Tevi Troy writes for City Journal about the potential long-term significance of Donald Trump’s election victory.

Love him or hate him, the second election of Donald Trump as president of the United States establishes him as one of the most significant and astounding figures in American history. With this second win, Trump has also done more to change the conventional wisdom than any American political figure in nearly a century.

Only 15 presidents have served two or more terms, so Trump’s victory already places him in elite company. Time served in office is certainly one of the ways we rate our presidents, but there is much more to the Trump story. The 2024 election will change how we look at presidential electoral coalitions. As pollster Patrick Ruffini wrote, “The FDR coalition is being dismantled piece by piece and reassembled in Donald Trump’s GOP.” Trump made gains among blacks, particularly among black males, which would be devastating to future Democratic electoral hopes if sustained. For years, Democrats have counted on winning overwhelming majorities among black voters. Republicans have long hoped that they could just get into double digits, thereby blunting the Democratic dominance among blacks. This year, they did it, garnering 13 percent of the black vote.

Similarly, the Jewish vote, three-quarters of which typically goes to Democratic presidential candidates, also shifted. Democrats still won a majority of Jews, but Republicans got 32 percent of the Jewish vote, which similarly eats into Democrats’ expected margins in ways that could be hard for them to overcome. A more worrisome sign for Democrats may be in the New York Jewish vote, where 46 percent of Jews in America’s largest Jewish population voted for Trump, potentially signaling where this community will be going electorally in the future.

Most devastating of all of the shifts was probably the Hispanic vote. For years, Democrats have counted on this demographic as part of their coalition, even as their policies have not always appealed to conservative, Catholic, pro-law-and-order Hispanics. Trump won 45 percent of the vote, suggesting that Hispanics may, like Irish and Italian Americans before them, be moving away from voting as a distinct coalition.