was the 1968 election a turning point in the voting patterns in the US?

[freepcrusher]

I think of it this way.

If you add Nixon and all the third party candidates up you basically get an election similar to 1972-1988. Basically, the democrats are restricted to inner city ghettoes and Humphrey only ends up winning five states and Nixon wins a 499-29 EV Victory. The only states Humphrey wins are in the northeast or in Scandinavian areas of the Midwest.

If you add Humphrey and all the third party candidates up you get an election similar to 1932-1964. It involves basically cleaning up in the south getting at least 56% in each state, and winning a handful of states elsewhere. The only states Nixon would win would be in the plains and mountains states (NE, KS, Dakotas, MT, ID, WY, AZ, NM, UT), rural Ohio and Indiana, and pockets of residual republican strength in New England (NH and VT).

[sg0508]

Probably the last election where you can say most of the 50 states were not decided prior to the primaries.  It really shaped the plains and mountains as GOP states, the end of the old democratic south (until the brief buck in 1976) and the movement of the heavy democratic states to the northeast, Rust Belt and west coast (Humphrey almost won CA).

[Heimdal]

It was the election which finally saw the death of the old New Deal coalition, as Vietnam and the Civil Rights backlash tore the Democratic Party appart.

[Username MechaRFK]

It was the election which finally saw the death of the old New Deal coalition, as Vietnam and the Civil Rights backlash tore the Democratic Party appart.

I would put 1984 as the end of the New Deal coalition. Or to go back  even further, 1976 election.  It was one of the depressing elections in recent history.

[SingingAnalyst]

Yes, it exposed divisions which persist to this day. The 1976 election was a temporary return to the old ways.

[Boston Bread]

Yes, it exposed divisions which persist to this day. The 1976 election was a temporary return to the old ways.

Yes, map-wise. But the Democratic coalition in the south was much different. Without the black vote, Carter would have only won AR, TN, GA out of the 13 confederate states. The southern white vote in 1976 was more Republican than any election before 1968. So I'd say 1968 was a permanent tipping point.

[/]

It was the election which finally saw the death of the old New Deal coalition, as Vietnam and the Civil Rights backlash tore the Democratic Party appart.

Good point...

[Obama-Biden Democrat]

Yes, it exposed divisions which persist to this day. The 1976 election was a temporary return to the old ways.

Yes, map-wise. But the Democratic coalition in the south was much different. Without the black vote, Carter would have only won AR, TN, GA out of the 13 confederate states. The southern white vote in 1976 was more Republican than any election before 1968. So I'd say 1968 was a permanent tipping point.

Yea, no doubt. What is outstanding is that Democrats used to get 90 % of the vote in some southern states and even 99 % a few times. And that was with a almost entirely white electorate.

By the 1976 election the Civil rights backlash hurt Democrats badly in the South, even with Carter's southern appeal. I would guess he won around 35 % of Southern whites, and relied on heavy Black support to win.

[SingingAnalyst]

Yes, it exposed divisions which persist to this day. The 1976 election was a temporary return to the old ways.

Yes, map-wise. But the Democratic coalition in the south was much different. Without the black vote, Carter would have only won AR, TN, GA out of the 13 confederate states. The southern white vote in 1976 was more Republican than any election before 1968. So I'd say 1968 was a permanent tipping point.

I agree. Current voting patterns can be traced to 1968. The backlash in 1964 was confined to the deep south; KY and TN had swings toward Johnson comparable to the national average. Sure the south went GOP in 1972, but so did the rest of the country. Even today's gender gap poked its head out in 1968, with women 4 points more for Humphrey than men.

[Fuzzy Bear]

Yes, it exposed divisions which persist to this day. The 1976 election was a temporary return to the old ways.

Yes, map-wise. But the Democratic coalition in the south was much different. Without the black vote, Carter would have only won AR, TN, GA out of the 13 confederate states. The southern white vote in 1976 was more Republican than any election before 1968. So I'd say 1968 was a permanent tipping point.

