The G.O.P. pollster Patrick Ruffini’s book “Party of the People” outlined the realignments reflected in this year’s election results.
You should be skeptical of anyone with a very detailed, confident take on the dynamics of the 2024 election right now. At the very least, you should be if they didn’t tell you before the election.
But Patrick Ruffini, a longtime Republican pollster who is a founding partner at Echelon Insights, did tell you before the election. In 2023, he published a book called “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.”
What he argued in that book is really two things: First, the educational divide reshaping American politics would continue, with non-college voters swinging right and college-educated voters swinging yet further left. But second, he argued that the 2020 election results, weird as they seemed to many, weren’t a fluke.