Grover Norquist is one of the most influential conservative operatives and sharpest political strategists in Washington. As president of Americans for Tax Reform, the taxpayer advocacy group he founded in 1985, each week he chairs the "Wednesday Meeting," a gathering of more than 120 elected officials, political activists and movement leaders. It's just one of many reasons The Wall Street Journal has called him "the Grand Central Station" of the conservative movement. Norquist's new book, “Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives” (William Morrow), examines what he says are two competing "teams" in American politics -- the “Leave Us Alone Coalition” and the "Takings Coalition” -- and explains the demographic, economic and political trends that are shaping their futures. I talked to him April 22 on his cell phone as he raced around to various meetings in Washington.

Q: The Leave Us Alone Coalition is who?

A: Taxpayers who want their money left alone. Property owners who want their property left alone. Gun owners who want their Second Amendment rights left alone. Home-schoolers who want their kids left alone -- and everyone for whom the most important thing in their life is their faith and their family and who don’t want the government attacking their faith or throwing prophylactics at their kids.

Q: And the Takings Coalition people would be?

A: Trial lawyers, labor unions, big-city political machines, government workers, people with government contracts.

Q: Who is your book written for?

A: Anyone who is interested in the politics of the United States for the next 25 years.

Q: Why did you write it?

A: Well, since I do political work and have been doing political work for the last 25 years, I’ve learned how the center-right coalition works and how the left coalition works. And the mistakes that each team makes come from misunderstanding the nature of their own coalition. It’s the equivalent of a book that tells you how a car works, so that people who are interested in riding in cars can get somewhere. It’s about how political coalitions work. And how smart politicians damage themselves when they misunderstand what moves voters. Since I’m center-right, I’m hoping that the center-right will learn more from it than the left, but a smart person of the left could learn quite a bit too.

Q: Are these two coalitions evenly divided or is one gaining?

A: Over the last 10 years, they’ve been fairly evenly divided. You saw two very close presidential elections. You’ve seen a series of close congressional elections. The book talks about 30 or 40 different trends, some of which advantaged the Leave Us Alone Coalition, some of which advantaged the Takings Coalition, and some of which are up in the air – meaning depending on how one team or the other behaves, they can either take advantage of opportunities or push them away. It’s not inevitable that one team or the other will win.

Q: You point out many demographic trends or changes that mostly bode well for the Leave Us Alone Coalition.

A: There’s probably 40 different shifts -- the growth in the number of the investor class – how many Americans own shares of stock is up from 20 percent in 1980 to over 60 percent today makes people more sensitive to taxes on businesses, and therefore more Republican. The decline in organized labor from 30 percent of the private sector workforce in 1970 to 7 percent of the private sector workforce today….

There are some groups that tend to be Republican – orthodox Jews are growing. Mormons are having more kids. If you just divide people into conservatives and liberals, the average 100 conservatives have 41 more kids than 100 liberals chosen at random…. These are exactly the sort of things over time that cause problems for the left: The growth of home-schoolers, people who absolutely want to educate their own kids and want to be left alone to do so. The challenge for the right is the growth in the number of Hispanics. They have to decide whether they are capable of carrying out a conversation about immigration that doesn’t come across as mean-spirited, and do with the Hispanic vote what they did in the 1960s with the African-American vote, which is to kick it away for a least a generation. That’s the question mark, because Bush was doing very well and then in 2006, the Republican Party went the other way on immigration – on the tone, sound and the way they were heard on immigration. It’s not so much the policy as your tone. The tone of the conversation determines whether Hispanics think you want them to be Republicans or you don’t want them to be Republicans.

Q: Is there any single trend or shift that gives you hope that the Leave Us Alone Coalition is in the ascendancy?

A: The growth in the number of people with shares of stock -- because those people, when they hear people wanting to tax businesses, understand that they’re taxing their retirement. If you own shares of stock, it makes you more Republican and less Democrat, and it makes you more independent. You don’t need to get the government -- if you’re saving for your retirement -- to come and say “We’re going to take care of you – and by the way, if we don’t raise your taxes, we won’t be able to take care of you.”

Q: And that’s why you’ve said the privatizing of Social Security is the end of the Democrat Party? A: It takes 60 votes to reform Social Security, because the Democrats will filibuster. The Democrats know that if every American saved 10 percent of their income for their own retirement, and they watch that 401(k) or personal savings account grow, that the party of trial lawyers and labor unions and corrupt big-city machines has nothing to offer an American with a 401(k). Every idea Hillary Clinton has ever had in her life will make your 401(k) smaller.

Q: Would you put gays, recreational marijuana users, Amish in the Leave Us Alone Coalition? In a libertarian sense, they are very much a part of it. Continued...