BamaATL is partway there, in that the racist appeal worked with the union, blue collar workers of the Midwest that had been abandoned in every policy and taken for granted by every Democrat since Bill Clinton became president.
Between Clinton's support for NAFTA and globalization, gutting those jobs and careers, Howard Dean being caught saying something about pickup trucks and gun racks, and Obama bailing out the banks, a generation of Rust Belt workers had never seen anything good from the Democrats. On top of that, they then went and coronated the wife of the guy who started the whole thing, who didn't even BOTHER to show up to a couple of their states for a campaign visit, as opposed to the one guy who actually spoke their language and promised to do something for them.
So in 2016, if you were blue collar rust belt, you were either voting for the same sort of person who destroyed your future, or this guy who promised you revenge on those fuckers. It was an easy choice.
The biggest difference between 2024 and 2016 is that Biden has actually done something for those areas. He's the first guy in decades to finally deliver on the promises that the Democrats were supposed to be doing for those union guys, and the unions are overwhelmingly behind him.
And, at the same time, they all saw that Trump's "swamp draining" did nothing for them; if anything, they ended up worse off.
Meanwhile, the demographics are getting ugly. Not only are the old voters who support Trump older, the young voters who hate him far more numerous, but COVID absolutely affected the unvaccinated, who form his base, more than any other demographic.
On top of this, the GOP has lost any kind of policy directive; they are purely the party of Trump.
Predicted a few years back that we'd see the end of the Republican party because of this, because it fit the pattern of the death of American political parties from our history. As time has gone by, the mechanism of the GOP's self-destruction has become more apparent.
Yeah, they're following the same script the Nazis did, but this isn't the Weimar Republic. We aren't in crippling future-ending debt to the rest of the world because of last generation's mistakes, and our federal system makes our government different in kind from theirs. This attempt will fail.
Where we DO see historical similarities is in the fall of the Federalist and Whig parties, although the non-starter Know-Nothings and Bull Moose party are more similar in respects to the current GOP...