The Great Political Realignment of 2026

0:01Robert Siegel:This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:18Robert Siegel:Hi, I'm Robert Siegel in conversation about politics with New York Times opinion contributor E.J. Dionne. Hello, E.J. Great to be with you. And joining us for the first time, Sarah Isger, editor of SCOTUS blog and also author of Last Branch Standing. Welcome. Thanks for having me.

0:38Robert Siegel:There is lots on our plate. We seem to have reached an impasse with Iran. We're still blockading their ports. They're still controlling the Strait of Hormuz. For us, that's it from the Middle East this week. Instead, we're turning to the midterms. The Supreme Court's Voting Rights Act decision is already changing congressional maps in the South. And we'll look at how the parties are faring in primaries across the country and at two states that are heating up ahead of November. But despite the difficulties imposed by time zones, we're going to start by taking note of President Trump's trip to China.

1:11Robert Siegel:E.J., what's different between this China trip of President Trump's and the one that he made in his first administration? Yeah, I think that if you look back to Trump in his first term, you would not have predicted that people fear he might sell out to China where there is active worry about what he's going to do. And I think the second thing is a radical shift in China's perceptions of the United States. Li Wan of the New York Times had a really powerful piece this week about how not just nationalist opinion, hardline opinion in China, but consensual opinion has shifted to the idea that the United States is definitively in decline.

1:54And they're sort of talking about Trump as having a big role in that. There was a piece by a nationalist think tank under the headline, Thank Trump. And they talked about him as an accelerator of American political decay. And when you looked at the sort of orchestration at the beginning of the trip, it's clear that Xi and the Chinese regime know they have to put on a good show for Trump and make him feel great. But then right out of the box, Xi was also very tough on Taiwan. And so I think there's a real feeling that right now, especially with the war in the unsettled, the war in Iran, I'm sorry, I am mentioning it, in the unsettled position that it's in, the United States is just not in the same position it was either in the first Trump term or in the Biden term, where Biden had actually built coalitions in Asia to counteract China.

2:49Robert Siegel:I suppose we should note that the Chinese have decidedly lower tolerance for disorder and protest than we do. Quite so. I would argue that one of the biggest differences between our relationship with China from Trump's first term to now is almost more domestic. It is Americans interest in foreign policy and what's going on in China and our own extreme polarization that's happening here in the country so that in the first term there were real conversations about what would happen if China invaded Taiwan and what that would look like in America. You're not hearing that conversation anymore because nobody here believes that there would be some sort of bipartisan or unified response.

3:39And Trump's relationship to the world looks so different than it did from his first term. His first term was a maybe a one standard deviation away from Republican politics for the previous 40 or 50 years, the sort of Reagan three legged stool. This administration is two, three standard deviations away. It's very hard to see where the germs of Reagan republicanism still exist. And it seems that Trump maybe thinks of or treats Russia and China as co-equals in a way. Sort of we've divided the world up into three sovereigns, Russia, China and the United States, and he will treat them as such, which is very different, of course, than a Cold War Republican Party mentality.

4:30I think that's a really good analysis. I like the standard deviations idea. And I think we should say that when Trump came in, his toughness on China actually became something of a bipartisan position, that Joe Biden was tougher on China than his predecessors were before. Trump. But I think the problem now is a lot of the Republicans who in their heart of hearts really disagree with this have been very reluctant to speak up and defend this earlier view. And I think Trump, just as in Iran, he has allowed Iran to remind the world of what they can do in the Strait of Hormuz, his tariffs against China reminded China of what it could do on rare earths.

5:13And he really backed off the tough tariffs on China and actually gave it to our allies, really was much tougher with our allies than with China. And it's a very bizarre turn that I think does owe to this theory of three hegemons in the world, if I can pick up what is probably Chinese language here. You know, you talk about the lack of Republican response. I do think some of that is when you have this political realignment happening so quickly where the Republican Party of 2026, again, is such a break from the Republican Party of 2012. And Trump still has such a hold on what it means to be a Republican that is divorced from policy or political philosophy of, you know, conservatism, let's say.

6:03It's dizzying for a lot of these Republicans. You see this in Indiana where he can still defeat Republicans in primaries who don't go along with what he wants. And so if you are a Republican senator right now, let's say, they don't know what the foreign policy of the Republican Party is because it has shifted so, so quickly, even from Donald Trump's election in 2024 and what he was running on as his foreign policy. again, to the extent we think that election was about policy, which I don't think anyone does. But, you know, the vibes based theory of politics even then has some idea of what the foreign policy is.

