated mid-twentieth century Democratic conventions saw their constituencies fall away a generation later.

The Southern charm and adept triangulation of Bill Clinton, plus cultural issues like abortion, brought affluent college grads into the Democratic tent, and Barack Obama’s election produced a top-and-bottom coalition that seemed enduring, momentarily.

But the Clinton-Obama Democrats may have stage-managed things too cleverly. Bill Clinton cleared the field for Al Gore in 2000, and after the one close and extended fight for the nomination in 2008, Barack Obama cleared the field for Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the meantime, the pro-defund-the-police left, which has shown its clout in big city mayor and prosecutor elections, threatened to grab the 2020 nomination for self-proclaimed Socialist Bernie Sanders.

Blacks, one-fifth of the party’s primary voters, determined the Democratic nominations in 1992, 2008 and 2017, and, steered by South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, did so again for Joe Biden in 2020.

Now that Biden has been driven off the ticket by party leaders, including former president Barack Obama, the substitute nominee must almost certainly be Kamala Harris, chosen as vice president by Biden after he promised to select a black and a woman.

A party that is a coalition of disparate constituencies can scarcely afford to disrespect a constituency so large and assertive as black Americans, given their history, have been and are. And yet, before Biden dropped out, a larger percentage of blacks appeared set to vote Republican for president than in the sixty years since the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater 60 years ago–and all for a rookie politician who is far from a consensus-builder.