ABSTRACT
Realignment attracted considerable attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s by providing a powerful dynamic theory of periodic, large-scale, far-reaching political change. The apparent failure of realignment theory led in the mid-1970s to emergence of the very different theory of dealignment: dealignment argued that the incoherence which earlier scholars had seen as a temporary manifestation of an old and dying party system was, in fact, stable, and enduring political order. A dealigned political universe does not necessarily doom Bill Clinton in 1996. Race had of course been a classic example of an issue with potential to divide the Democrats ever since Franklin Roosevelt combined white southerners and blacks in his new majority coalition after 1932. Incongruities between the business and electoral cycles would make it inevitable that some Republican at some time would have to run for (re-)election when the claim to be the party of good times seemed less compelling than it did in 1980 or 1984.
