Excellent analysis, Impy. And that’s a great explanation of the 1824 presidential election in modern terms (although Clay and JQ Adams were more similar in style—and on ideology, for the most part—than are Cruz and Trump).
I will quibble on how Democrats pandered to immigrant groups consistently since the 1840s. The Democrats didn’t do much to attract Germans (mostly Catholics from Bavaria) that emigrated following the Revolution of 1848 and soon would become the backbone of the Republican Party in much of the Midwest (and in random pockets such as Louisville, KY and the Texas Hill Country) due to their principled aversion to slavery, nor the Cubans that fled Castro’s tyranny in the early 1960s (Kennedy’s cowardly treason during the Bay of Pigs invasion made Cubans one of the strongest GOP voting blocks in the nation for the next 45 years or so, nor really the Vietnamese that escaped Communist death camps. The Democrats won’t pander if doing so will conflict with their basic Leftism, so they preferred to lose the German vote in the 1850s and ‘60s rather than to appear to be anything but coddling of slavery and to lose the Cuban and Vietnamese vote during the Cold War and beyond than to appear to be anything but coddling of Communism.
Thank you. This specious idea of an alleged great “switch” is a pet peeve of mine. Oddly enough you have people on both sides propagating it, at least democrats are very quick to claim the likes of Lincoln and disavow slave lovers and Jim Crowers as people who would “be Republicans today”, while holding fast to their claim on people like Jefferson.
Excellent point re: Immigrants, I used too broad a brush.