The Red State-Blue State Divide: Is Economy the Driver?

[Geee]

PJMedia:

With another close national election looming, we seem headed towards another election night where most states are spoken for and just a few battlegrounds like Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, and Florida will choose the next president.

The conventional wisdom about the familiar divisions of Democratic “blue” states located mostly on both coasts versus Republican “red” states in mostly the South and the Heartland is that the phenomenon is based mainly on social issues. Michael Barone, co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, has argued for years that social or cultural issues like abortion, gay rights, gun control, and minority rights have been more important than economics since the 1960s in determining Americans’ votes. On the other hand, Democratic strategists like James Carville have always believed that Democrats win by focusing on economic issues. And in the conclusion to The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), Kevin Phillips wrote: “Thus, it is appropriate that much of the emerging Republican majority lies in the top growth states or new suburbia, while Democratic trends correlate with stability and decay.”

 

As we shall see, Carville and Phillips have a point: as the South has gotten wealthier, it has become more Republican; as the North has lost economic clout, it has moved towards the Democrats in the last generation.

But Mr. Barone and the other “culture war” theorists also have a point. In 2008, President Obama carried eight of the top ten states in per capita income, losing only Dick Cheney’s Wyoming and Sarah Palin’s Alaska (both with substantial energy wealth). Furthermore, the 2008 exit polls showed that red-state voters were more likely to attend church services regularly, and to oppose abortion, gay rights, and gun control.

[Valin]

@Geee

 

 

For roughly a century after the Civil War era, from the 1850s to 1956, the South was the Democrats’ best region. But in the 1960s, the Democratic vote for president in Dixie collapsed from 50% in 1960 to only 31% in 1968. Virtually all historians blame the Southern defection on the civil rights movement that eventually forced federal intervention in the “Southern way of life,” i.e., segregation. (The proof offered is that after signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Lyndon Johnson, a native Texan, ran worse among white Southerners than did Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy, both Yankees. Johnson reportedly said after signing the bill: “I’ve just handed the South to the Republican Party for the next 50 years”).

 

 

 

You could also say the rise of the South has to do with (as the writer notes) the end of Jim Crow, people did not have to spend so much time and energy being concerned about Race, this also allowed the smart best qualified blacks to enter into the economy, + two words...Air...Conditioning.

Remember at this time (the 60's) the FBI went to war against the KKK. Also I think Whites in the south said...Enough, Jim Crow is stupid.