I consider the 1980 a re-alignment. Granted Reagan won almost every state, but it stays consistant that the states that he won the least amount of vote (yet still won) are the ones that Gore and Kerry won more recently. And same applies to what George W Bush has (the Reagan states with most support).
That's not entirely true. Reagan barely squeaked by in a lot of southern states that Bush carried with large majorities, states like South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, etc. In fact, 1980 was the last election in which the Democrats had a larger percentage of the vote in the south than in the nation as a whole.
Still, I agree that it was a realigning election. Many of the southern states that Reagan won by the barest of margins have been voting Republican ever since, with increasing Republican majorities.
I have said that I thought 1992 was a realigning election, in that the Democrats picked up a lot of states that they hadn't been able to win for a long time, and have held onto them. But on second thought, I consider 2000 to be the real realigning election. It is in the 2000 election that the whole blue state-red state split became most apparent. In both 1992 and 1996, the loss of Republican support in areas that they had long carried could be blamed on weak candidates, economic circumstances, etc., in other words, temporary factors, and not a real realignment. But in 2000, it became apparent that certain states had strongly shifted to the Democrats, and would vote Democratic regardless of circumstances.
Tragically, this includes my current home state of Connecticut. After being at worst a swing state, and leaning Republican in quite a few elections, Connecticut was a solid Democratic state by 2000. New York went from being a left-leaning swing state to a strongly Democratic state, as the city became more strongly Democratic than ever, and the previously Republican suburbs switched to Democratic. In 1988, Dukakis carried New York, with about 51% of the vote. This was the old pattern in New York; it was under normal circumstances carried by the Democrats with a small margin, and was competitive under certain circumstances. But by 2000, the Democrats were getting 60% of the vote. By the same token, southern states shifted sharply to the Republicans.
I think this realignment tentatively began in 1992, as the end of the cold war lessened the perceived for many to vote Republican because they didn't trust the Democrats on national defense. It accelerated during the Clinton years as certain issues that got the Republicans votes faded away, such as resentment of welfare and rampant crime. I also think that the Lewinsky matter helped solidify this realignment, as it laid bare the huge differences in attitude toward religion and morality in different sections of the country. I think the Clinton era emboldened aggressively anti-morality and anti-Christian liberals, and in certain states, discussion of right, wrong or character became taboo. Liberals had been on the defensive for some time, and the Clinton era put them back on the offensive, in a nasty and hateful way. This is one of the worst consequences of the Clinton presidency in my opinion, and has led to the divisive realignment of the 2000 election, with the 2004 election being basically a re-run of 2000.
Time will tell whether the current state of political affairs continues. I hope it does not, because the number of states which are competitive in presidential elections is ridiculously low at this point.
