Electoral Map Typology

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Aug 09, 2008 at 15:15

I looked at all the maps, and tried to come up with a sensible way of grouping them.  The discussion below is based on that grouping, but I'm open to suggestions about other ways of grouping them as well.  I'm going to be working at three levels in this diary.  The lowest level-which I'll get to last-is that in which every map appears, and they are all shown in their groupings.  The middle level-which begins below the fold-shows one representative map for each of the groups.  The top level-shown immediately below-groups all the Democratic-leaning maps and all the Republican-leaning maps together into two supergroups.

Democratic Vs. Republican Maps

The archetypal Democratic victory of the past 100 years was Roosevelt's re-election in 1936. The archetypal Republican victory of the past 100 years was Nixon's re-election in 1936 1972.   Roosevelt's victory was a resounding affirmation of the New Deal.  It's hard to believe it, but Republicans actually thought they were going to win in 1936, and a bit winning issue for them was going to be.... Social Secutiry!  With the government taking money out of people's paychecks-and no one getting anything back, at first, the Republicans thought they had themselves a sure-fired winner.  On the other hand, Nixon's 1972 victory was all about "us" vs. "them"--but he did not threaten the core New Deal accomplishements, and in fact, he used cooperation with the still-powerful, still-liberal Democratic Congress to help give him the freedom to act in the areas he really cared about-primarily foreign relations.  

Twelve years later, Ronald Reagan would win a similarly strong landslide, basically on much the same terms-even though the foundation was far more questionable.  Reagan was much more hostile to the New Deal than Nixon had been, and the Congress was weaker.  But while programs were cut back, the post-double-dip recession boom provided enough short-term prosperity that most folks simply weren't thinking about such things, so it was relatively easy to keep them out of the debate-especially with Walter Mondale talking about raising people's taxes.  Thus, what these high-level maps have to tell us is that Democrats win when the issues of public welfare and the common good are front and center, while Republicans win when such issues can be shunted aside, one way or another, and issues of identity--"us vs. them"-come to the fore.

Not a real surprise, you say?  Well, maybe not.  But if not, then why does virtually every Democratic candidate ignore the power of Roosevelt's message?  Bill Clinton, for one, did not.  He ran as an economic populist.  Governing, not so much.  But he knew what to tell people, and won eleciton by comfortable margins.

Here's another way to look at the two groups of maps, in terms of recent victories by the two parties.  The maps are quite similar.  But Clinton won a cluster of key states in 1996 that Gore did not.four years later.  A principle reason was that Gore simply lacked Clinton's capactity to campaign as a populist:

On the flip, we look at the wider variety of map groups associated with each party's success in different forms at different times.

The following map groups encompass all the electoral maps from 1896 to date.  Because they are based on similarities in configuration, there are two maverick maps: Wilson's victory in 1916 is more like other Democratic losses, such as 1896, than it is like any other Democratic victory, and Nixon's victory in 1968 is more like Kennedy's win in 1960 and Carter's in 1976 than it is like any other Republican win.  With that in mind, here are the main map groups, with discussion to follow:

Republican Map Groups

Republican map types basically progress along one axis from solid landslide to to Wilson's razor-thin re-election in 1916-with George Bush's two wins, centered in the South, as an anomalous group off to the side:

The logic of these groupings is fairly straightforward.  Throughout most of the last 150+ years, the Democrats electoral base was the South, while the West was a swing region, so the stronger the Republicans were, the poorer the Democrats did in the West, and less states they held onto in the South.  This all changed in 1964 with Johnson's embrace of Civil Rights, after which we get national Republican landslides like Nixon's re-election in 1972, and Reagan's in 1984, as well as slightly weaker landslides, such as Reagan in 1980 and Bush I in 1988.  

This explains the main, vertical axis of this configuration of map groups.  The top group came last, then below it are the groups associated with decreasing GOP dominance, until we come to the last two "groups"  each only containing a single member.  The two groups could actually be considered one, but splitting them makes the overall progression clearer. Finally, by 2000, the GOP had become a solidly Southern-based party, and thus we have the sole group on a horizontal away from the main sequence, in contrast to the anti-Southern orientation seen on the main sequence.

Democratic Map Groups

Democratic map types also progress primarily along one axis from solid landslide to a group of three similar maps that include Humphrey's 1968 loss to Nixon-with LBJ's landslide without the Deep South as an anomalous group off to the side:

The logic of these maps is almost as straightforward as that of the Republicans.  From Roosevelt's 1936 landslide, surpassing even his sweeping 1932 win, we get a progressive weakening that almost lead to Truman losing in 1948, though the final result was relatively solid, particularly in the Electoral College.  Kennedy's victory in 1960 was razor-thin, and involved a map type never seen before, and was followed four years later by another map type never seen before-LBJ's landslide without the Deep South.  Johnson's landslide belongs by itself off the main axis.  But Kennedy's 1960 win would closely resemble two subsequent elections-Humphrey's loss in 1968 and Carter's win in 1976.  Furthermore, Clinton's two victories in 1992 and 1996 would produce maps that were similar to, but stronger than these three maps, with three main axes of solid Democratic support: the West Coast, the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains, from Maine through Tennessee.  Thus, the Democratic map groups reflect the same turning point around civil rights, with the South moving to the Republicans, but they show a capacity to fight back as well.

