Posted on 09/01/2015 6:26:50 AM PDT by Kaslin
In my last column, I looked at the possibility of two impossible things -- impossible things in the sense used by Alice and the Red Queen -- happening in the already turbulent 2016 presidential cycle. Here I'll look at another: the possibility that the partisan division lines that have endured with little change for two decades might suddenly shift and change.
This has happened before. History teaches two lessons pointing in opposite directions: Partisan divisions can stay the same for a long time. And they can change suddenly and without much warning.
There's no question that partisan divisions have shifted little in recent years. Consider the almost precisely identical popular vote percentages for Barack Obama in 2012 (51.01 percent) and those when you combine the 2000 vote for Al Gore and Ralph Nader (48.38 plus 2.74 for 51.12 percent). The Republican percentages in those elections were nearly identical, too: 47.15 percent for Mitt Romney and 47.87 percent for George W. Bush.
The circumstances were similar. Gore was incumbent vice president in an administration with positive job approval; Obama was the incumbent president whose approval reached 50 percent on Election Day. Under different circumstances, the Republican percentage rose a few points higher in 2004 and the Democratic percentage a few points higher in 2008.
Moreover, the national pattern was matched in most states. In 28 states and the District of Columbia the Obama 2012 and Gore/Nader percentages were within 1 or 2 percent (rounded off) of each other.
The biggest shifts were not, by the way, in California, Texas or Florida, despite large Hispanic immigrant influxes. They voted just 1 or 2 points differently in 2000 and 2012, and the same was true for the large states from New York and New Jersey westward to Illinois and Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa.
The biggest shift toward Democrats, 9 points, came in Obama's birthplace Hawaii, and in left-trending Vermont. The next biggest (at 5 points) were in Virginia and North Carolina, where the Obama campaign rallied high-education newcomers and larger-than-national-average black populations to the polls.
The biggest shift toward Republicans came in the Appalachian/Jacksonian belt --coal-rich West Virginia (12 points), Clinton's home in Arkansas (10 points) and Gore's in Tennessee (9 points), plus 5 point shifts in Kentucky, Louisiana and Oklahoma. Also, Mitt Romney's home states of Massachusetts and Utah shifted 6 points Republican.
All of which suggests that the 2016 results should look somewhat similar. Neither party has won less than 46 percent or more than 53 percent nationally since 1984. Like economic forecasters, psephologists usually expect the next cycle to look like the last one.
But maybe not. Consider another extended period with even more turmoil during which the two parties' presidential percentages were almost identical at beginning and end: 1960 to 1976. John Kennedy got 49.72 percent of the popular vote, Jimmy Carter 50.08 percent.
Here again, despite the upheaval of the civil rights revolution, there was surprisingly little regional change. The Carter and Kennedy percentages were within 1 or 2 points in 22 states (D.C. didn't vote in 1960).
The biggest shifts toward Democrats were in Arkansas and Tennessee, where the young Clinton and Gore were on the ballot, and in Mississippi, thanks to enfranchisement of blacks by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The biggest shifts toward Republicans were in Alaska and Utah.
Both 1976 nominees came from their parties' historic heartlands, the Upper Midwest and the Deep South. That helped Carter reassemble a Democratic coalition that looked much like Kennedy's, uniting Northern Catholics and Deep South whites, augmented with blacks. Gerald Ford, like Richard Nixon, carried affluent suburbs and California, even winning 49 percent in the San Francisco Bay Area.
But that 1960-1976 alignment quickly disappeared. Carter lost 12 of 14 Southern states to Ronald Reagan, and the South became bedrock Republican -- presidentially in 1984, congressionally in 1994. Affluent suburbs in million-plus Northern metropolitan areas moved toward Democrats in the 1990s. Mitt Romney got 24 percent in the Bay Area in 2012.
For 2016, Hillary Clinton is trying to re-assemble the Obama majority. Republican strategists are hoping to pluck enough 2012 target states to win. But events so far -- Clinton's slide, the Trump phenomenon -- may destabilize what have been enduring partisan preferences. And who knows what more turbulence is ahead?
Just about every election watcher (including me) has assumed that a new partisan alignment is an impossible thing. History tells us it is -- until it isn't.
Perhaps a pipe dream, but I’ve long thought that down the road a conservative separation from the GOP-e could also attract a significant portion of the black community. There are a lot of social conservatives in the black churches. Time will tell.
The “Trump Phenomenon” is the confluence of Americans fed-up with the political professionals, the media and liberal academia.
These inside-the-beltway “aristocrats” still refuse to accept or understand it.
They do so at their own peril.
There are signs everywhere of a major shift in the black and the legal Hispanic community away from leftism towards the right.
Hispanics have a socially conservative bent too, but it never fails to overcome the lure of free sh*t at election time.
If there is a re-alignment it is going to end up looking like most of my Democrat neighbors in Pittsburgh. Social Conservatives rooting for Bernie Sanders economics.
Remember the “Reagan Democrats”
People who claimed to be Democrats but liked an d voted for Reagan.
For pretty much the same reasons Trump is winning.
Reagan had a little more tact, but times were very different
should have said ALWAYS fails to overcome it
There should be a stiff tax on all Democrat bastions in the affluent enclaves of the east and west coasts and the metropolitan mid-west. The Middle Class is sick of paying for their Leftist redistribution schemes, which have done nothing but make Middle Class families struggle and The Poor families implode. It’s time they put their money where Bernie Sanders’ mouth is.
I hate to say it, but I don’t think most Blacks, most Whites or voters in the wider minority community have the capacity to make astute political decisions due to their ignorance of the American Constitutional system.
I have stated here several times recently that this is exactly what we are witnessing, a complete realignment of both political parties.
Considering the electoral demographics, if we just taxed stupidity, we could eliminate the national debt.
Nail on head. The whole Trump phenomenom has told me that small government conservatism is dead. With most people on the right, including the purists, Conservatism was only skin deep. It was based purely on social issues, underneath there was pure New Deal Liberalism on the issues of government and economics.
We are. However, for smaller government, free market conservatives it is our nightmare. We are seeing what I have feared for years, the fusion of social conservatism with leftist economics. It is the New Deal Democrat with the flat top haircut on the Fourth of July. We are finding that all along, that is what those who called themselves conservative wanted.
The democrats are now the weather underground of 1976 and the gopes are now the democrats of 1976.
I think the partisan divide is wider than ever. Democrats are America hating communists, adrift in a morass of hate, relativism and sodomy.
One thing I am noticing, a complete breakdown of the generally accepted “no new taxes” stance that Republicans have held since Reagan.
Trump is proposing to raise taxes on the wealthy. He is doing this because it is popular. Even amongst many Republicans. It’s bad economics but that shift is definitely occurring.
Saw at least one report of a “ Democrats for Trump” bumper sticker
Wonder what results democrat pollsters would get if they asked the question Hillary, Bernie, or Donald?
If the GOPe are the Democrats of 1976, than the Trumpsters are the Democrats of 1956.
I think also you have to consider that these folks have been watching big government Crony Capitalism at work for Wall Street and corporations for a long time. Eventually it starts to sink in that there IS no free market. And if that’s the case, the next logical move is to tilt the un-free market in a direction more in my favor.
...alleged birthplace Hawaii...
The next biggest (at 5 points) were in Virginia and North Carolina, where the Obama campaign rallied high-education newcomers and larger-than-national-average black populations to the polls.
On the ground reports indicate that some poling places had more black voters show up than the entire population of blacks in that precinct.
Exactly
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