Facts about "Reagan Democrats"

[136or142]

From what I've read part of what the first two posters wrote is both true.

In regards to the second poster, he is correct that Bill Clinton won some of these former Reagan Democrats back in 1992 or 1996.  However, many of the seemed to favor George W Bush over Al Gore in 2000, and contrary to what the second poster wrote, there is very little evidence that hardly any of these voters or, as the second poster wrote, these type of voters, voted for Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012.

Most of this 'working class' demographic had become fully Republican at the Presidential and Congressional level by 2000 over social issues.

The first poster is correct in that Politico recently took a look at these supposedly new voters that Trump brought into the primary process, and concluded that nearly all of them had regularly voted previously, just not in primaries.  They also concluded that nearly all of them were long time Republican voters, though I'm not sure how they figured that out.

[136or142]

the problem is that things have changed in the last couple of generations. Yes Reagan got 27% of Democrats in 1980, but Ford got 20% of Dems in 1976. Back then there simply were a lot more Dems and a lot of them started voting Republican after the 60s. I seriously doubt Trump is going to do much better with actual self-described Dems as McCain (10%) or Romney (7%).

Perhaps the better new (but convoluted) term would be "Trump Dem-leaning Independents". That would be indies who voted for Obama in 2008 (when he got 52%), but probably didnt vote at all in 2012 (when he got 45%), and are now considering Trump.

It wasn't until 1984 that they became "Reagan Democrats."  Most people seem to have forgetten that in the Spring of 1983 Ronald Reagan had a 32% (maybe 33%) approval rating.

There was an article in Rolling Stone at the time that still showed him to be competitive with most Democrats, just as the equally unpopular Jimmy Carter was still competitive with Ronald Reagan according to the polls until the last week of the 1980 election, but that Walter Mondale had something like a 10%  lead (or higher) over Reagan in the Spring of 1983.

It seems that the voters back then were tired of political revolutions or political experiments and wanted somebody they considered to be 'down to earth' which they considered Walter Mondale, and pretty much no other Democrat and certainly not Ronald Reagan with his 'revolution' to be.

[136or142]

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Perhaps, just perhaps the source was not reliable and had zero relation to reality?

Do you have any source that indicates this isn't true?  I, like you, have some doubts about their explanation for why Walter Mondale was the only Democrat with a clear lead over Reagan at the time, but I have zero reason to doubt the accuracy of their numbers.

[136or142]

It wasn't until 1984 that they became "Reagan Democrats."  

Actually Regan got a smaller percentage of Dems in 1984 (down to 26%), but more importantly, the number describing themselves as Dems dropped from 43% to 38% and those describing themselves as Republicans rose from 28% to 35%.  Again reinforcing how 'Reagan Democrats' were actually becoming Republicans, which was actually a trend (and as others have noted, much of that was due to the obvious movement of Dems to the GOP in the South).

And much of the Midwest as well.

[136or142]

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Doesn't sound like 'super republican' to me. Boomers have been a notoriously terrible republican 'base'.

Yes, but nobody is claiming (or nobody should be claiming) that all boomers are heavily Republican, only that white boomers are heavily Republican.

If the exit polls on the boomers are adjusted to only include white voters, my guess is that it would back up the claim that (white) baby boomers are the most heavily Republican large voting demographic.

[136or142]

Little tidbit, if we are talking about Southern Democrats who voted for Reagan (and possibly Republican after that), they absolutely did not defect until 1984.  Jimmy Carter dominated the rural South in 1980 and only (barely) lost the Southern states that he did because Reagan won the more populated counties...

The only Southern States Jimmy Carter won in 1980 were his home state of Georgia and West Virginia.  It is true that he lost many of them by around 1-2%.

[136or142]

the best i can tell the best equivilent to "Reagan Democrats" in this election are persuadables (i sometimes prefer that term to "swing voters") who strongly prefer Trump's protectionism to Hillary's generally free trade views. Voters like that are more likely to be blue collar and thus Dem leaning.

Maybe "Perot-Obama voters" is a slightly better (albeit still outdated) term?

Donald Trump is only a definite protectionist to the degree to which he doesn't personally negotiate the free trade deals himself.

[136or142]

It's not really fair to say Reagan Democrats were all Southerners.  Southern Democrats who voted Democratic in downballot races were part of Reagan's 1984 coalition, but it doesn't explain why New Jersey voted as Republican as Georgia in 1984.

Reagan won many white working-class votes in major cities in 1984 from voters who were culturally conservative, but registered Democrats at the "local level".  The local level reached all the way down to Congressional races.  Then, too, the parties were less ideological back then; lots of Democrats moderated their voting records to tailor them to their constituencies in ways that seem to be no longer tolerated. 

Hard to say regarding New Jersey, as while George H W Bush won approximately 54% of the vote there in 1988 he won 57% of the vote in New Jersey.

That the state became fairly heavily Democratic at the Presidential level (and at the state level most of the time) is likely part of the change from the suburbs being heavily Republican (except for the inner suburbs) to outside the south the suburbs at least leaning Democratic.

[136or142]

West Virginia is Southern?

From wiki

The question of how to define the subregions in the South has been the focus of research for nearly a century.

As defined by the United States Census Bureau,[1] the Southern region of the United States includes sixteen states. As of 2010, an estimated 114,555,744 people, or thirty-seven percent of all U.S. residents, lived in the South, the nation's most populous region.[26] The Census Bureau defined three smaller divisions:

The South Atlantic States: Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Delaware
The East South Central States: Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee
The West South Central States: Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas.

1.People are paid to research this?
2.What kind of research could you do?  "No, I'm still needed to work on this, just let me check that map again."  ??

I'm joking, of course by a map, West Virginia is hardly geographically in the South.

The one on that list though that makes no sense to me is Delaware. And,  if Delaware is considered 'southern' then why not Maryland?