The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(08-21-2020, 02:12 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: CNN has a piece up showing how the Republicans might reinvent themselves.  Mind you, I don't see the battle taking place on CNN.  They are too coastal mainline.  I don't see it taking place so soon.  We have to see what happens in the election and how Trump responds.  If CNN is too coastal for the main battle to take place there, it might be a good place to get an overview.  The conservative media outlets will each have their various agendas and edit out the better arguments in opposition.

But the big difference is that each of the advocates stays polite.  They don't label factions as elitist, racist, trumpists, or whatever.  They will speak in code and talk around the real issues.

Realignments happen under the cover of blowout elections. Consider that even if Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were similar ideologically, they won with very different maps:

 These three Democratic wins involve the "New South" -- the South between the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the completion of the success of the Southern Strategy.  

1992 is about as clearly a Realignment election as any in the lifetimes of any reader of these forums unless one is very old. Few saw 1992 coming, and the 1992 election looked very different from that of 1976.



It's not a perfect match (there was a third-party nominee getting lots of votes), but I am showing the one Carter win to the two (Bill) Clinton wins: 

Ford, Bush, Dole -- blue
Carter, Clinton once -- pale blue
Carter, Clinton never -- yellow
Ford -- but Clinton twice -- white
Carter, Clinton twice -- red

...putting the states showing white for those that Carter did not win but Clinton won twice says much about subsequent Democratic wins of the Presidency; only one of the states in yellow has voted for any Democratic nominee for President since 1976. If Bill Clinton could not win Texas (Hope, Arkansas is not far from the Texas state line) maybe no Democrat can win it for the next thirty years; the state used to vote Democratic except in Democratic losses and even went for Humphrey in his 1968 loss.

In 1996, five states voted for the last time for a Democratic nominee for President for the foreseeable future.  I distinguish Missouri from these because those five states voted for McCain by double-digit margins (Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia) in 2008.
Obama did find a way in which to win twice:

If anyone has any doubt that the Presidential Election of 1976 is ancient history for all practical purposes:

Carter 1976, Obama 2012    



Carter 1976, Obama twice  red
Carter 1976, Obama once pink
Carter 1976, Obama never yellow
Ford 1976, Obama twice white
Ford 1976, Obama once light blue
Ford 1976, Obama never blue

...as long as politicians of one Party see themselves close to winning they keep trying to win with a variant of the previous election, trying to broaden and solidify their bases and working states that were close in recent elections. In a wake of landslide defeats that don't have simply a catastrophically-inept nominee as a goat they cannot simply work the edges as they simply look better losing without winning. Instead they must seek to peel away significant constituencies. For example, agrarian racists and "Eisenhower-Rockefeller" Republicans were unlikely to fit within the same coalition, which may explain why an Obama win is more similar to an Eisenhower win than even those of any preceding Democratic nominee for President. 

In case you don't have that map in your mind, then I can tell you that every state in red or white except Hawaii (not voting in the 1950's) went for both Obama and Eisenhower twice. Every state in medium blue except Alaska (like Hawaii, not voting in the 1950's) voted for Eisenhower twice and against Obama twice. Indiana went for Ike twice and Obama once, and North Carolina went for Stevenson twice but Obama once. 

Biden wins in 2020 only if he puts the Obama coalition back together, and so far that seems to be happening.