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Last weekend, in "The 'Mapping-Changing' Meme In Historical Perspective, 1896 To Date", I looked at the changing patterns of electoral maps from 1896 to date, taking them in series of time periods. In this diary, I want to step back an look at the overall patterns, and see if there aren't some lessons we can learn from them.
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.
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