One of the absolute worst showings that a political party ever had in the US presidential

election was the Democratic Party in 1924.

They lost every state outside of the Jim Crow South and barely scraped together a quarter

of the popular vote.

If a political strategist would have argued at the time that in only 10 years that their

political party would put together the greatest coalition in American political history, nobody

would have believed them.

But that's exactly what happened in the 1930s.

The New Deal Coalition was born and it included everybody from the KKK on one side to black

communists on the other, and in between were great planes populists, backcountry Jacksonians,

dissident Ivy Leaguers, multilingual urban ethnic groups, laborers, farmers, and this

coalition will hold together for decades.

While the New Deal Coalition stands out for its diversity and its longevity, it's merely

one of many similar episodes in American political history, where a political party is

announced dead, but only a few years later it's resurrected and comes back much stronger.

Question is how do realignment like these happen?

How do different figures seem to capture the political moment, how their finger on the

pulse of American electoral politics, and are able to give voters exactly what they want?

How does somebody like Andrew Jackson, who is absolutely despised by the New England

elite, and should completely reform the office of the presidency?

How does somebody like Phyllis Schlafly, in the 20th century, create the grassroots conservative

movement and completely bypass all the traditional king makers and institutions that turned out

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