So far, our discussion has focused solely on political life in the states as it is quantified for the late 1970s and the 1980s. The present chapter expands the focus backward in time, in order to place our findings in historical perspective. For this task, we assemble measures of state ideology and partisanship from earlier eras. These measures, drawn from Gallup polls from 1936 to 1963, are far noisier than the contemporary measures of state ideology and partisanship that have dominated our discussion so far.

Measurement error demands that our indicators of “historical” ideology and partisanship be analyzed with considerable care. Still, Gallupbased measures of early ideology and partisanship provide helpful leverage for understanding the historical continuity of state-level public opinion and its consequences – from the times of the New Deal to the Reagan presidency. In the following pages, we will see that earlier state-level ideological sentiment may have been less stable than we found for the more recent period, 1976-1988. We will also see evidence that even for the 1930s to the 1960s, state ideology was an important influence on state policy.

HISTORICAL MEASURES OF STATE OPINION

Chapter 2 demonstrated that for the 13 years from which our CBS/NYT survey data were collected, states moved very little in terms of their relative positions on the scales of net ideological identification and partisan identification. The stability of the states was particularly evident in the case of ideology.