The arrangement of social groups into partisan coalitions fundamentally shapes the content of political competition. How should we understand the interests and ideology holding together such coalitions? I introduce a framework, based on a spatial voting model, to study how issue attitudes generate electoral coalitions. The model decomposes group-level voting behavior into three components: the distribution of policy preferences, issue weights, and candidate positions. The model clarifies what data are necessary to sustain policy-based explanations for electoral realignments, and provides a lens through which to interpret correlations between vote choice and issue preferences. I apply this framework to explain educational realignment among white Americans — a trend that is disrupting longstanding class coalitions. Using nearly 200 survey questions to estimate issue-specific ideal points from 1984 to 2020, I find that both economic and cultural issues have driven educational realignment. Over the past 15 years, college-educated whites have become more favorable toward redistribution, pushing them toward the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, cultural issues have gained salience for the white working class, meaning their longstanding conservative cultural attitudes now translate into Republican support. Educational realignment is thus deeply rooted across issue domains, suggesting the stability of these new coalitions into the foreseeable future.
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William Marble (2024) studied this question.