Question

Trace the development of political parties and changes that occurred since its establishment. •

Identify voters depression methods that are implemented in our society.

Answer 1

The Democrat Party got its start with Andrew Jackson. It gained a lot of traction because of John Quincy Adams presidential win - despite losing the popular vote and electoral college. Andrew Jackson was a Southerner, but actually had less support in certain regions of the South at the time than he did in the North. Regardless, this history firmly established the Democrat Party as the anti-establishment, populist party.

The Republican Party entered the stage with Abraham Lincoln, also elected in a pretty tumultuous way. Specifically, Lincoln got only 40% of the popular vote, and it was highly split along geographic lines. He wasn’t a very popularly known candidate before the election, but had been groomed by the Republican party for 6 years to be president. It’s pretty much the exact opposite of how Andrew Jackson came to be elected, and it put the Republicans in the position of being a regional, elitist party.

So at this point, they were the populist party versus the elitist party. There was regional split in that the GOP was the first American party to rely soly on votes from certain regions, but there were some Republicans in the South, and quite a few Democrats up North. The fundamental difference was populism versus elitism.

That difference continued through the end of the 19th century. There were progressives in both parties, conservatives in both parties, but Dems were populist, and Republicans were elitist. Around the turn of the century, that started to shift. The Democrats started to be a more left wing party, and Republicans started to be more right wing. Not 100%, not even close, Southern Democrats remained incredibly conservative, but reluctant to become Republicans because of associations with the Civil War.

Ultimately around the ’50s or so, there really was a strong ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats also rejected the South, while the Republicans worked to embrace them. People call this the “Southern Strategy,” and say it was primarily a race-driven thing, but it’s always more complex than that. The simple fact is, Southerners were conservatives, Democrats were liberals. The generation who fought the Civil War had finally fully died off. I’m a person who believes historical forces are much more powerful than single issues, and so I look at it that way. The younger generation of Southerners realized that the Democrat party had “left them behind,” in Reagan’s words, and began to register as Republicans. The older Southerners followed them over the course of the next 2–3 decades.

So at that point, the split had shifted from being populist vs. elitist to being an ideological one. Republicans were conservative, Democrats were liberal. The populist vs. elitist divide still existed, though, if only in perception. It was fading, but it still existed. It’s also worth noting that the Republican Party never really became a Southern Party, even though many of its loyal voters were Southern. A couple Republican politicians came out and said they didn’t want to be a party of the South. Republican leadership rarely came from the South (in fact more prominent Democrat politicians were Southern), and it maintained a slightly elitist perspective, though a conservative one.

The problem, of course, is that that isn’t a stable situation. The people who embrace conservative ideals in the US are not the elites. They are the “common people.” The elites tend to be liberal. So Arkansas-based Clinton ran on a platform of “I feel your pain,” while Bob Dole was a Kansas senator who’d been in office since the ‘50s. And we won’t even get into the Bushes… Or McCain. Or Romney. A lot of people ended up not voting for their politics in that situation. Conservative people voted for liberal politicians because they pretended to be one of the people (more so than the other guy), elites voted for a populist party, because it was liberal. Republicans had to try to win the trust of the common people, who agreed with their ideas but distrusted them personally.

What we saw in 2016 was the full reversal of the parties. Donald Trump ran as a populist candidate who was more conservative than his opposition. Hillary run an unapologetically elitist, liberal campaign (much to Bill’s chagrin). And you see how the lines fell differently. As former Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCotter put it, “He may not be of the people, but he’s running as a candidate for the people.” (Paraphrase). The coastal (elite and liberal) states voted for Hillary, and the rest of the country pretty much voted for Trump. The remaining elitist Republicans formed the Never Trump movement, and blue collar, Union Democrats voted for the Republican candidate in spades, many for the first time in their lives. It’s one of those historic reversals, and the completion of a transition that’s been a century in the making.