CRITICAL ELECTIONS IN 1860 AND 1964

This chapter will develop the idea of activist influence in elections presented in the previous chapter, but will apply the model to the transformation of electoral politics that has seemed to occur in recent elections in the United States. Indeed we shall use the model to suggest that a slow transformation has occurred in the locations of Republican and Democrat presidential candidates, and as a consequence, pattern of majorities for the two parties in the States of the Union have shifted. In our account, this is because the most important policy axes have slowly rotated. We ascribe this to the shifting balance of power between different activist groups in the polity.

Just to illustrate the idea, Table 8.1 shows the shift in state majorities for the two-party candidates between 1896 and 2000, whereas Table 8.2 shows the similarity between the two elections. It is clear that there is a strong tendency for states that voted Republican in 1896 to vote Democrat in 2000, and vice versa. Aside from the fact that a number of states had been formed out of the territories in the period from 1860 to 1896, there is little substantive difference between the pattern of Democrat and Republican states in 1860 and 1896. However, as Table 8.1 suggests, the states that voted Republican for Lincoln in 1860, or for McKinley in 1896, tended to vote Democrat in 2000.

Prior to 1856 of course, there was good reason to believe that the Democrat Party had almost become the permanent majority, by controlling almost all southern and western states.