Little has been written about what happens to Democrats - I'll post what I find soon - and if this plays into a potential realignment of the parties.
A couple sources:
(note the reference to the 1948 election - there's nothing new going on)
- From Politico: The GOP’s Breakdown Is Only Just Beginning.
For years, pundits have predicted that the Republican Party is breaking apart. But it took Donald Trump to make it happen.
The Republican Party is like a gigantic Antarctic ice shelf with fissures we’ve watched develop for years. Those cracks were evident in 2010, when the Tea Party emerged, and in 2014, when GOP primary voters rejected establishment favorites, including the sitting House Republican Leader, Eric Cantor.
The obvious legacy of the 2016 election is a split between pro- and anti-Trump forces, but this division has a twist rarely seen in American political history: The party’s voters and its elites are not only separate constituencies, but ones whose interests and beliefs are incompatible. The two groups are starting from different places and ending up perhaps even further apart.As the fractures grew, the party held together—for the past eight years, opposition to President Barack Obama was more or less enough to ice over major intraparty differences. But in the glaring sun of Donald Trump, those dividing lines are no longer survivable: The party has melted down and cracked apart, and its various components are drifting away.
In the past, party splits have frequently been unclear, messy and short-lived. When the Democratic Party splintered over civil rights in 1948, the faction of the party that didn’t like President Harry S. Truman or the platform walked out and formed its own
“Dixiecrat” ticket. In 1952, some of those Democrats who didn’t like Adlai Stevenson endorsed Dwight D. Eisenhower. And Theodore Roosevelt ran on his own Bull Moose ticket in 1912 after losing the Republican nomination to incumbent President William Howard Taft. In the end, those divides either healed over in some way, or they happened so quickly that the Band-Aid was ripped off, the pain ended and the parties could get to work building new electoral coalitions.
By contrast, this year’s Republican unwinding is hesitant and halting—and it’s not clear at all where it will end. Trump’s nomination and, at this point, presumptive loss is probably just the beginning. Nationally, there is much more infighting yet to come. At this point, the possibly alarming news for Republicans is that what defines the GOP breakup isn’t its severity or depth: It’s the great degree to which it’s still incomplete.
- From Vox: The Republican civil war starts the day after the election.
If Donald Trump loses the election next week, “there will be a lot of blood left on the floor between November and the 2020 primaries,” predicts GOP consultant John Weaver, who advised John Kasich’s campaign.
For all the attention on the fights between Trump and a faction of Republicans who have refused to support him, most GOP elected officials have so far taken the path of least resistance. They’ve supported their party’s nominee, even if they’re not thrilled about him.
These Republicans — from Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Reince Priebus to Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and many others — have calculated that since Trump was the nominee chosen by Republican voters, and the only person standing in between Hillary Clinton and the presidency, they should stand by him.
Should Trump lose on Election Day, though, many Republicans will want to say "I told you so" and turn the page on the Trump experiment, returning to a more generic Republicanism that they see as a better vote-getter and a more substantively defensible ideology. And to discredit Trumpism, they’ll make the case that Trump is to blame for his defeat — that he blew what should have been a winnable election for Republicans.
Many of Trump’s most passionate supporters won’t see it that way at all, though. They’re being primed to see a candidate betrayed by an out-of-touch establishment that is compromised by its social and economic ties to a cosmopolitan elite. So if Trump loses, his backers will try to turn grassroots disappointment at his defeat into grassroots rage against Republicans who were insufficiently supportive, thus leveraging their own way into power. (If he wins, the party will face a whole different set of issues.)
