Donald Trump is an Arrogant, Faithless, Ungodly, Post-Modern, Post-Industrial Caricature of William Jennings Bryan

Making this post as brief as possible, even to the extent that I think it is possible and dangerous for political analysts of the present to get distracted by comparisons with the past, I firmly believe that the victory of Donald Trump over an entire slate of sixteen other presumptive Republican Party nominees in the primary contest for President of the United States highlights the degree to which the current alignment of the major political parties in the U.S. has changed decisively in relation to the mid to late Twentieth century alignment.  Emphatically, as numerous analysts have astutely noted, the party of Reagan is dead.  The fundamental marriage of cosmopolitan libertarian business ideology and Evangelical conservatism that drew millions of reverent Democratic voters into the Republican camp in 1980 is gone, once and forever.  What is left for the Republican Party is now the mass of militantly political religious conservatives and angry, racist, sexist, and xenophobic rural, working class Whites in the South, Midwest, and Rockies, with isolated pockets in states like Pennsylvania and Minnesota.  On the other hand, the Democratic Party primaries should be making entirely manifest that the roughly Keynesian, pro-labor ideology of the party of Roosevelt is on life support and unlikely to survive November.  Rather, the Democratic Party has increasingly become, since the 1960s, a loose ensemble of technocrats devoted to the principle that domestic social policy can be rendered bureaucratically efficient, civil rights activists building on the legacy of 1960s and moving on a range of racial, sexual, and ethnic fronts, increasingly marginalized leaders in organized labor (whose members may or may not be in tow), and localized holdovers on the legacy of urban ethnic politics, particularly in the lapsed Catholic enclaves of the Northeast.  Adamantly, there is no reason to assume here that the Democratic Party should hold any axiomatic allegiance to particular, leftist ideologies and commitments that once occupied their attention.  To the extent that the Democratic Party remains progressive, the very meaning of this term, however traditionally ambiguous, has come to focus on one particular nexus: the urban, intellectual cosmopolitan, internationalist outlook of party leadership, like Hillary Clinton.
              All of this suggests to me, once again, that we have moved from the peculiar, historically-specific labor-liberal (Franklin Roosevelt) v. business-conservative (Reagan) axis of mid-Twentieth century politics back into the urban-cosmopolitan v. rural-nativist axis of late-Nineteenth century American politics, where the Democratic Party, in the age of contemporary economic globalization, is occupying the position once occupied by the Republican Party of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.  As such, the Republican Party, with Donald Trump at the aegis, is taking up the mantle of the late-Nineteenth century Democratic Party, with its roots in an amalgam of rural populism, advocating for the interests of marginalized agrarian constituencies, international isolationism, and racial and ethnic xenophobia (especially outside of Northeastern Catholic enclaves).  If we add at least a subset of White, relatively less educated of urban/suburban America (i.e. the subset of the White working class population whose ancestors most abundantly benefited from mass production manufacturing industry from the 1920s to the 1950s and for whom higher education was relatively inaccessible for a range of reasons), then we have the Trump Republican voting bloc.  With the exception of the subset of urban/suburban, less educated Whites, we have the voting bloc carried by William Jennings Bryan for the dual nomination by the Democratic and Populist Parties in 1896, a bloc that carried twenty-two, largely rural, sparsely populated Southern, Plain, and Rocky Mountain states for 176 electoral votes (see below), losing all of the larger, more urban, industrial states to McKinley.

If we take the above alignment of states, recognizing the changes in population distribution across the states, the degree of urbanization in each, and add Arizona (a traditional Republican state that may be up for grabs if new Hispanic voters come out in significant numbers), New Mexico (a recently strong Democratic state that may be up for grabs), Oklahoma (presumably a safe state for Trump), Alaska (Trump), and Hawaii (Clinton), and we flip Kentucky and West Virginia (coal states that Clinton isn't going to carry), Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida (increasingly urban and cosmopolitan states that Trump won't carry), then the electoral map won't look promising at all for Trump.  Moreover, it isn't going to look promising for a Republican Presidential candidate for some time to come - this is a general electoral bloc that cannot win for a party whose ideology simply will not make inroads into the Democratic coalition for a long time.