I agree. Current voting patterns can be traced to 1968. The backlash in 1964 was confined to the deep south; KY and TN had swings toward Johnson comparable to the national average. Sure the south went GOP in 1972, but so did the rest of the country. Even today's gender gap poked its head out in 1968, with women 4 points more for Humphrey than men.

The 1968 election represented a full-scale rebuke to the Democratic liberalism of the Great Society, permissiveness, and the counterculture.  The themes that resonated were Law and Order, a rejection of the Far Left Anti-War movement, coupled with a desire to find an honorable end to the Vietnam War.  It also represented a full-scale endorsement of Middle Class values.  The 1972 election was even more of the same, and the results were even more destructive for the Democrats because their convention put the Counterculture front and center at their convention.  (The Democratic Party is still recovering from the awful sight of hippies, radical minorities, and leftists dominating a convention and calling it the "New Politics"; a politics that was rejected by all but MA and DC.)

And that's the way America went until some time after 1988, when the suburbs of the Northeast and Midwest began to rebel against the domination of the GOP by its religious conservatives.  The cultural disconnect between Southern evangelicals and previously Republican constituencies in the Northeast and urban Midwest resulted in a realignment as older voters died, or moved to Florida, and younger voters with more liberal social mores voted Democratic.  But for 20 years, the "Real Majority" described in the book so titled by Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg held sway at the Presidential level, and that "Real Majority", Richard Nixon's "Silent Majority", wanted no part of the "reforms" of the counterculture, liberal as they may have been on labor unions, Medicare, and other economic issues.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Yes, it exposed divisions which persist to this day. The 1976 election was a temporary return to the old ways.

Yes, map-wise. But the Democratic coalition in the south was much different. Without the black vote, Carter would have only won AR, TN, GA out of the 13 confederate states. The southern white vote in 1976 was more Republican than any election before 1968. So I'd say 1968 was a permanent tipping point.

Yea, no doubt. What is outstanding is that Democrats used to get 90 % of the vote in some southern states and even 99 % a few times. And that was with a almost entirely white electorate.

That was because it was a 100% white electorate. Prior to the Civil War the South was split between Whig and Democratic states. NC, TN, GA, LA, FL were Whig and the rest were Dem though MS would sometimes go Whig. The problem was that these Whigs ranged from plantation owners to commercially oriented farmers to the poor whites of eastern Tennessee/Western NC. Some like the later were bastions of Unionist support and after the Civil War became areas of GOP strength in the Democratic dominated South. The pre-Civil War era witnessed the subsuming of Whigs into the Democrats, though it should be noted that former Whigs were elected in opposition to the former Democrat Jefferson Davis during the Civil War, such as Zebulon Vance in NC.

After the Civil War you had a few Whigs who had become Republicans like the Eastern TN areas mentioned before and some northerners who were sustained by the majority black voting blocks in those states. Until the KKK drove them from the polls and Conservatives, many former Whigs included retook the states and made life difficult for the blacks. However the end was not at hand yet, for Mississippi had a black Congressman as late as the 1880's. The end came in the 1890's when a post Civil War generation steeped fully in the "horrors" of Black Lincoln Republicanism and Lost Cause Mythology. They former a rather militant wing of the Democratic Party, and passed Constitutions like in MS that stamped out both black and poor white voting in many instances. Turnout and participation plummeted, though you did have a Progressive and a bourbon wing effectively returning to the Era of Good Feelings' one party rule. Those seeking power joined the Democrats and thus primaries and the struggle between Bourbon and Populist/Progressive took the place of two party competition.

The reformation of the two party system began in 1952 in the South. Turnout surged massively in many states, including Virginia, but the Republicans benefitted more than the Democrats and flipped that state for decades to come. Republicans also got the upper hand in TN, KY and FL as well and made NC competitive (these states look familiar, see above). Dallas, Charlotte and Tampa became Republican towns in the same manner that cities and metropolitan areas had rejected the populism of Democrats as far back as Jackson in favor of the more commercially oriented party, with a base built on strong middle class and even some working class support. Once the Democrats had embraced Civil Rights, there was no longer anything special to hold them in a party against their interests and so these people defected to the business oriented party. Northerners also began to pour into these big cities and their suburbs, most far righties from the Midwest.