This GD thread covers some similar ground.
The public is not so very divided overall but there is very much sorting into parties and there likely has been some geographic sorting as college-educated become mobile and settle in areas of those more likely to be like-minded, and non-college educated rural stays put.
In 68, Texas was more liberal than hippie-heavy California. And Oregon.
The west coast was very red during the 70s & 80s. The only exception is Washington going blue in 88. In 2 decades…literally the only exception.
In 92, the current construct is introduced. Don’t expect this to change anytime soon.
You got to come up with a point here.
The current construct was introduced because that was the new reality. It will definitely continue to change as different states become more or less swingy. Here’s a good little page at 270toWin:
It shows states that have voted the same since the selected date. For example, since 1972, 8 states have always voted Republican and DC went Dem. Since 1980, 12 states have always gone Republican and DC and Minnesota have stayed Dem. So obviously when the vast majority of states were swingy, they didn’t need a phrase for what was basically normal.
Your argument that things won’t change in future is that they did change in the past?
Let me guess… Jews are behind it, somehow?
I think it depends on how you classify a swing state. Part of the reason it seems that swing states are new is that up until 2000 we hadn’t had very many recent close elections. Based on how I would define a close election, there were only three close ones between the end of WWI and the Gore vs Bush election. I think the only close ones during that span of 80 years were 1948, 1960, and 1976. Naturally there were swing states that decided those elections, just not the same ones we have today. In 1960, for example, I think it was Texas and Illinois that decided that election for Kennedy. There were questions back then too about voter fraud in those two states. I think that’s bound to happen in very close elections.
As far as the current climate, I think it’s largely a rural vs urban divide combined with a polarized electorate. I would date the current paradigm to 2000 rather than 1992, with my boy a few changes since then. I think Virginia and North Carolina as a whole are trending bluer and Ohio and Pennsylvania trending redder because of these population shifts, with the former becoming more urban and the latter gaining strength in rural areas. Other than continuing slow changes due to demographic changes, I don’t think the current paradigm will change significantly unless one of the two parties undergoes a major shift in it’s platform. .
Take Oregon which I happen to know something about, although I have never lived there. In 1956 I took a political science course from a man who had recently completed a PhD at U. Oregon under Richard Neuberger. Neuberger was a protege of Wayne Morse. Until 1952 Oregon was as solidly Republican as it gets. Morse ran and won as a Republican and reelected in 1950. He broke with the Republicans over the choice of Nixon as VP. He sat for two years as an independent and then became a Democrat, willing reelection in 1956 and beginning the turning of the state at that point. He had also helped Neuberger win election to the Senate in 1954 as a Democrat.
But my instructor told the following story. His wife was on the board of the League of Women voters and also a Democratic committeewoman. Another board member complained that holding that position was incompatible with the non-partisan nature of the league. But the accuser was a member of the board and a Republican committeewoman. When this was pointed out to her, her explanation was that is hardly the same thing. In her mind, being a Democrat was partisan; being a Republican was “normal”. That’s how bad it was in Oregon. Now of course, it is solidly blue. But I bet that eastern Oregon isn’t.
I am not sure what is 'intriguing" about this. Aside from effort to oppose Al Smith for being Catholic, (which might not even have been a huge factor, given the economy at the time), there was never a religious matter that cropped up as a major national issue prior to the 1970s. (Catholics and a few other minority religious groups were discriminated against throughout much of history, but the political battles tended to be fought on local levels without becoming a national issue. The polygyny issue of Mormonism tended to be a once-and-done matter regarding “those people” out in Utah.)
Multiple issues occurred over several years:
1950s Rock and Roll scandalized many people and was associated with evil–but it was not a political issue.
The Pill was produced in 1960, leading to the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s–not a political issue.
in 1963, SCOTUS prohibited the public leading of prayer in public schools. A political issue, but not one that generated widespread action since many communities simply ignored the prohibition.
In the late 1960s, the movement to decriminalize abortion began to grow, leading to state level political action on both sides.
Evolution was taught or not taught in local schools, depending on the personality of each community. (The percent of people who accepted evolutionary science in the '60s was over 50%.)
With Roe v Wade, abortion became a national issue. Many people who opposed that decision united and many of their leaders were among the more conservative religious groups, so when they held rallies or published op-ed pieces or books, they wrapped the issues of abortion, sexual license, (sometimes Rock and Roll), Creationism, and “the ban” on prayer in schools together. From that rhetoric, people like Jerry Falwell were able to assemble a group of outraged people under the banner “Moral Majority.” At around the same time, more people got involved in the movement (begun with the Prayer in Schools issue) to reject public prayer and Creationism in public schools, which created an adversary situation with the group led by Falwell and company. Given the generally “liberal” perception of Democrats and “conservative” perception of Republicans, the Moral Majority linked up with the Republican Party, (often dismissing efforts of like minded Democrats to join them).
So, yes, before that time, there was no real “Religious Right.”
How did you not notice that the 1948 and 1960 and 1968 elections were so close that nobody had any idea who the winner was until the next morning? (And those are just modern examples. It happened in 1916 as well, e.g.) It was very common for states to be so split that they were battlegrounds, hotly contested by both sides.
