I'll just recycle a 2009 SHWI post of mine:
***
We had a thread some years ago here about a Democratic Party of the
"right" and a Republican Party of the "left":
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/browse_thread/thread/1a82f5f54a6a26b/
As I noted then, the social bases of the two parties make it difficult to
accomplish such a shift. I'll quote a couple of my posts from that
thread:
(1) A biographer of the wealthy merchants of New York wrote in the 1860s:
"It is a very common fact that for thirty-four years [since the revival of
two-party politics in 1828] very few merchants of the first class have
been Democrats. The mass of large and little merchants have, like a flock
of sheep, gathered either in the Federalist, Whig, Clay, or Republican
folds. The Democratic merchants could have easily been stored in a large
Eighth Avenue railroad car."
Quoted in Seymour Martin Lipset, *Political Man: The Social Bases of
Politics*, p. 312. Lipset was writing in the 1950s when there were many
more liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats than there are today,
and when the rhetoric of each party was centrist. He warned his readers
not to be misled by this fact; as he noted, even if an individual
Republican candidate is to the left of an individual Democrat, the parties
still rely on different bases of support, in terms of classes, ethnic
groups, and religions (p. 329):
"The differences between the social bases of the two major parties which
have held up for more than a century and a half suggest that those who
believe in the Tweedledee-Tweedledum theory of American politics have been
taken in by campaign rhetoric and miss the underlying basis of the
cleavage. It is especially ironic that the Marxist critics of American
politics who pride themselves on differentiating between substructure and
ideology have mistaken the ideology for the substructure." He adds in a
footnote:
"The conservative strata, on the other hand, have repeatedly recognized
that the differences between the parties are fundamental, even though in
given historical situations the Republicans may nominate a candidate who
is as liberal as, or even more liberal than, his Democratic rival. Thus
in 1904 the progressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt ran against the
conservative Democrat Alton Parker for the presidency. And the New York
*Sun*, the newspaper with closest ties to Wall Street, wrote: 'We prefer
the impulsive candidate of the party of conservatism to the conservative
candidate of the party which the business interests regard as permanently
and dangerously impulsive.'
"It should be remembered that it was a conservative Democrat, Grover
Cleveland, who, in 1886, sent the first message to Congress on labor. In
it he urged that a commission on labor disputes be set up which could
investigate and even arbitrate if so requested by the parties involved or
by the state government. In 1888 in his last message to Congress after
being defeated for re-election, Cleveland denounced 'the communism of
combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overwhelming cupidity and
selfishness...not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty
and toil...'...It is important to note that Cleveland was much more
conservative in his second term of office when he no longer had to
anticipate facing the voters than in his first one, and that he was
repudiated by the Democratic party at its next convention in 1896. In
fact, Cleveland was the only President elected in his own right to be
repudiated by a convention of his own party while still holding office.."
Lipset also notes that even what seems to be the most "conservative"
stance of pre-New Deal Democrats--their hostile attitude toward blacks--
reflected their lower-class (white) basis of support. Clement
Vallandigham, for example, argued in 1861 that "The great dividing line
was always between capital and labor" and that the "monied interest" used
anti-slavery and sectionalism as a trick to weaken its opponents.
Even with respect to the Progressive Era, where historians usually dwell
sympathetically on the Republican "insurgents" to the neglect of the
Democrats, David Sarasohn has argued in *The Party of Reform: Democrats
in the Progressive Era* that the Democrats were the true progressives, and
that the insurgent Republicans get too much credit. He notes that apart
from La Follette, most of the insurgents had mixed feelings about
organized labor. He also points out that on the tariff, none of the
insurgents repudiated protectionism the way most Democrats did. The
insurgents only claimed to oppose "excessive" protection, and they
usually argued that the products of their home states were, if anything,
not protected *enough*. (This was true even of La Follette, who was
easily the closest thing to a free trader among the insurgents.)
I am not saying that all this makes a reversal of roles of the parties
impossible, but it does show the difficulties involved. You could quite
conceivably get a very liberal Republican or very conservative Democratic
president (especially an "accidental" one, whom everyone thought had been
trapped in a dead-end vice-presidential post...). But for him to persuade
his party to follow him is another matter.
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/2aac757559d20773
(2) Lipset's essential point is that (p. 230) "The Democrats from the
beginning of their history have drawn more support from the lower strata
of the society, while the Federalist, Whig, and Republican parties have
held the loyalty of the more privileged groups."
This is obviously an oversimplification, as Lipset recognizes: "There
have been important exceptions to these generalizations, of course, and
class is only one of the structural divisions in society which is related
to party support." (Indeed, the two party system could not survive if one
of the two parties got its support *solely* from the rich--there just are
not enough of them.) For example, until the New Deal, African Americans
generally supported the more "aristocratic" party (Federalist, Whig, or
Republican) against the Democrats. This is not unrelated to the fact that
the white working man, North or South, was more likely than the wealthy
white man to worry about African American competition.
Also, the class divergences between the parties do not necessarily dictate
either activist government or laissez-faire. In the nineteenth century,
the lower classes were more concerned with stopping federal programs that
they regarded as favoring the rich (high tariffs and the internal
improvements they paid for, the national bank, etc.) while business was
interested in positive help from the government, not mere laissez-faire.