6:41We have moved away from what that was even two years ago.

6:44Robert Siegel:And Trump doesn't clarify matters by by stressing very, very much his personal relationship with Xi as opposed to our national relationships. Well, that appears to be what the foreign policy is for Trump. It's always about his personal relationships, which is a theory of foreign policy, by the way. It's just hard for a party to follow that, again, to the extent that we think, frankly, political parties still exist right now as cohesive policy units. And to have an American president who seems to be so eager to say how friendly he is with Putin and Xi is actually genuinely frightening, at least to me.

7:25Robert Siegel:Yes, because they're not Canadian. Well said.

7:56Robert Siegel:It's presumed that most of those Republican members would be white. Sarah, I heard a podcast you did where you discussed with David French, you discussed this ruling for an hour. There's obviously lots there. You're a court watcher. You're a conservative. Is this a good decision? It depends. It depends whether you're asking if it's a good decision on the law. Is it a good decision for the effects it will have on our politics for America? I am not going to defend, nor do I think any of the members of the court would defend the idea that partisan gerrymandering is good for America. What the court has said is that there is nothing in the Constitution for them to anchor themselves to to determine what is OK legal partisan gerrymandering and what isn't.

8:40It is up to Congress to determine that. They have chosen not to do so. But the court's only job is to say who gets to decide. And they're saying we nine people do not get to decide about partisan gerrymandering. So then if you follow from there, you have the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. And we have held that that prevents racial gerrymandering, using race to put someone in one district or another for the purpose of diluting their vote, for instance. And then Congress did pass the Voting Rights Act, of course. They amended it in 1982. So to apply to redistricting, we really didn't do that until the late 80s or after the 1990 census.

9:24So racial gerrymandering for good versus for bad is a relatively recent phenomenon. And so how those two interact is pretty important. The 14th Amendment says no racial gerrymandering. But if you're racial gerrymandering to create majority minority districts, then that's OK. And it made sort of a hash of the law because once again, in Louisiana that brought this case, Louisiana creates one majority minority district. They get sued from black voters and a court says you have violated Section two of the Voting Rights Act. You must draw an additional district. So Louisiana is like, OK. And so they draw a second majority minority district.

10:07They get sued by white voters who say you have racially gerrymandered. And a court says, you're right. That's not allowed. And Louisiana is like, what? Either way, we get a court order saying this doesn't work. And what the Supreme Court has said is unless there is evidence of a racial gerrymander, the using race for the purpose of putting someone in one district or another, we are going to presume that's a partisan gerrymander. E.J., I think the reason you're having some difficulty in being ambivalent about this decision is because it's a really, really horrible decision that violates some of the very principles that the court claims should be upholding.

10:47Congress should decide this question. Well, Congress did decide this question in the Voting Rights Act when it passed a law. Racial gerrymandering actually goes back a long way. The reason Congress changed this law is states like Mississippi were drawing districts that very consciously cut up the black vote so that black voters could not be close to dominant or even near majority in any of the districts. And Congress said that when you have all white delegations in states with very, very large minority populations, minorities are not being represented. And the court says, oh, well, we've gotten past these racial problems.

11:27And in Shelby Beholder, the decision where the court began its wrecking job against the Voting Rights Act, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a great line where she said, it's like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet. We didn't have discrimination because Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. I really think this is going to go down as a Plessy v. Ferguson decision because, you know, the separate but equal decision, because the court is really tying Congress's hands with this. It's saying it's OK to discriminate against a black voter because they're Democrats. And so immediately all these southern states rushed to get rid of all of these black majority districts, proving the point of the Advocates of the Voting Rights Act.

12:16Robert Siegel:Sarah, I think you have something to say about that. I think what you have said is internally contradictory about this. We have held, for instance, that it's OK that in New England, which is about 60, 40 Democrat, Republican, there are no Republican congressmen. We don't draw districts for proportional representation based on people's religion or based on their party affiliation. And yet we said that we were going to treat people differently on the basis of race, that in fact you would be in one district versus another because we presume that your race is the most important thing about your voting behavior.

12:53And the court over 20 years has been on a project to remove that kind of, quote, beneficial racism from American law. John Roberts wrote 20 years ago, the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. So this is right in line with the affirmative action decision, understanding that people disagree with that. But it's this idea that somehow it is OK as long as you are treating race essentialism because you think you're doing something good for the person.

