Posted on 12/22/2009 8:05:01 AM PST by Danae
You may be right that Laughlin was the only 1994-1995 switcher to go on to lose the primary, but after Michael Forbes of the NY-01 switched from the GOP to the RATs in 1999 he went on to lose the 2000 Democrat primary to a librarian or some such named Regina Selzer who benefited from RNC or NRCC billboards thanking Forbes for his votes for the Contract with America, etc. (and Republican Felix Grucci easily defeated Selzer in the general, with Forbes getting like 2% as the nominee of the now-defunct Liberal Party).
Had you been “strongly against slavery” in 1860 you would have voted for Lincoln irrespective of anything else. Breckinridge and Bell were pro-slavery, and Douglas was, to use the modern terminology, “pro-choice”-—he did not wish to own slaves himself, but did not believe that anyone should interfere with a person’s “right” to own slaves. BTW, the similarity between the pro-slavery position then and the pro-abortion position now is uncanny.
I do question Jackson’s sanity while in office. Given that his beloved wife Rachel died before he was sworn-in (likely dying perhaps from the stress of one of the ugliest elections in the 19th century where SHE was personally attacked for being a bigamist), I think he carried a LOT of seething hatred for his opponents that went well beyond the professional to personal. He got to relive the mess (exacerbating his heartache) with the Peggy Eaton affair, which cleared out his Cabinet as a result (and elevated Martin Van Buren, who was pro-Peggy, to Jackson’s heir apparent — which would result in the wholesale formation of the Whig Party in Tennessee, prior to which it was almost uniformally Jacksonian Democrat).
I meant D to R congressional switcher.
I know all about Forbes. That was masterful how the GOP helped the old lady beat him. Too bad Grucci later pissed the seat away.
The only other GOP switcher that failed that comes to my mind is a Governor, Buddy Roemer of LA who came in third in the 1991 jungle primary and left LA voters with the worst choice ever in the runoff. (I’d have cast a blank ballot smeared with dog doo before)
As to the Lincoln slavery thing. Yes. Anti-slavery dems left the party. Though I would’ve wanted to avoid the war which I guess was impossible without guaranteeing that slavery could stay and expand to the west so.......
However as I think about it I most likely would have been a Whig and then a Republican at that time despite not being a protectionist (would that have made me a WINO? ;D) so I’d probably gone with my party’s candidate.
To respond to you LS by conservative I did not mean pro-war but rather meant fiscally conservative and small government. AFAIK that was the norm for New England Republicans (save for the tariff issue) in the early 20th century.
As to the draft, it’s the same thing as slavery in my eyes (cept you get paid some and it’s temporary (if you survive the war) ) so I couldn’t support one not even for WW2. The 13th amendment makes it unconstitutional in my textualist view.
The Peggy Eaton thing is an interesting event. Imagine people calling John Edwards a whore and thus offending Obama so much he appoints Liz Edwards to the cabinet and then fires everyone else cause their spouses won’t invite John to parties. ;-D
Tennessee only went Whig cause of Van Buren? After 1832 I notice it didn’t go dem for President again till 1856. Even Polk lost it.
I notice the SC legislature didn’t back Jackson’s reelection (over his split with Calhoun and the nullifers I gather) and went with John Floyd in 1832 a nullifier who had been a National Republican. And a went with a local Whig in 1836 before returning to the dems thereafter.
Uh no. See we have runoffs and in runoffs Davis would be killed. I know the Alabama Republican Primary electorate very well. Go ahead and mark that idea off as DOA. It won’t happen.
As for Bright I do expect him to become a Republican at some point. He wants to be governor I’ve heard and after the job that Obama has done and Davis will do on the Dems in this state it will be his only option.
Wow. It’s in your blood. God bless you, Impy. Merry Christmas.
I’m a political junkie (especially with election results and electoral history). That’s what led me and several like me to FR. I used to annoy people on a general discussion forum many years ago by scathing Jim Jeffords and they suggested I post here. ;D
Merry Christmas Art.
I think Tennesseans were hoping Jackson would back his Senate successor, Hugh Lawson White (not that he could make him VP, since they hailed from the same state, but only give clear indications that White would be his preference for the 1836 election). I forget now if John C. Calhoun was also potentially jockeying for it, although he seemed to prefer to go back to the Senate over staying as VP (VP was a boring job, anyway), and the Eaton thing (and Jackson’s seeming distaste for Calhoun) wasn’t going to see Jackson support him, either. Van Buren seemed the only natural or logical choice for Jackson to support (although it was at the expense of pissing off the South — but had Jackson backed a Southerner, it might’ve similarly hacked off the North, so Jackson was going to have a problem no matter whomever he went with).
White, of course, switched to being anti-Jacksonian after Van Buren becoming VP. Even if Sen. White had been elected President, he wouldn’t have likely completed a full term, as he died in 1840.
SC was somewhat unusual in that it didn’t really have a Whig opposition in the state (at least most of the Southern states had either a respectable opposition, if not an outright Whig majority). The Nullifiers were the oppositionists, officially coming into being with 1831 (as a recognized opposition party, and they were the SC political majority). I’m surprised they didn’t officially become a longer-term majority party or become Whigs outright. Only Nullifier Sen. William Campbell Preston became a Whig (in 1837), but the remaining Nullifiers effectively returned en masse to the Democrat fold (disbanding effective 1839). Preston’s seatmate Calhoun (also serving as a Nullifier from the point at which he quit the VP post before its expiration in 1832), returned to the Dems at the same time Preston went to the Whigs.
SC only elected two Whigs in history to Congress (excluding Preston), that being Waddy Thompson, Jr. and his successor William Butler, Jr. (The Whig Butler was from the prominent Democrat family in the state - he was the brother of Andrew Pickens Butler, the Senator that was the subject of the vicious attacks by Sen. Charles Sumner).
I personally found it remarkable how the Whigs themselves managed to hold together as any sort of viable opposition (they remind me of the kooks around FR that exclaim we must vote against the Democrats just because they’re Democrats, no matter how viscerally odious that “R” is). I’d say many of the Southern Whigs were probably more pro-slavery than some of the Democrats ! They were more the party of the rich in the South. Many of them unapologetically joined the Confederate cause. Only a few of them were of the Conscience, rather than Cotton, vintage (such as those in East TN, who were more like anti-slave Northern Whigs, and went to the GOP and kept it that way now effectively 150 years without interruption).
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