Trump's opportunity and agenda.

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.
• Position: National Affairs

"Presidents usually begin their terms with a fund of political goodwill. This cannot be 'twittered' away. [Donald] Trump's adolescent behavior must disappear. He is the president, and has an extraordinary opportunity--something that does not come along often, nor last long." THE MOVEMENT of many white working-class voters began with the election of Richard Nixon and continued with Ronald Reagan. Nonetheless, the power in the Republican Party was in the business class and the suburban electorate. There was inadequate recognition that the nature of Republican voters was in the process of a fundamental change.

During the Obama years, this change accelerated. In the congressional elections of 2010 and 2014, the Republicans gained seats in congressional and state races while working-class voters deserted the Democratic Party in droves. In those elections, Republicans claimed both Houses of Congress, as well as securing 30 governorships and the vast majority of state legislatures.

Democratic strategists deemed this an aberration. They claimed the victories were temporary and would not stand up against a larger, more racially diverse Democratic electorate in the presidential years. Democrats owned the future. Older white America was shrinking. Demography was on their side. The growing population of African-Americans, Hispanics, Millennial, urban professionals, and independent women would constitute the core of a governing Democratic coalition. The Democrats had won four of the six presidential elections from 1992-2012, capturing the Northeast, West Coast, and upper Midwest with comfortable margins. If the Democrats could get their people to vote in the congressional elections, as they did in presidential elections, they would control all three branches of government, as they did during the first half of Pres. Barack Obama's first term.

The results of November's election put these dreams on hold and exposed the contradictions within their constituency. The Democrats had developed what Joel Kotkin calls a "barbell coalition." On one end of that barbell are those found in the prosperous metropolitan areas of New York; Washington, D.C.; Boston, Mass.; Chicago, 111.; Los Angeles and San Francisco, Calif.; Seattle, Wash.; and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; and in the academic hubs of Cambridge, Mass.; Berkeley, Calif.; Madison, Wis.; Austin, Texas; and Ann Arbor, Mich.

These people were the beneficiaries of our high-tech information age economy. Immersed in...