Wikipedia: The Reagan Coalition.
The Reagan Democrats were Democrats before the Reagan years and afterwards, but who voted for Reagan in 1980 and 1984 and for George H. W. Bush in 1988, producing their landslide victories. They were mostly white socially conservative blue-collar workers who lived in the Northeast and were attracted to Reagan's social conservatism on issues such as abortion and to his hawkish foreign policy. They did not continue to vote Republican in 1992 or 1996, so the term fell into disuse except as a reference to the 1980s. The term is not generally used to describe the Southern whites who permanently changed party affiliation from Democrat to Republican during the Reagan administration and they have largely remained Republican to this day.
Wikipedia: New Democrats (The Clinton Coalition)
New Democrats, also known as centrist Democrats, Clinton Democrats, or moderate Democrats, are a centrist ideological faction within the Democratic Party in the United States. As the Third Way faction of the party, they support cultural liberalism but take moderate or fiscal conservative stances. New Democrats dominated the party from the late-1980s through the mid-2010s
. . . The landslide 1984 presidential election defeat spurred centrist Democrats to action and the DLC was formed. The DLC, an unofficial party organization, played a critical role in moving the Democratic Party's policies to the center of the American political spectrum. Prominent Democratic politicians such as Senators Al Gore and Joe Biden (both future Vice Presidents) participated in DLC affairs prior to their candidacies for the 1988 Democratic Party nomination. However, the DLC did not want the Democratic Party to be "simply posturing in the middle". The DLC instead framed its ideas as "progressive" and as a "Third Way" to address the problems of its era. Examples of the DLC's policy initiatives can be found in The New American Choice Resolutions.
From RCP: Assessing the Obama Coalition.
The Democratic Party is really a coalition of several semi-distinct parts. At its core, it is comprised of urban progressives and racial minorities, both of which were relative latecomers to the coalition. Layered over this base, with varying degrees of loyalty to the modern Democratic Party, are white working class voters (added by FDR in the 1930s), suburbanites (added by Clinton in the 1990s), and the oldest portion of the Democratic Party, rural voters.
Part of the key to the modern Democratic Party's success, especially at the Presidential level, has been the Democrats' ability to maintain at least residual strength among the very first Democrats: rural "Jacksonian" Democrats in Appalachia (western Virginia, West Virginia, Northern Alabama, etc.) and in areas of the country first settled by Appalachians (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, etc.). But as I noted a year ago, the Democrats in 2008 essentially traded away Jacksonian Democrats at the Presidential level for an improved showing in the suburbs and increased turnout among minorities. This allowed President Obama to become the first Democrat since the founding of the Republican Party to win the Presidency without any electoral votes from West Virginia, Tennessee or Kentucky.