We happen to be in the middle of a transition period in which the country is fairly evenly split. It’s happened before (52 and 56 were purely Eisenhower and 64 was dead Kennedy) and it will probably happen again.
One party domination of the Presidency is the rule. Republicans from the corrupt bargain in 1876 through 1928; Democrats from 1932 to 1964. (Domination is not a synonym for absolute.) It will probably happen again, and probably we are already in the middle of it as historians will see it.
Sorry, but this premise makes no historical sense. Nothing unusual or unprecedented is happening. Just the opposite. Business as per usual.
The process was probably more honest back then. Even third-parties won a few states. Something that would never happen since the inception of the 92’ construct.
Yeah, Strong Thurmond won some states on the Dixiecrat Party line in 1948 and George Wallace won some states on the American Independence Party line in 1968. So your “most honest” process was one in which bigots stayed away from the major parties which held them in utter revulsion. Good going. You actually managed to lower the tone of this election cycle. That’s a feat.
How do you think “third parties” work?
The last time a third party candidate won electoral votes was in 1968. George Wallace. Running on a segregationist platform. Segregation was popular among the white electorate of certain deep south states, and political poison everywhere else.
There isn’t another issue both as divisive and as localized as Jim Crow, that isn’t supported by either major party, that would leave an opening for a regional third party to win states.
Yes, there are divisive issues. And nowadays usually the Republicans are one one side, and the Democrats on the other. And if they aren’t, then you get things like Donald Trump popping up and winning the Republican nomination despite not following the party line on dozens of issues.
If an issue really is that popular but opposed by both parties, eventually someone will try to capitalize on it. Except segregation wasn’t the issue of the future, 4 years later in 1972 check out the electoral map. Nixon wins in an epic landslide. What happened to all those southern segregationists? They all decided to vote Republican. And then in 1976 the Southerners for a minute remembered that the Republicans were the party of Lincoln and they all turned blue. For the last time. Reagan wins the south in 1980 and 1984, and by 1988 the political revolution is complete and the South is solidly Republican.
What happened in 1992 was the finalization of the party realignment. Even in the 1980s there were still conservative southern Democrats and liberal northern Republicans. But that didn’t matter much, because the Democrats had held Congress for so long that the parties were nearly meaningless. The so-called “bipartisanship” of the era just meant that because the Democrats controlled everything, being a Democrat didn’t mean much, most votes weren’t along party lines because if they were then the Democrats would win handily.
Then along came Newt Gingrich. After holding the house for generations the Democrats were finally ousted, and the Republicans who took charge felt they had an explicit ideological mandate for change.
Yes, it’s all a conspiracy among the powerful. Except it’s not secret. The ideological realignment is very well known and out in the open. The conspirators are people like Reagan and Jesse Helms and Gingrich and Bill Clinton, all of whom shaped and molded the political landscape in various ways to result in the morass we have today.
When? Pro-segregation parties won some in 1948, 1960, and 1968. Only faithless electors have gone third party since, IIRC. And besides the pro-segregation, I think the last third party to win a state was 1924. Now, certainly pro-segregation candidates did win votes and the elections were honest in that regard. I just don’t get what’s less honest now. The two-party construct has been with us a very, very long time. And I think (but am not certain, would be happy to learn otherwise), that the '48, '60, and '68 third party wins were all pretty much one-issue voters. They just lost on that issue.
No third party won any state in 1960. A number of Democratic electors voted for Harry Byrd, but he wasn’t on any ballot.
A cabal of faithless electors is about as dishonest as an election can be, but that would ruin the OP’s imaginary point.
The pattern we’ve seen since 92 didn’t “just happen”, although many would like to believe that.
Yeah, I was reading about that one in Wikipedia. First I’ve read of “unpledged” electors instead of unfaithful ones. I’m getting the impression the unpledged ones were deliberately voted for (and whether the voters knew who they’d cast for?)
Of course it didn’t “just happen”! Lots of people worked very hard for years and years to make it happen. Or they worked hard for years and years to make it not happen, and they failed.
The people who made it happen aren’t secret. You’ve heard of Newt Gingrich, right?
That’s not quite what I meant.
Interesting theory regardless, Newt, the grandfather of swing states.
It’s not like Newt Gingrich wanted swing states. But he was one of the leaders of the Republican takeover of the House that created the party system we have today.
States are swing states unless they are reliable votes for one party or another. Some states are reliable votes for Republicans. Some states are reliable votes for Democrats. Some aren’t. Those are swing states. Swing states didn’t get that way because Newt Gingrich listed them that way in 1994, they got that way because in 2016 the demographics and ideological makeup of the voters in the state doesn’t result in a reliable clear majority for either party.
But that can change, states like Virginia that used to be considered reliable Republican states turned into swing states because of changing demographics. And Virginia has progressed passed the swing state mark and is now a pretty reliable Democratic state. Why? Because of changing demographics and the growth of Northern Virginia as a cosmopolitan urban area that now outnumbers and outvotes the southern and rural parts of Virginia.
There we have it, urban migration is completely behind the 92’ construct.