If nature abhors a vacuum, then American politics rebuffs linear extrapolations. History is littered with trends that promised to give one party absolute dominance—until internal contradictions tore them apart.
In 2002, journalist John B. Judis and think-tanker Ruy Teixeira penned The Emerging Democratic Majority, which projected that the tectonic trends of American life would soon give Democrats a durable political majority. This new majority would rely on a combination of Democrats’ traditional working-class base, women, a swelling number of college-educated and ethnic-minority voters, and the growth of urban metropolises. Judis and Teixeira’s argument informed the thinking of a generation of progressive policy thinkers and political strategists. With Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory, the golden fields of Democratic dominance seemed at last in sight, and it even had a name: “the coalition of the ascendant.”
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