Even from its first flurries, it’s already clear that a presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will radically accelerate the ongoing transformation in the identity of the two major political parties.
One of the key trends in modern American politics is what I’ve called the class inversion—the shift since the 1960s of working-class whites from the Democratic Party to the Republican, and the parallel movement of more white-collar whites from the GOP to the Democrats since the 1980s. A Clinton-Trump race that could prove more competitive than many expected threatens to finally uproot the last vestiges of the class-based political alignment that defined U.S. politics from Franklin Roosevelt through the 1960s. CONT.
Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic