My students and I had fun discussing political geography today.  For instance, take a look at these two maps side by side.  First, we have the presidential electoral map from 1860, from the National Atlas of the United States:

Then we have this recent study, from Open Left, depicting how white men (the only ones eligible to vote in 1860) voted in 2008:

Now, obviously it would be very easy to overdraw an analysis from these two maps.  And indeed, I think Open Left is a bit too Whiggish (despite trying not to be Whiggish) about the links between the expansion of voting rights and the election of Progressive presidential candidates–after all, the expanded electorate has certainly elected its share of conservative Presidents.

But it’s still pretty interesting.

No Oscar commentary from me, but all this talk of Hollywood did bring me back to a quote from a couple of weeks ago.

Like hungry jackals at a carcass, factions have already begun fighting over how best to spend the $800 billion stimulus.  One of the tastier goodies will be an allotment for high-speed rail connections in various parts of the country.  Republican Senator Jim DeMint seemed particularly upset at the prospect of a Los Angeles to Las Vegas connection:

The President has a point that taxpayer money should not be used to pay for Wall Street fat cats to fly to Las Vegas but why is it okay for taxpayer money to be used to help pay for Hollywood elites to get there on a fancy gambling train? And why are we subsidizing leisure in a stimulus bill rather than encouraging work and greater productivity?

A few points here.  Does anyone really think a genuine Hollywood elite would take the train?  Also, can’t we imagine that down-home productive plebeians would find plenty of uses for a rail connection between two major population centers?  (As a side note, does anyone even pretend that “Hollywood elites” isn’t dog-whistle for “Jews”?)

Finally, why is it that politicians believe they can get so much mileage out of demonizing certain parts of the country?  The examples in recent (or semi-recent) politics are numerous:

• The 2004 ad that stated,  “Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading . . .” says the husband. His apple-cheeked wife interrupts to say, “. . . body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, Left-wing freak show back to Vermont [Dr Dean's home state] where it belongs.”
• The 1988 attempts to saddle Michael Dukakis with the label of “Taxachusetts” based on the policies of his home state.
• More recent efforts to lambaste Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi for her “San Francisco values.”  (No mystery about the dog-whistle target there.)

In any case, Matthew Yglesias asks a similar question:

For whatever reason, conservatives are constantly allowed to get away with this business of summarily dismissing vast regions of the country as unworthy and never get called on it. But this sort of thing is leading the movement on a direct (albeit, non-rail) route to a Dixie-only ghetto.

This idea put reader BPM in the mind of the Federalist Party in the 1810s, which was more or less a New England-only ghetto.  Historians have argued endlessly about the degree to which nineteenth-century political parties were regionally based.  And it remains to be seen whether the Republican party will wind up being confined to the South and the Plains/Mountain West.  Regardless, this sort of rhetoric does appear to be self-defeating.  Shouldn’t each party claim to be the better representative of all America?  Why single out some locations as more American than others?  (I mean, I think I know why, but it’s worth asking the rhetorical question.)

From Brad DeLong’s most prodigious of all blogs by a working academic, there is some support for my “William Jennings Bryan coalition” post of a few days ago, with heavy-duty social science graphs.  As I understand it, the graphs show that 2008 southern voters were radically more responsive to race than voters in other regions, with the Midwest as the next most similar region, but not very similar. (It was the relatively underpopulated Plains that went for McCain, not the cities of the [post-] industrial Midwest.) Brad opines:

The whites in the heartland of today’s Republican Party just do not vote–and do not think–like the rest of us do. Richard Nixon wanted the Republican Party to lock up the South. Now it looks as though the South has locked up the Republican Party.

The post does not get any deeper into the history of the GOP’s southern problem, and emphasizes racism more than I did; yet one must note that for all Bryan’s humanism and good Christian intentions, southern racists were his hard-core base of support.  In his last run in 1908, Bryan pulled more than 70% of the vote in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and over 90% in those last two.

While last week’s NYT article on the South’s waning influence in national elections was one more example of the bigot hunt that the media has been on ever since Barack Obama emerged as a serious contender for the Democratic nomination, it nevertheless makes a good point about the dead end the GOP has rushed into by over-relying for too long on the Southern strategy of somewhat indirectly stirring up the racial and cultural antipathies of southern, rural, and less educated voters. “They’ve maxed out on the South,” political scientist Merle Black is quoted saying in the story, which has “limited their appeal in the rest of the country.” The underlying problem is that while there seem to be NASCAR fans and mega-churches everywhere these days, the South’s fundamentalist political style does not travel all that well, or age gracefully when it does. Non-southerners (and a non-trivial minority of southerners) get tired of being harangued and bullied after a while. More than that, perhaps, the high emotional key and folksy inflection just do not suit voters without the necessary white, rural, evangelical Protestant background/mindset. Life in the big city seems to foster a more complicated view of the world.

What the 2008 Electoral College map shows more than ever is that the Republicans now find themselves with the coalition the Democrats had at the beginning of one of their least competitive periods a century or more ago. That would be the William Jennings Bryan coalition of the Solid South plus the Plains and mining West, the Great Commoner’s ticket to presidential election losses in 1896, 1900, and 1908. While Bryan was far more intelligent and humane than either John McCain or Sarah Palin, he appealed heavily to rural Protestant self-righteousness, building on the remains of the Populist Party, and lost crucial northeastern working-class Catholic votes that the Democrats have always needed to win national elections.  Twisting the Populist platform of economic reform into the nostrum of “Free Silver,” with an assist from western mining interests, the Bryan Democrats were defeated in 1896 by William McKinley and his “Full Dinner Pail” of typical Federalist/Whig/GOP trickle-down economics, which seemed the safe and rational alternative when contrasted with Bryan’s emotionalism.

Far from learning from their mistake, the Bryan Democrats nominated their favorite two more times and saw him beaten even more badly each outing. In his later years, Bryan made his alliance with evangelical Protestantism (and status as a political ancestor of modern Christian conservatism) even clearer by stumping against evolution and taking the anti-monkey (I mean, anti-evolution) side in the Scopes “Monkey” Trial.  Coming from Nebraska, Bryan also forged the political and cultural connection between the Plains states and the South that disappeared for a time at mid-century but reemerged with a vengeance in the the GOP culture wars that have raged ever since the Clinton sex scandals.

Let’s go to the maps. From Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, here’s the election of 1896 (note the historically correct use of red for the Democrats and blue for the GOP):

Now 2008:

The South’s larger, migration-fueled population in recent times made the Bryan coalition a bit more winnable for the modern GOP than it was for the Bryan Democrats. That is, until one consequence of northern migration below the Mason-Dixon inevitably made itself felt: as educated Northeasterners moved further south down I-95 into northern Virginia and then fanned out into the burgeoning cities of central North Carolina, they brought some of their more tolerant attitudes and modernity-friendly politics with them. This effect is certain to spread in the future. The solid South will go back to its loser status and stay there for awhile as key parts of it become more diverse and break away, and the rest gets more and more offensive to everyone else.

After the jump, a salute to the sort of “culture and heritage” that today’s GOP increasingly follows in the footsteps of:

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