I tend to think these claims are overblown, but here are pieces which together suggest that the Reagan Coalition has been substituted with an Obama Coalition.
Here is a sober piece from the National Journal, and something a bit more hysterical from P.J. O'Rourke.
From the former:
Barack Obama on Tuesday won the most decisive Democratic presidential victory in a generation largely by tapping into growing elements of American society: young people, Hispanics and other minorities, and white upper-middle-class professionals. That coalition of the ascendant -- combined with unprecedented margins among African-Americans -- powered Obama to a commanding victory over Republican John McCain, even though Obama achieved only modest and intermittent gains with the working-class white voters who provided the foundation of the Democratic coalition from Franklin D. Roosevelt's election in 1932 to Humphrey's defeat 36 years later.
"Obama is reimagining a Democratic coalition for the 21st century," says Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, a Democratic group that studies electoral trends and tactics. "Democrats [are]... surging with all the ascending and growing parts of the electorate. He is building a coalition that Democrats could ride for 30 or 40 years, the way they rode the FDR coalition of the 1930s."
As witht he piece below, the author points out the problems that the Republican party is having in appealing to the cosmopolitan centers of the country as social concervatives become stronger in the party and help determine what positions it takes on hot button issues.
