President Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide triumph over Barry Goldwater in 1964 seemed to ratify the postwar liberal consensus and doom the Republican Party to irrelevance-until, four years later, Richard Nixon's narrow win augured an 'emerging Republican majority' (the title of a book by his adviser Kevin Phillips) based in the white, suburban Sun Belt.
Recent American history has been hard on would-be realigners. The two parties are playing one of the longest deuce games since the founding. Even with the structural distortion of the Senate and the Electoral College favoring Republicans, the American people remain closely divided.
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