Someone asked warsofasoiaf if there was a way to form another “New Deal coalition” type of thing in the modern political landscape. I think you would be better equipped to answer that.

Yeah, I wasn’t sure whether they were talkin about another New D’eal in the sense of a policy agenda or another New Deal coalition in the sense of a long-lasting majority. 

So I’ll take the latter first: it’s not clear. Everyone can see the demographic writing on the wall that was at the heart of Tuxiera’s Emerging Majority thesis, but turnout takes work to translate potential voters into actual votes ( t’s clearly possible to turn out the so-called Obama Coalition, but it’s not guaranteed) and it doesn’t get easier when state legislators do their level best to suppress voting by populations they don’t like, and cto gerrymander like hell to diminish their impact. 

In terms of the former, I’m less pessimistic than my colleague Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, and Money about whether good policy makes for good politics, and I think it’s more a matter of policy design than a binary yes-no. Some policies work better to fuse a connection between the electorate and the government than others, and it revolves around key issues of visibility, tangibility, salience, and benefit levels.

For more on this, see here and here.