Divergent Realignments?

Why the Tories Squandered the Realignment Opportunity and the GOP Consolidated their Realignment

Why did the British Conservatives squander a generational chance to realign politics, whilst the US Republicans consolidated their own Realignment. In this post, I’ll argue that the squandering of the Realignment by the Tories didn’t happen because of forces outside of the control of Conservative politicians. It wasn’t an Act of God. Instead, a failure to take the Realignment and its voters seriously, combined with a series of flawed decisions meant that the Tory opportunity disappeared almost as quickly as it emerged.

The British Conservatives comprehensively blew their Realignment moment. So much so that they are now in third place in almost all of the Red Wall seats that they won for the first time in 2019. Whilst the 2019 gains were stark, so were the 2024 losses, with the entire Realignment being completely squandered:

By contrast, US Republicans accelerated their Realignment moment, increasing their grip on Blue Wall counties and winning over more working class, Black and Hispanic voters in 2024.

They registered a swing towards them in almost all counties. And built on their previous gains amongst working class voters of all ethnicities.

As Nate Silver pointed out in an excellent Substack, this was even seen in the voting changes in New York’s working class boroughs:

What did the US Republicans do right that the British Conservatives got woefully wrong? I’d argue the Americans took four things seriously that their British counterparts didn’t - the Realignment itself, Realignment voters, immigration and reindustrialisation. If the British right (whether it be in the guise of the Tories or Reform) wants to reignite the Realignment then they should learn the lessons of the Tory failure to build on 2019 and the Republican consolidation.

And they should think very seriously about this. The Red Wall might have returned to Labour, but Labour’s vote in those seats is not even close to where it was in the latter years of the 20th Century. What was once a familial relationship between industrial seats and the Labour Party is now, at best, a grudging one. It’s up to the British right to learn from past mistakes and make the Realignment permanent.

But there’ll be plenty of time to discuss that in future Substacks. But first - what went wrong for the British Conservatives and right for the US Republicans.

A Failure To Take The Realignment Seriously

For many Tories in the days and months after the 2019 landslide (at least until Covid intervened), the election meant that the job was complete. They regarded the Northern and Midlands seats that had voted Conservative for the first time as being permanently in the Tory column. This was a catastrophic error. Rather than thinking seriously about how to make the Realignment permanent, they quickly fell back into politics as usual.

This excellent podcast discussion between Oren Cass and Henry Olsen, which discusses the 2024 US Presidential election has a fascinating detour into the UK Realignment. They argue, correctly, that after building a working class coalition in 2019, Conservatives failed to govern in a way that respected their new voting bloc. Whilst Republicans were willing to change their party around their new support base, the Tories displayed no such adaptability. Indeed, only a few years after 2019, they seemed to have tired of the Realignment.

Too many Tories failed to properly understand why they had won, making it difficult for them to deliver on promises and difficult to win again. Whereas the 2019 campaign had illustrated a willingness to challenge neo-liberal orthodoxy in order to secure a better future for post-industrial towns, the actual governance fell short of this promise.

The Conservative Party didn’t display a sufficient willingness to change in order to deliver what they had promised their new voters and to adjust to the realities of a changed politics. As such, the dramatic volte face from the promise 2019 to the libertarianism of Truss, followed by renewed austerity, can be seen as symbolic of a Party that had failed to take the Realignment seriously.

The same could be said of much of the “wonk class” around the Tory Party. With the honourable exception of Onward, most of the right of centre think tanks continued to push out the kind of ideas that could have been pushed out decades earlier.

Admirably consistent maybe, but clearly not indicating a seriousness about addressing the opportunities and challenges of a changing political geography. Consolidating the Realignment would have required a resolute focus on the needs of “left-behind” places and a level of ideological flexibility that too much of the centre-right wasn’t able to make.

Contrast this to how the US Republicans reacted. The intellectual rigidity of the GOP in the 90s and 2000s now looks unrecognisable. The tremendous work of American Compass has built a considerable intellectual foundation for a new conservatism in the US. And even the Heritage Foundation, formerly a bastion of neo-liberal orthodoxy, embraced tariffs and a changed economics.

A Failure To Take Realignment Voters Seriously

“It’ll play well in the Red Wall”. This was a refrain often heard in Westminster in the year or so after 2019 - generally about a long-term hobby horse of that politician and about a topic that was of marginal interest to Red Wall voters. This desire to “project” on working class voters, rather than listen to them was representative of a failure to take new Tory voters seriously and ensure that their priorities were reflected in policy.

