Comment by cmurf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmurf | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in Kansas and up until about 15 years ago it bounced back and forth between Democrats and Republicans frequently. And in my dad's era, post war, pretty much everyone was a Democrat, whether urban or rural. And then the parties have flipped ideologies substantially (Southern Democrats, and then Nixon-Atwater Southern Strategy Republicans), and even arguably in 2016 you get a rather substantial 180 degrees with Trump Republicans who suddenly became anti-globalism (domestic capitalism, global mercantilism).

So on the one hand, you need more data over more elections to see if there's correlation, but then that adds noise. At a national level, the parties have sub-parties within them where in consensual democracies they'd be separate parties, it's not a strictly two party system like you see in majoritarian democracies. And this is always in flux.

Another source of noise is just the nature of the 2016 presidential election. Possibly a better source to reduce noise? U.S. senate races. They're statewide like a presidential race, the term is 6 years, but the lack of national media hype involved in the campaigns makes them less emotional and the data might be more stable. The incumbency problem might make it useless.

JFK and FDR still seem like Democrats.

Hoover, Eisenhower, and Teddy still seem like Republicans.

The idea that the parties "switched" is little more than a notion with which Democrats try to distance themselves from the awful parts of their past.

The distancing claim is that the racists switched parties, not that the parties switched ideologies.

Ya know, like Strom.

If you don't think it's kind of obvious which party currently has more members that think it's fun to race bait or worse, well whatever.

The claim was:

> And then the parties have flipped ideologies substantially

Strom Thurmond was one of three Southern segregationists who switched parties. The rest of the segregationists remained Democrats, including such famous names as George Wallace and Robert Byrd.

And the Civil Rights Act had more support from Republicans than from Democrats.

You've misread my comment. I responded to you stating that Democrats like to distance themselves from their past by pointing out that they don't do this with claims about switching ideologies.

That's why I put the word "distancing" in front of the word "claim".

Does that 3 count include an exhaustive survey of voting Republicans or is it just sophistry to get people reading the remark to focus on prominent individuals?

That 3 is the number of politicians who switched. I focus on prominent individuals because history has recorded their actions, so we can actually speak factually about their behavior.

Unless you have an exhaustive survey of individuals who switched parties, let's avoid unfounded (and likely partisan) speculation about what such a survey might say.

You started the thread with an assertion that is on the same footing as my speculation.

That assertion is based on facts, not speculation, and I'm happy to back it up with as many facts as you like. For example:

In 1976, after the South supposedly supposedly switched allegiance, shortly after LBJ's (reported) claim that he'd "lost the South for a generation", all the Southern states except Virginia voted for Carter, a Democrat.

(Apparently there's some doubt about whether LBJ actually said that. The media may have lied to us again.)

1976 is the only time since the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that a Democrat has won a majority of the south. !976 was definitely not a regular election. The Democratic candidate was white evangelical southerner. The Republican candidate was a northerner who had been Nixon's vice president and had pardoned Nixon. It took pretty extreme circumstances for the south to vote for a Democrat after 1964.

What are the extreme circumstances there? That the Democrat was a Southerner? So were Clinton and Gore.

That Ford was closely associated with Nixon and had pardoned him? Why would the South have cared more about that than the rest of the country? Despite the pardon, Ford won 27 states, including California, and 48% of the popular vote.

In 68 much of the South voted for Wallace, a Democrat running as an independent, and Texas voted for the Democrat ticket. In 72 every state save MA and DC voted for Nixon, so the South doesn't stand out there. Then in 76 the South voted for the Democrat, Carter.

It's not until Reagan that we see the South reliably voting Republican.

Ike feels like he would more likely be a centrist Democrat today than a Republican.

Nixon too, in a way.

I mean, Nancy's "respectable Republican cloth coat".

There is also the 1994 mid term elections where Kansas republicans picked up 2 congressional seats and the governor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Revolution#House_of...

The ideological "sort" of conservatives into the Republican party and liberals into the Democratic party is a recent phenomenon. As recently as the late 1970s, the Republican party wasn't even clear on its stance on abortion. The sort was set in motion after Reagan was elected and wasn't really completed until after the Contract With America years.

There was a long time of Democrat domination of the southern states' politics from the end of Reconstruction that didn't end until about sixteen years ago. It's hard to assign ideological values like left/right, or even positions of, e.g., capitalism vs. not-capitalism, to the parties before the 70s, and even since (with some exceptions).

The Democratic party had something of a flirtation with the left side of the spectrum in FDR, but it wasn't anything like a defining characteristic of the party back then, and JFK went pretty much in the other direction. The Republican party had Presidents like Coolidge, who would definitely be on the right side of the spectrum, but also Nixon, who gave us price controls and proposed single-payer health care.

It's all a bit of a mishmash with a few salient exponents of somewhat-consistent ideology here and there, like Presidents Teddy Roosevelt (a progressive of sorts), FDR, Reagan, and now Trump. Things do seem to be clarifying in recent times, but even so, it's still not always all very clear. The fact is that the individual candidates have more going for or against them than just party affiliation or ideology.

There's an axis of populist economic policies in there, too; in the late 19th century this was strongly associated with Democrats, while Republicans pushed harder for "pure" laissez-faire capitalism.

That one is a bit more interesting, since in the modern day there are populist-economic wings of both major parties, though with very different approaches to implementing their ideas, surrounding a more laissez-faire "center".

Kansan here. Gun control is a big part of the Democrats failure in KS. Several years ago, over 90% of the voters supported the RKBA amendment to the KS constitution.

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