(Here too there were exceptions: workers in protected industries, like
steel, favored high tariffs, and poor farmers who needed roads to connect
them with the rest of the world favored internal improvements; conversely,
some busines interests, which relied on the import of cheap raw materials,
favored free trade.) In the twentieth century, the lower classes have
generally supported a more activist federal government (in terms of
supporting organized labor, social insurance, etc.) while business has
theoretically been more in favor of laissez-faire (though in practice it
still wants positive assistance from the federal government). The point,
though, is that in both eras the Democrats have generally been more in
favor of action--or, in the nineteenth century, inaction--to benefit the
lower classes, and their opponents (Federalist, Whig, or Republican) in
favor of a more pro-business government (which they would of course argue
benefits the economy as a whole, and therefore all classes). In that
sense, the Democrats have always been the party of the economic "left,"
the Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans of the "right." Conservative
accusations that Democrats are engaging in "class warfare" go back more
than a century and a half, at least to Andrew Jackson's Bank veto message,
where he scandalized conservatives by saying that the Bank oppressed "the
humble members of society - the farmers, mechanics, and laborers."
It has to be remembered that Lipset was writing in the 1950s (before
"social issues" like busing and abortion drove away some of the
Democrats' white working class support and attracted to them some upper
class support) and was especially impressed by the class divisions between
the two parties in the post-New Deal era: "The emphasis on
'classlessness' in American political ideology has led many American and
European political commentators to conclude that party divisions in
America are less related to class cleavages than they are in other western
countries. Polling studies, however, belie this conclusion, showing that
in every American election since 1936 (studies of the question were not
made before then), the proportion of the population voting Democratic
increases sharply as one moves down the occupational or income ladder. In
1948 almost 80 percent of the workers voted Democratic, a percentage which
is higher than has ever been reported for left-wing parties in such
countries as Britain, France, Italy, and Germany." (p. 303)
Another divergence Lipset notes in the social bases of the parties is that
Catholics and immigrants have historically been more Democratic. This is
related to, but not the same as, class divisions: Wealthy Protestants
have historically been more likely to vote Republican than equally wealthy
Catholics. Nativism has generally been strongest among the Federalists
(the Alien Act), Whigs (the majority of Know Nothings had been Whigs) and
Republicans. In the North, Prohibition--unpopular with immigrants--was
generally supported by Republicans more than Democrats. (There was also a
class aspect to this: it was a lot easier for the well-to-do to get
decent-quality bootleg liquor than the poor.) Another consequence of
immigrant support of the Democrats is that despite Wilson's personal
sympathies with the Allies during World War I, it was Republicans (like
TR, Root, etc.) who were most likely to favor US entrance into the war,
while Wilson campaigned as the anti-war candidate in 1916. When Wilson
nevertheless took the US into the war, traditionally Democratic ethnic
groups (the Irish and many of the Germans, especially the Catholic ones,
had been Democrats) felt betrayed and helped to give the Republicans a
landslide victory in 1920. (In World War II, it was easier for the
Democrats to take an interventionist position, partly because ethnic
Anglophobia had already declined, and Hitler seemed a bigger menace than
the Kaiser. "During the great debate of 1940 and 1941 over aid to Great
Britain, Irish-Americans and German-Americans alike were displaying
increasing tendencies to oppose the interests of their mother countries--a
survey taken in December 1940 indicated that nearly 45 percent of Irish-
Americans supported increased aid for Britain. And as political scientist
David L. Porter has pointed out, a majority of Irish-American legislators,
and around 40 percent of German-American congressmen, voted in 1939 to
lift the embargo on arms sales to the Allies."
http://personal.ashland.edu/~jmoser1/anglophobia.html )
In arguing that the social base of the Democrats requires them to be on
the left on economic issues, Lipset notes (p. 318) that noneconomic issues
are another matter:
"...it is necessary to distinguish between economic liberalism (issues
concerned with the distribution of wealth and power) and noneconomic
liberalism (issues concerned with civil liberties, race relations and
foreign afairs). The fundamental factor in noneconomic liberalism is not
actually class, but education [and] general sophistication...But since
these factors are strongly correlated with class, noneconomic liberalism
is positively associated with social status (the wealthier are more
tolerant), while economic liberalism is inversely correlated with social
status (the poor are more leftist on such issues)." Lipset argues that
upper class noneconomic liberals (associated not so much with the upper
classes in general as with those of established "old family" background as
differentiated from the *nouveaux riches*) have never really felt at home
in either party: "Though linked to the Whig and Republican parties, these
upper class liberals have been ready to help organize 'third' parties
whenever their issues have become salient." He mentions the demand for a
new antislavery party before the Civil War, the effort to create a Liberal
Republican Party in the 1870s dedicated to civil service reform and the
elimination of governmental corruption, the Progressive Party of TR, and
the consideration given by some internationalist Willkie Republicans to
forming a third party in the early 1940s. John Anderson's third party
effort of 1980 would be another example, though of course it came after
Lipset's book. Lipset does recognize the possibility that the Democrats
would become the party of upper-class noneconomic liberalism in America,
noting names like Adlai Stevenson, but predicts (not entirely
accurately...) that "It is more likely, however, that Nelson Rockefeller,
the liberal Republican Governor of New York, will ultimately prove to be
the true representative of the revived pattern of direct participation in
politics by members of the upper-class--participation through their
traditional party, the Republicans."
***
I would only like to add here that I don't think 2016 really changes this, not only because Trump's actual economic policies are well to the right of what even the most "neoliberal" Democrats support, but also because Trump's popular support was not particularly low income:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/