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: 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. ... The decline in organized labor from 30 percent of the private sector work force in 1970 to 7 percent of the private sector work force today. … There are some groups that tend to be Republican — Orthodox Jews are growing. Mormons are having more kids. ... 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 not do with the Hispanic vote what they did in the 1960s with the African-American vote, which is to kick it away for at 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.

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.

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.