This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, April 6, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The great realignment of ideological commitments and political parties is in full swing as Democrats now appear to be

the free traders and Republicans the protectionists among other shifts and reversals

so exactly where do you

libertarian ideas fit in?

Stephanie Slade is a senior editor at Reason.

We spoke earlier this week.

Where do you attribute sort of the first inklings of this massive realignment in

politics that we seem to be living through today.

Well, I think it's been going on for quite a while, but I mean the 2016 election

obviously was a shocking event for everyone. No one really saw that result coming.

But in

2020 something happened despite the fact that Joe Biden obviously won the

election. A lot of people sort of keyed in on the fact that there were certain

constituencies, for example Hispanic voters, who shifted unexpectedly and quite

dramatically in some cases toward Donald Trump. Now this was obviously offset by the gains that

Biden made with other groups, but this was not a thing that I think anybody really saw coming was Donald Trump after four years in the White House and running on all the things that he ran on and saying all the things that he has said, gaining among minority voters.

So that was a real, like, I think just a lot of eyebrows raised

on election night in 2020.

And that was kind of what started me down the path of thinking,

okay, what is going on here?

...