Obama's popularity slide has made his coalition dangerously shallower

“[T]he entire concept of realignments/permanent alignments, which underlay much of the misbegotten analysis of the 2008 elections, is bankrupt and should be abandoned.”

So wrote RealClearPolitics’ Sean Trende in his 2012 book, The Lost Majority. One of the book’s main theses was that “the permanent majority” — that great white whale hunted and claimed by both parties over the last decade (and long before that) — is an unsustainable illusion in the long run.