Anyone else notice that before 1992, this concept simply did not exist. In 1984, 49 states went red. 1988, 40 went red.
Notice in 1992, the west coast & northeast went blue. The electoral maps from then on follow a very similar pattern with some variance. Some of these states were somehow declared “swing states”, and others were not. If you’re really bored, look at electoral maps throughout history. The sharp delineation of the west coast & northeast going blue everytime never existed until 1992.
You hear quite often about how solidly “red” Oklahoma is. Yet, they routinely elect democratic governors. Although, in recent history, they’ve always gone red for president.
There’s no rational way to explain this other than “That’s just how it is”. For whatever reason, this has always gone unnoticed.
Well, the modern geographical party alignments stem from a series of small evolutions starting in, say, 1948 with the Dixicrats, moved along significantly by the “Southern Strategy” and eventually the rise of the religious right as a political force starting circa 1975…
As a political force? Yes, I’d say evangelicals weren’t a significant political element until the early to mid seventies, after a long post-Prohibition, post-Scopes Trial hiatus. It wasn’t Roe v. Wade (1973) that galvanized them initially (though they would later seize upon it as a major driver), but arguably the 1971 forced racial integration of Bob Jones University and other previously white-only religious schools.
The religious right had some sway over Reagan (to his credit, fairly little - he offered them more lip service than influence), but have grown to be a persistent and significant political faction. I’d personally like to see them fade back into political obscurity, but what you gonna do?
No mystery there: Local politics is different from national politics. I’ll use Montana as an example instead of Oklahoma, because I’m more familiar with it:
In Montana, almost everyone is pro-gun, and a lot of them very strongly so. When given a choice between a pro-gun candidate and an anti-gun candidate, Montanans will usually choose the pro-gun candidate. In presidential elections, that usually means the Republican, so Montanans usually vote Republican for President.
But when so many Montanans are pro-gun, that includes most Montana democrats. So in an election for, say, governor (or senator or representative), you’ll have a pro-gun Republican running against a pro-gun Democrat. Since both are pro-gun, guns are simply not an issue, and the people vote based on other issues, such as the environment (which is also important to a lot of Montanans). And so they can end up with Democratic governors like Schweitzer and Democratic senators like Tester.
Now, I’m not sure exactly what the issues are that are relevant to Oklahomans (though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that guns are one of them there, too), but whatever they are, the effect is the same: Oklahomans are united on some issues and divided on others, and whatever issues they’re divided on, it’s natural for one party to take each side, and so sometimes one side wins locally and sometimes the other one does, even while the united issues keep them voting consistently in national elections.
There had been religious influence in righat wing politics before that, (like Billy James Hargis, for instance) but the first big religious right groups were Christian Voice in 1978, and the Moral Majority in 1979,
Supposedly the parties have become very ideologically opposed. There used to be conservative democrats and liberal republicans. But now they have mostly been purged. The blue dog democrats lost most of their house seats. Southern democrats are all republicans now. Liberal republicans from the northeast have either been replaced by liberal democrats, or they switched parties (like Jim Jeffords or Lincoln Chafee did). It is mostly a question of geography, conservatives tend to be southern while liberals are west coast and northeast. But now those geographic areas tend to have one party rule.
FWIW, California has gone blue the last 6 elections. But they consistently went red for the 6 elections before that. However the kinds of radical swings we used to see do not seem possibly now. In 1964 the GOP carried 6 states, in 1968 they carried 32. Swings like that are not possible now. I’m not 100% certain as to all the reasons though.
Not so fast! Religious conservatives were always around, long before 1975. It just so happens that, before then, BOTH parties accepted “family values.” Even George McGovern would have laughed at gay marriage in 1972. Even Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson were anti-abortion in 1972.
Until the Sexual Revolution went mainstream, there was no need for an organized religious conservative movement like the Moral Majority.
Next door to George McGovern, the Minnesota Democratic Party, at their 1972 state convention, voted to include as a plank supporting gay marriage in the party platform. (But then it took 41 years for the legislature to enact it.)
Ever since the civil rights movement, the reliably red states have not changed much. The south and rural states always go conservative. A popular conservative like Reagan and Bush Sr will make blue states go red, but it just doesn’t happen in reverse. If Hillary can turn states like GA and make TX even close, in a way that is more of a political landslide than Reagan in 84.
California, Washington and Oregon went red in that election, too.
It was a strange year, followed by two terms of Reagan and one of Bush41, before the current alignment took hold. An anomaly like Trump will probably cause strange results this year, too.
Isn’t one of the factors the size of any one side’s majority in any given state? Over here, we’ve had the notion of “marginal” constituencies for Parliament for decades, and it’s a matter of where a majority is small enough to be worth the other party/ies concentrating campaign resources there.