When Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, it seemed to mark the beginning of a new era of Democratic dominance, one propelled by the rise of a new generation of young, secular and nonwhite voters.

With hindsight, the 2012 election looks more like the end of an era: the final triumph of the social movements of the 1960s over the once-dominant Reagan Republicans.

Instead, it’s the three Trump elections — in 2016, 2020 and 2024 — that look as if they have the makings of a new era of politics, one defined by Donald Trump’s brand of conservative populism.

Whether you call it a realignment or not, American politics hasn’t been the same since Trump won his party’s nomination. The two parties clash over areas of former consensus, even as they reach detente on issues that defined the polarizing 2004 and 2012 elections. It can be disorienting for anyone who came of age before Trump. It can even feel like American politics has been turned upside down.

Until Trump, there was a lot about American politics that you could take for granted. The meaning of the two parties seemed clear. Republicans represented Ronald Reagan’s three-legged stool of small-government fiscal conservatism, the religious right and foreign-policy hawks. Democrats represented the working class, change and the causes of liberal activists.

Every four years, the parties mostly litigated the same fights over the same issues. They rehashed arguments over war and diplomacy; entitlement spending and tax cuts; “family values” and the social movements of the 1960s; or trade and free enterprise versus labor and protecting jobs. It led to predictable demographic divides and recurring, long-term electoral trends.

That all changed when Trump came down the escalator.

On some issues, it can even seem as if the parties have switched places.

Today, Trump champions the working class, rails against elites, strives to protect American jobs and criticizes traditional U.S. foreign policy, all while Democrats defend the establishment, norms and the old foreign-policy consensus.

Long-standing areas of bipartisan consensus have suddenly become fiercely contested. Immigration, free trade, postwar U.S. alliances, even support for democracy at home and abroad have all become defining conflicts between the two parties during the Trump era, rather than areas of agreement. Yet at the same time, the two parties seem to have reached a truce on the most bitter fights of the Bush-Obama era, such as the Iraq War, Social Security and same-sex marriage.

This new partisan conflict has led to very different electoral coalitions.

In 2016, Trump made enormous gains among white voters without a college degree, including in northern states, where Republicans had not been able to sustain breakthroughs. Since then, he has made even larger gains among young, Black, Hispanic and Asian voters — and did so by representing everything Democrats thought these groups opposed.

After three elections with Trump on the ballot, the partisan gap between white and nonwhite voters is now smaller than at any time since the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The partisan generation gap has fallen by two-thirds. Perhaps most strikingly, the old class divide between rich and poor, between capital and labor, has seemingly vanished.

The exit polls found Trump losing voters making more than $100,000 a year, while winning among voters making less — including those making less than $50,000. If anything, 20th-century fights are emerging as plausible areas of bipartisan consensus, with Republicans seemingly receptive to labor and spending on infrastructure, while Democrats seem more open to deregulation and supply-side remedies to problems like housing and energy.

In place of the old class conflict, there’s a new educational divide. Before Trump, people voted about the same way with or without a degree. Now, the gap between voters with or without a degree is as large as the income gap was back in 2012 — and all the way back to the dawn of survey research.

These changes aren’t minor, and they’re not just because of the singular force of Trump, either. They are part of a broader political change occurring across Western democracies, where the remnants of the old industrial political order is being supplanted by something different.

The transition away from industrial-era class politics has been ongoing since the 1950s and 1960s, when postwar affluence and an expanded safety net mostly satisfied a century of demands from industrial labor. Soon thereafter, the rise of a new generation of college-educated youth activists helped bring a new set of issues to the fore — from civil rights to women’s rights to Vietnam — that helped shatter the New Deal coalition.

This was the last great upheaval in American politics.

In a sense, everything you could take for granted about politics before Trump came into place by this time or soon thereafter. The parties were redefined; even the legs of Reagan’s three-legged stool can be recast as opposition to the 1960s cultural revolution, the anti-war movement and the Great Society. The fallout set the next five decades of electoral fights and trends into motion.

In hindsight, Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney was the culmination of this era. Obama won by a modest margin, but it nonetheless seemed to offer a decisive verdict on the era as a whole: Liberals won.

This liberal triumph in the culture war came against the backdrop of the financial crisis and the Iraq War, which simultaneously dealt enormous blows to the Reagan-era consensus for smaller government, deregulation and a neoconservative foreign policy.

Four years later, Trump destroyed what remained of Reagan’s three-legged stool and redefined the Republican Party around a new set of issues. He seized the mantles of populism, change and the working class by campaigning on newer issues: trade and China, immigration, energy and the excesses of a newly dominant college-educated, liberal, “politically correct” or “woke” left. In the end, the Democrats lost their core message and voters who they imagined were part of their base.

Whether you call it a realignment or not, it’s a new era of politics.