ABSTRACT
Few concepts in the social science literature have aroused as much interest and controversy in recent years as electoral realignment. Symptoms of impending realignment of the New Deal party system in the mid-1960s were in fact quite numerous: the national issue agenda clearly changed, with emergence of new issues of race, social order, and foreign affairs that altered the clear issue landscape of class-based economic conflict that had dominated the previous forty years. Burnham charts the Democratic percentage of the popular vote for president over time for each election since the re-emergence of two-party competition in 1824. The change in the pattern of outcomes in American presidential elections since the New Deal is striking and overwhelming. The mini-realignments occurred around 1946 or 1950 and transformed a clear Democratic presidential majority into a quite competitive system in which either party could (and did) win elections on the basis of short-term factors.