The sad truth is that too much of the British centre-right failed to properly understand the needs, priorities and concerns of Red Wall voters. Beyond “Getting Brexit Done”, there was little articulation of what Conservatives wanted to achieve for their new supporters. The Northern working class might have been crucial members of the 2019 Tory electoral coalition, but they were still woefully unrepresented in the broader Tory political class.

Voters who had backed Brexit and then voted Labour for the first time did so in anticipation of change. Sadly, in too many cases they went from being “taken for granted” by Labour to being “taken for granted” by Tories.

It probably came as little surprise that Conservatives thought it appropriate to unceremoniously dump the entire Realignment agenda in 2022, only three years after the Realignment election.

The election of Liz Truss might be remembered best for its political catastrophe, but it should also be remembered as a time that the Tory Party finally decided that it didn’t have the patience, the discipline or the willingness to pursue a politics that reflected the concerns of their new voters.

Instead, a manifesto based on the Realignment was binned and replaced with a hyper libertarianism almost designed to scupper the Realignment from the beginning. This, followed by the return of a managerialist austerity following Truss’s downfall, showed scant respect for the voters who had voted Conservative for the first time in 2019 and displayed a clear message that their priorities didn’t matter.

As Henry Olsen argues in an excellent piece for Commonplace:

[Trump] is not the first leader of a conservative-populist coalition. Two others—Sweden’s Fredrik Reinfeldt and Britain’s Conservative Party—have tried to do what he now attempts. Both failed to meet the test when it came, destroying their new coalition in the process… Both failed for the same reason: when push came to shove, the leaders chose the old base rather than the new converts. In so doing, they drove the new voters away, irrevocably splitting their coalition and allowing their leftist adversaries to regain power.

Again, this can be contrasted to how the American Republicans have consolidated their Realignment. Greater steps have been taken to better understand new working class GOP voters and their policy priorities. And the choice of JD Vance as Vice President, with his upbringing in Appalachian poverty and commitment to a “working class capitalism” is symbolic about how far they have been prepared to go to entrench the US Realignment.

The Republicans have displayed more of a willingness to adapt to their new voters, whereas Conservatives ultimately expected their new voters to adapt to the party.

A Failure To Take Reindustrialisation Seriously

Probably the greatest commonality between the Realignments in Britain and in the United States is the importance of communities that were devastated by the closure of heavy industry. In England, all but one of the former coalfields voted in favour of Brexit and communities that had once been dominated by coal, steel and manufacturing voted Tory for the first time in 2019. In the United States, the rustbelt communities that had once been dominated by heavy industry became decisive voters in the past three Presidential elections.

Reindustrialisation, reshoring and “bringing manufacturing back home” became an essential part of the American conservative offer. Oren Cass, one of the most influential intellectuals on the American right has cogently set out the “Conservative case for reindustrialization” and the think tank he leads has led a concerted effort on the US right to build a case for the renewal of domestic manufacturing, through an activist industrial policy, with an element of tariffs. Rebuilding American industry is now a policy with cross-party support in the United States.

Such support for reindustrialisation had a short-lived upsurge of interest on the British right. Indeed, I made the case on the BBC’s Rethink series and in Little Platoons. Theresa May became an enthusiast for industrial policy. Levelling Up done properly would have been based around reviving manufacturing in post-industrial places. The Levelling Up White Paper was clear that government “must support high-growth businesses and reverse the historic decline in manufacturing in the UK.”

Despite these promising beginnings, British Conservatives rapidly lost interest in efforts to reindustrialise the economy, rushing back to more comfortable laissez-faire ideas and, with the honourable exceptions of the likes of Nick Timothy and Michael Gove, not giving enough attention to the changed circumstances of a post Covid, more fragmented world. The case for reindustrialisation is one that we will return to repeatedly on this Substack, but the failure to properly place reindustrialisation at the centre of their post 2019 offering was a failure that cost the Conservatives dear.

A Failure To Take Immigration Seriously

Properly controlling immigration was an essential part of both realignments. This was based on the need for an economic model that didn’t depend on low paid labour and properly invested in domestic skills and domestic industry. A key plank of the Vote Leave campaign was the desire to regain control of Britain’s borders and the 2019 realignment was partially based on the Conservative promise to reduce immigration.

What happened since then has been well documented. Rather than reducing legal immigration, Conservative governments presided over record net migration.

And this was down to deliberate policy changes after 2019 that meant that the UK had amongst the most liberal immigration policies in the West.

This seemed a near certain route to alienating Realignment voters who had been promised lower and controlled immigration. By contrast, the American Realignment was consolidated by the failure of progressives to at all control the Southern border, meaning that Republicans could own the issue and consolidate changing voting behaviour.