Map Groups With All Maps

We're now ready to see all the maps in their propers groups.  First the Republican map groups, then the Democrats.

Map Electoral Maps in Groups

Reps Landslide		Reps South/West
Reps Landslide
Dem's Fragment of South
Dem's ~ Solid South
Dem South Plus Western States - Dems Lose

The Reps Landslide group includes every election from 1972 to 1988, except for the 1976 post-Watergate election in which Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter beat Michigan Republican Gerald Ford.  The identity-based foundations of these landslide elections-and their racial component-are so obvious as to require no further comment, other to point out how different they are from anything else in our history.

The Reps South/West group-which our punditalkcrazy has taken to be some sort of eternal verity-is an anomalous offshoot of this seemingly now-past era of Republican landslides.  Neither demographics nor the catastrophic results of conservative Republican governance favor its continuation.

The Fragmented South group encompassed Al Smith's 1928 campaign, when his Catholic religion put Democratic forces in the South at low ebb, and Dwight Eisenhower's two 1950s victories, when the popular war heo made significant inroads into the traditionally "solid" Democratic South.

The Solid South group includes Teddy Roosevelt's 1904 victory, plus the first two elections of the 1920s.  Smith's loss in 1928 represented a further fragmentation of this previously solid foundation.

The South Plus Westerns States group was a fairly stable configuration from 1896 to 1916.  It was broken only by Teddy Roosevelt's extremely successful re-election bid in 1904, which reduced the Democrats to the Solid South configuration, and the 1912 elections, when Roosevelt ran as a Third Party candidate, and in fact reduced the Republicans to Third Party status, producing the first instance of a Democratic Landslide.  Wilson's 1916 re-election produced the only Democratic win in this configuration group.

Democratic Map Electoral Maps in Groups

Dem Landslide		Dem Landslide W/O South
Dem Landslide-Fragmented
Triple Axes
KHC

The Democratic Landslides are FDR's first two elections, and Wilson's 1912 election, when Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican Party with his third-party Bull Moose candidacy.

The Democratic Landslide w/o The South consists of just one election: LBJ's 1964 landslide, which is almost the mirror image of Eisenhower's 1956 victory just eight years before.  Not only was this dramatic reversal a tremendous historical anomaly, it came immediately after the 1960 election, which was also an anomalous map at the time, although it would later be followed by two similar elections, and a related group of Clinton's two elections. Thus, the 1960/1964 election pair stand out as a clear transition point in the pattern of electoral maps.

The Dem Landslide-Fragmented group includes FDR's unprecedented third and fourth elections in 1940 and 1944-which would have been great triumphs for anybody else-with further erosion in 1948, when Truman ran for re-election.  With the defection of the Dixiecrats, and a vigorous challenge from the left as well, in the form of former Vice President Henry Wallace, Truman was assumed to be a loser, and pulled out a surprisingly decisive win, but still a step down from the sweeping landslide status of FDR's four elections.

The Triple Axes group consists of Clinton's two elections.  This shows the potential for rebuilding from the low ebb of the following group, which was facilitated by Clinton being a upland Southern governor.  This enabled him to flesh out enough of the bare-boned KHC configuration to win solid Electoral College victories.  

Last is the KHC configuration (difficult to characterize geographically in compact form, its name comes from the last initials of Kennedy, Humphrey and Carter, those who produced this configuration).  When it first appeared in 1960 it was complete anomaly.  Instead of bouncing back from Eisenhower's Fragmented South crushing of the Democrats in 1952 and 1956 by re-consolidating the South, Kennedy ran very strong in the North and Midwest, compared to lackluster performance in the outer South, although he did pick up some Western States, ala the Dem South Plus Western States group.  This odd hybrid would only later be confirmed as more than fleeting by Humphrey in 1968 and Carter in 1976.  Clinton's further building on it seemed to echo the way that the Democrats had built on the Solid South before, but the 2000 election seems likely to have put an end to this line of development, as the Democrats now seem poised to advance in other directions, while losing ground in some of the KHC states.

Conclusion

All the above seems to strongly indicate that this could well be a map-changing election, not just for this election, but for many elections to come.  It does not seem likely that we will see maps in the future that resemble any of the groups seen above, at least with any regularity.  There have been two such breakpoints before.  The 1932 election ushered in an era of Democratic dominance, after which only Eisenhower's two victories resembled anything earlier-except, of course, for Wilson's Roosevelt-assisted election in 1912.  After Eisenhower, two elections unlike any previous ones opened up an era in which Republicans would eventually gain landslide status, but no maps would look like those seen before 1960.  It seems altogether possible that we are about to see a similar transition with this election as well.