The outcome of the US presidential election may determine the political future of the Democratic and Republican parties

The outcome of the deadlocked, murky US presidential election defies confident predictions, but the contours and consequences of the bitter, sometimes rancid and seemingly endless campaign are already clear.

The Americans’ election in Tuesday’s presidential election will continue the dramatic transformation of two major parties that, like the country itself, are in massive transition. In an unlikely and uncomfortable interplay, both parties have simultaneously rejected their pasts, reconfigured themselves, and together herald a political future quite different from the one that has dominated the country for generations.

Regardless of who wins, the voters who flock to the polls to choose between two candidates who have adjusted their profiles in recent years are also engaged in a separate, far-reaching process: consolidating, even accelerating, the changes in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, which nominated Donald Trump and Kamala Harris respectively and sent them into this year’s campaign.

“There has definitely been a transformation of party coalitions along income, geographic and educational lines,” said Matt Grossman, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University in one of the critical seven swing states. “This election cements those coalitions, and that’s especially evident here in Michigan.”

The final New York Times/Siena College poll puts Michigan, which has 15 electoral votes and has been a particularly fierce battleground in the final days of the campaign, in a 47 percent-47 percent tie. The Times/Siena poll puts Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral votes, for the top swing state award in Tuesday’s poll, tied 48-48.

In both places, as throughout the country, the content of American politics has been infused with questions of identity and culture.

“The mainstream media constantly wants to attribute voter preferences to economics, but what really matters this time is voters’ identities beyond economics, especially education levels and gender,” said David Shumway, an expert on cultural forces who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “We sometimes think that the Democrats are defined by identity and culture, but the whole Trump movement is rooted in identity and culture.”

The Republicans and Democrats have been trading places at the top of American politics and business circles for 168 years – since the time when the nascent Republican Party first took on the established Democratic Party in 1856 in an election that was one of the precursors to the Civil War .

The two parties have been in a virtual standoff for the past quarter-century, one party following the other in the White House, where Congress has generally been so closely divided that major legislation has been rare. In the past 25 years, vice presidents, who have the power to break ties in the Senate, have cast the deciding vote in the chamber an astounding 55 times. In all of American history, it has only happened 301 times.

Along with the presidency, control of both chambers on Capitol Hill will be decided Tuesday, with Democrats likely to end GOP rule in the House and Republicans to oust Democrats in control of the Senate.

Although Mr. Trump talks about making America great again, his emergence as a formidable force in American politics is as much a sweeping revolt against the recent past as it is a movement determined to shape America’s future. It represents a rejection not only of the Democratic Party, but just as importantly, of the Republican Party as well.

By drawing Americans who once swore unwavering allegiance to the Democratic Party, he shattered a ruling coalition that had controlled the House of Representatives without an interregnum for four decades; it gave US presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, whose pictures were hung on the walls of coal miners, steel workers and urban warriors for decades, portraits that in some cases are still there; and it gave the country Social Security for the elderly, the Great Society for the poor, and Medicare and Obamacare for the unhealthy.

Pushing the country’s traditional conservative elite away from its usual home in the Republican Party of Calvin Coolidge, Dwight Eisenhower, George HW Bush and even the disgraced Richard Nixon, Mr Trump has claimed the disenfranchised, the alienated and the blue-collar voters who was once the bedrock of the Democrats. He also shattered a GOP tradition of prudence, prudence, personal and public responsibility, and sound judgment that acted as a brake on liberal excesses and, with the Nixon exception, demonstrated the power of character in American civic life.

As these shifts roll out — bringing the likely changes in Capitol Hill leadership along with the replacement of Joe Biden in the White House — the changes in the nature and makeup of the parties come into sharp relief.

“Parties change over decades — that’s normal — and we accept the idea that there are fluctuations,” said Tom Corbett, a Republican who was governor of Pennsylvania from 2011 to 2015. “Both parties go to their extremes. MAGA- the people who lead my party are too far to the right. The Democrats are too far to the left. I don’t recognize the people who have taken over my party.”

At the same time, the former chairman of the Democratic Party, Paul Kirk, looks with amazement at the composition of the party he led from 1985 to 1989.

“The Democratic Party was filled with the people who loved FDR, Harry Truman, JFK and Lyndon Johnson, and in his two elections, Ronald Reagan stole them, and many of them never came back,” said Mr. Kirk, who served in the Senate from Massachusetts 14 years ago. “Now add to that the former Democrats who now vote Republican because of cultural issues. They don’t like what they see in the party and think that’s not what made them or their parents and grandparents Democrats for decades.”

The result is that the Democratic Party has lost its heritage base, the Republican Party has been stripped of its semblance of sobriety, and the country, clinging to a political system that creates a collision of only two parties, seems to be sailing into in that kind of way. of uncertain, dangerous waters, as the poet Walt Whitman spoke of when he wrote in 1849, when the country was divided by the question of slavery a dozen years before the Civil War, “Mankind with all its fears,/With all the hopes of future years,/ hangs breathless on your destiny!”

Ms. Harris will also be remembered as a consequential, trailblazing figure, even if the results of Tuesday’s election do not carry her to the Oval Office, the nuclear codes and weekend retreats at the verdant Camp David in the Maryland mountains.

In this campaign, there has been little talk about whether “America is ready” — the phrase attached to every breakthrough moment, successful or not, in the country’s history — for a black female president. It is patently clear that America is ready for a candidate with Ms. Harris’ gender and ethnic profile. The remaining question is whether Ms. Harris is the one to break the barrier. When the polls close on Tuesday, the answer will begin to take shape.