Once upon a time, you could hardly have imagined a stronger political alignment than the one that existed between nonwhite working class voters and left-wing political parties.

Spanning well over a century, the US Democrats have strengthened this alignment through initiatives like the Progressive Era reforms (1890s-1920s), the New Deal (1930s), the Civil Rights movement (1960s) and Obamacare (2010s).

Though many are yet to come to terms with it, a major political realignment has been taking place in recent decades.

What were once marginalised and anti-establishment ideals — whether the sexual revolution, radical environmentalism, Marxism or transgenderism — have colonised the establishment. While continuing to take working-class support for granted, left-wing parties like the Democrats have pushed tirelessly for causes that mostly concern the college-educated, urban well-to-do.

This platform shift was always going to come with a price. Like the spiralling national debt, any good analyst could have seen it coming a mile off. But who would choose the warnings of the pessimists over blissful ignorance?

In 2024, however the ideological debt collector has come knocking.

Last week, pollster and political scientist Ruy Teixeira illustrated how deep and rapid the non-white working-class vote has swung away from the Democrats. “These voters are now less Democratic than white college graduates,” he warned.

Just 12 years ago, in the 2012 election, Barack Obama elbowed out Mitt Romney to win a second term in the White House. Obama enjoyed the support of 67 percent of non-white working-class voters, but lost white college graduates by 7 points, for a differential of 74.

In 2024, Biden has managed to flip that differential, still carrying nonwhite working-class voters, though by a razor-thin margin of 6 percent, but leading Donald Trump by 15 points among white college graduates — a differential of minus 9.

It is difficult to overstate what a paradigm-shattering change this represents for the party once favoured by the Hispanic landscaper, the Black factory worker, the Arab taxi driver and the Asian hair stylist.

“There is perhaps no better illustration of the Democrats’ transformation into a Brahmin Left party, beloved by the educated but increasingly viewed with suspicion by the working classes of all races,” Teixeira concludes.

He offers further analysis:

[A]s the Democrats have moved to the left on sociocultural issues, they are increasingly diverging from the comfort zone of the moderate-to-conservative supermajority of nonwhite working-class voters. Democratic positions in these areas are, however, congenial to white college graduates who have rewarded Democrats with increasing support. The accelerating “Brahminization” of the party is the result.

Posing the question whether the Democrats can “escape the negative effects of this Brahminization”, Teixeira wagers that, though such an outcome is possible, it relies not on record voter turnout, as in 2020, but the opposite, where Election Day apathy suppresses an otherwise dominant working-class vote.

So ominous was Teixeira’s analysis that it caught the attention of the New York Times —where columnist Ross Douthat presents it as the code to crack Biden’s otherwise “hard to explain” lousy polling numbers.

“Joe Biden is one of the most unpopular presidents in modern American history,” Douthat concedes. “In Gallup polling, his approval ratings are lower than those of any president embarking on a re-election campaign, from Dwight Eisenhower to Donald Trump.”

“Apart from anxiety about his age, there isn’t a chattering-class consensus or common shorthand for why his presidency is such a political flop,” he offers.

Douthat then acknowledges “the political realignment” discussed above — “where right and left are sorting increasingly by class and education, and where anti-institutionalism has migrated more to the political right”.

He goes on to cite Teixeira’s findings, discussing the “politically moderate minority voters, especially lower-middle-class Hispanics and African Americans, who already tended somewhat rightward in 2016 and 2020 but now seem to be abandoning Biden in larger numbers”.