Obama-Romney Was the End of an Era

Barack Obama's victory over Mitt Romney in 2012 seemed at the time to herald a "new era" in American politics, one of Democratic dominance fueled by "young, secular and nonwhite voters," writes Nate Cohn in a New York Times analysis. But the emergence of Donald Trump changed everything, and now the Obama-Romney race "looks more like the end of an era: the final triumph of the social movements of the 1960s over the once-dominant Reagan Republicans." Instead, it has been Trump and his brand of "conservative populism" that has fundamentally altered politics. Before Trump, the two parties essentially hashed out the same predictable arguments every four years from their staked-out territories.

"Republicans represented Reagan's three-legged stool of small-government fiscal conservatism, the religious right and foreign policy hawks," writes Cohn, while "Democrats represented the working class, change and the causes of liberal activists." Now the familiar patterns are gone. "Trump champions the working class, rails against elites, strives to protect American jobs and criticizes traditional U.S. foreign policy, all while Democrats defend the establishment, norms and the old foreign policy consensus." Consider that Robert F. Kennedy and Elon Musk were supporters of Barack Obama. Read the full piece, in which Cohn wrestles with whether it all adds up to a true political "realignment." Either way, "it's a new era of politics." (More politics stories.)