13:24Robert Siegel:But isn't there something odd about this discussion, which is we know that in the southern states, at least, Republican and Democrat are almost a translation of white and black. Highly correlated. And therefore, they correlate so much that to say we're not doing this on the basis of race, we're doing it on the basis of party, is as if to say, well, we're doing it on the basis of race by another name. So Justice Alito made this point, but I think it's well taken. Yes, at a general election level, it's completely, you know, I think it's a 0.9 coefficient, something very, very high for race and party.

14:02But what you would need to show is an intraparty racism, that a white Republican would rather vote for a white Democrat than a black Republican, for instance, or that a black Democrat would rather vote for a black Republican than a white Democrat. And that is evidence that nobody has been able to show. And of course, there are these examples, whether it's Tim Scott in South Carolina, Will Hurd in Texas, Byron Donalds in Florida, all black people elected in non-black majority districts. And it's the primary election where you would need to show the race problem, not the general election, because that is inextricably linked with partisanship.

14:42Adam Serwer in The Atlantic had the best line is if you read this decision, those who are trying to enhance black representation are seen as racist. Those who are trying to reduce black representation under this court's ruling are seen as non-racist. That's kind of absurd. And the reason it's absurd is that the 14th Amendment was passed in significant part to get rid of discrimination against black people. You cannot get rid of discrimination against black people if you don't think about race. The notion that trying to remedy racial inequality without ever thinking about race, that doesn't work.

15:24And that's why Congress passed the civil rights laws. It's why Congress passed voting rights laws. And they were supported at the time with big bipartisan majorities. This Supreme Court, I think, shows how extreme it is by throwing out what had been a bipartisan consensus on behalf of voting rights. And I think that's deeply unfortunate for the country. What's interesting is from a partisan perspective, Republicans were the ones who loved these packed districts. Democrats were the ones that were largely against them.

15:56Robert Siegel:Because they removed the most loyal Democratic voters from Republican, from contested districts. Absolutely. And so you had Republicans fighting these lawsuits that conservative lawyers were bringing, again, to make that distinction between Republican and conservative. Democrats didn't like Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Republicans loved it. But the black representation in the South, you are exactly right. You know, when I said I was ambivalent about, you know, this might be right under the law, but it might be bad for America, especially in the short term. I absolutely think it will lower the number of members of Congress who are black.

16:31The problem is that it may have other benefits, like, for instance, actually allowing Republicans and Democrats to fight over black voters instead of packing all the black voters into districts for the purpose of allowing Democrats to keep the seat easily has made Democratic Party, at least for some, take those voters for granted, stereotype them, caricature them. That won't happen anymore. And a lot of these Republicans are going to have to actually fight for the black voters that are in their districts to get their votes. Although they are they are drawn in such a way that they can probably win without them.

17:03So I wish I would like to see that nice world come about, too, that everybody fights for the black vote. But I don't think that'll happen. And even back in the day when you're quite right, that Republicans used this section to try to draw some positive districts for them. Democrats couldn't fight those districts all the way down the line because they, too, believed in black representation. and they were the party that was winning the black vote. So the one is an ambivalent result that led to increased black representation that both parties could more or less get behind. The court has made it impossible to do that.

17:39Robert Siegel:Before we leave the subject, let me ask you, Sarah, to speculate. Do you think that the result, one consequence of this, will be that the explicitly temporary map drawn in California and the map that Democrats in Virginia voted for, which was the same model, temporary. Do you think those will now become permanent and that they'll become a general race to reapportion? Well, so Texas and California's maps have both been subject of lawsuits because they argued that they were racial gerrymanders. Those will now be dead in the water, basically. Of course, Virginia's map has been struck down by the Virginia Supreme Court.

18:20They have appealed this to the United States Supreme Court with pretty near frivolous arguments. So I don't think that that map is going to take effect. But my hope, again, is that actually there will be enough pressure from voters to put an end to the partisan gerrymandering, the extreme silliness that we are seeing where, again, race is only one thing that may define a person's voting behavior. But we are now making sure that so many millions of Americans across the country are not actually represented and that we have these gerrymandered districts that prevent competitive general elections.

18:57Voters can stop this anytime they want. We could go on like this. I just want to make the point that Democrats tried to pass a national ban on partisan gerrymandering in the last Congress. They put a poison pill around that. Yes, it was not a clean build of stop partisan gerrymandering. It had a whole bunch of other Christmas tree things that liberals wanted. They knew that it wouldn't pass and that they would get this talking point. Press release legislation from Congress from both sides has annoyed me for years.

19:24Robert Siegel:I don't think it was press release, but go ahead. On to the next subject. The congressional maps will obviously affect the House races in November, but not statewide elections. And I'm interested in two states that used to be swing states and have become increasingly Republican, Iowa and Ohio, both of which have interesting elections for governor and senator this year. And they seem to be actually contested. And it raised a question for me, E.J. How did these states, which used to be represented by the likes of Tom Harkin and John Culver and Howard Metzenbaum and John Glaser, how did they become out of reach for Democrats?

20:08Yeah, this is these states are an important test of a number of things this year. One, which we'll talk about is the rural urban divide that has become much, much deeper in our country over the last 15, even just the last 15 years since Trump appeared on the scene. The other is they will show how deep the backlash is against Donald Trump. I am starting to think, and I'm curious what Sarah thinks about this, that we are moving from a kind of deep divide over Donald Trump to a gradual consensus that the country really wants to move past the Trump era. The line that's been coming through my head is Fannie Lou Hamer, the old civil rights leader.

20:49I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. And I think a lot of Americans, beyond their partisanship even, especially kind of normie Republicans who aren't MAGA, are just tired of this. And so these states will be a test of that. In Ohio, you've got really fascinating races both for governor and for the Senate where Democrats have a real shot. Sherrod Brown, who got defeated the last time around, is trying to make a comeback against the incumbent John Usted, the appointed incumbent to replace J.D. Vance. He's got a real shot. And the governor's race is actually very competitive to Amy Atten, who was the Democratic nominee, who was very well respected in the state for handling of covid, is running against Vivek Ramaswamy, who became a national figure and then went to Ohio and is trying to break through there.

21:42both have a real shot in Iowa, which is a state that has also swung really hard against the Democrats. You have a fascinating governor's race going on where the state auditor, Rob Sand, is the only elected Democratic statewide official. And he has a fascinating campaign where he is, in a lot of ways, a Democrat running as an independent. He's got these great T-shirts where the words bluer and redder are struck out, and underneath are the words truer and better. And you talk about appealing outside, and as a state auditor, he unearths corruption and waste. So that's pretty popular among a lot of Republicans.

22:23In the Senate race, you have an open seat. You've got a really interesting Democratic primary between Josh Turek, who is somebody who suffered from spina bifida. He's gone door to door in a wheelchair, got elected from a very Republican district. State Senator Zach Walls is a progressive candidate. Turek recently got endorsed by Pete Buttigieg. Walls endorsed by Elizabeth Warren. My hunch is Turek is the favorite, and he has a real shot at winning that race. Both of those states are competitive this year. If Democrats win one or both, it suggests that maybe this map we have isn't so permanent after all.

23:04What do you think, Sarah? A couple interesting points on this. One, to your first point about being sick and tired of Donald Trump, certainly the polling from Trump supporting Republicans has remained remarkably consistent that they are still on Trump's team. But I think you are on to something, but I think it's different. I don't think it's related to Donald Trump exactly. I learned from The New York Times recently that reality TV viewership has dropped off a cliff. Hollywood is no longer producing new reality shows. They're canceling the ones that are already out there. And so basically after a quarter century of the reality TV experiment, it has, to use the original meaning of it, jumped the shark.

23:47You know, how many times do you need to see someone eat a cockroach to be like, yep, people eat cockroaches for money, I guess. And so I think as we have been becoming tired of reality television, you will see voters get tired of reality TV politics because the two are inextricably linked. Reality TV politics, I think, grew as reality TV grew and it will die as reality TV dies. And you're seeing little examples of this along the way. You have the Democratic primary, for instance, in Texas between Jasmine Crockett, far more the traditional reality TV candidate, very aggressive, negative, online, attention seeking versus James Tallarico, who ran a very traditional grassroots model, having an actual ground game, a positive message, what I've referred to as the Ted Lasso candidate.

24:39And I think you will see more of those candidates break through to your truer and better point. My second observation is back to this idea that we actually don't have political parties anymore. We still have teams that we call Republican and Democrat, but that's not what a political party actually was or used to be, at least. It used to be a cohesive group around some policies and principles that would support candidates that supported those policies or principles. and the party existed separate from its candidates. Because of campaign finance reform and the law that was passed in 2002, we basically ended having separate political parties.

25:18And so instead, again, it's actually increased partisanship, but it's vibes-based. It's this sense that you belong to like the, you know, Starbucks, Trader Joe's, tote bag, matcha latte group, or you belong to the pickup truck, Yellowstone watching Walmart group. And it's not policy based. For the first time in American history, we have more people who identify as independent than with either of the two political parties. So when you talk about candidates trying to distance themselves from their political party, I don't think it's sick of Donald Trump. I think it's the political parties are meaningless.