Broad coalitions are one of the most influential forces in U.S. politics. They can determine which candidates win elections, which ideas live or die and ultimately which policies make it onto the national agenda. They are the backbone of political parties and can help propel a candidate to the highest office in the country. With the midterms approaching, conversations about political coalitions are already beginning to circulate, particularly in swing states and competitive races where either party is looking to gain ground.
In the U.S. context, political coalitions are essentially “big-tent” alliances made up of people and groups with different backgrounds, interests and priorities who rally around a shared political goal. They are not necessarily political parties themselves. In elections, that goal is simple: win enough support to gain power and advance a particular political vision.
In the 1890s, North Carolina’s Fusionists showed how an unlikely alliance between Republicans and Populists could reshape an entire state’s political landscape. Fusionist coalitions formed across the South between predominantly Black Republicans and the Populist Party, largely composed of white farmers. In North Carolina, the parties maintained separate organizations but cooperated on issues including education, voting rights and economic reform. Their alliance swept the state in 1894 and 1896, winning control of the legislature and the governorship.
Once in power, Fusionists repealed the County Government Act of 1877, restored county home rule, increased funding for public education and changed election laws to expand political participation. The reforms helped increase voter registration by more than 80,000, while approximately 1,000 Black North Carolinians held elected or appointed office during Fusionist rule. Their success, however, provoked a violent white supremacist backlash that culminated in the 1898 Wilmington coup. An unknown number of Black Wilmingtonians were killed, with some historians estimating that the death toll may have reached into the hundreds. Black residents, political leaders and Fusionist supporters were also forcibly expelled from the city.
The Fusionists showed the power of cooperation between separate parties, but Franklin D. Roosevelt demonstrated how a coalition could transform a single party from within. FDR brought together an extraordinarily broad coalition of Americans, including immigrant and urban ethnic voters, farmers, white Southerners who had long formed the Democratic base, union workers, African Americans and liberal intellectuals. This coalition helped FDR win four presidential elections and gave Democrats the political power to enact the New Deal, which expanded the federal government’s role in the economy and created programs such as Social Security and unemployment insurance that remain in place today.
But the old Democratic coalition contained deep contradictions, particularly over race. As Democrats increasingly embraced civil rights in the 1960s, many white Southern Democrats began moving away from the party, while Black voters became an increasingly important part of the Democratic coalition. Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign helped accelerate that realignment through the Southern Strategy, which sought to appeal to white Southern voters increasingly alienated from the Democratic Party over civil rights. Those changes helped reshape the coalitions behind both major parties and laid much of the groundwork for the political alignments we recognize today.
The Republican coalition has also undergone a significant transformation in recent years, particularly with the rise of the Make America Great Again movement. Donald Trump helped build a coalition that placed greater electoral emphasis on groups that had not traditionally been central to the Republican Party, including many working-class voters without college degrees, populists and voters who felt alienated from the political establishment. In 2024, two-thirds of Trump voters did not have a college degree, while white voters without a college degree made up 51% of his voters.
Like the coalitions that came before it, MAGA was not defined by complete agreement on every issue, but by a shared set of priorities that brought otherwise different voters into the same electoral coalition. The MAGA coalition has also translated those priorities into concrete policy changes. During Trump’s first term, its influence helped push the Republican Party toward a more protectionist economic agenda, including the use of tariffs, while placing immigration restriction and skepticism toward free trade at the center of the party’s platform.
These changes reflected a broader shift in the Republican coalition, particularly the growing importance of working-class voters and voters who are skeptical of the traditional Republican emphasis on free trade and limited government.
Today, Democrats face their own challenges. Their current coalition consists of groups that have become central to the modern Democratic Party, including Black voters, younger voters, college-educated voters, urban voters and increasingly suburban voters. Yet these groups do not necessarily share the same political priorities. Pew Research Center’s latest political typology illustrates some of these divisions, finding significant differences in political values among Democrats by race and age. Maintaining this coalition while expanding the party’s appeal to voters who have moved away from it will be crucial heading into the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential cycle.
The question for Democrats is how to widen their tent without alienating the groups that already form its base. American political history shows time and time again that successful coalitions do not require every member to agree on everything. They depend on finding enough shared priorities to keep different groups moving in the same direction. For Democrats, building that kind of coalition may determine not only how they perform in the next two elections, but what the party looks like for years to come.
As the 2026 midterms approach, both parties are once again looking to build and maintain coalitions capable of winning competitive races. But American political history shows that coalitions are rarely permanent. The Fusionists, FDR’s New Deal coalition and the modern MAGA movement all brought together different groups around shared political goals, reshaping their parties and the political landscape in the process.
The coalitions being built today may look very different from those of the past, but one thing remains consistent: the groups that parties bring together can ultimately determine what those parties become.
Featured image by StockSnap from Pixabay
Edited by James Sutton
