Two Guesses

[izixs]

Tis been growing thinking that there is not so much an alignment at this point of time and that there hasn't really been one since the late 60s. (Republicans becoming the party of the white south and conservatives while the Democrats becoming the party of everyone else in the south and liberals) And since then the shifts in voting patterns has not so much been a snap to a new alignment but a lethargic drain of natural constituencies to their respective parties and the evolution of the electorate on the demographic level. This has lead to high polarization as the first of these has come nearly to completion but also elections be determined by who shows up more and more as opposed to campaigning to convince everyone of all demographic groups. (Hence why I think threads about 'so and so should try to win <demographic/geographic X> are silly at this point)

Messaging and enthusiasm are the rule of the day. Getting a demographic on board with your party is incredibly difficult as they're almost always very solidly with the other party already and have been taught to distrust the messages coming from the other side. So the drain from one party to the other is either very slow or non-existant, and the shifts that are there are so slow and happening in different groups at the same time that having a solid election cycle or period of time where its clear to everyone in a demographic to shift to the other party is just not going to happen fast enough for a classical realignment.

We've gone from avalanches of people in one direction to people sloshing like liquid overall.