Voting blocks throughout history

[A18]

I keep reading about how different groups of people voted in, for example, 1896. What is this information based on? Surely there weren't any exit polls?

[Schmitz in 1972]

I keep reading about how different groups of people voted in, for example, 1896. What is this information based on? Surely there weren't any exit polls?

We don't need exit polls to know that college professors are usually democrats or that evangelicals are usually republicans, its just common knowledge. I suspect it was the same way back in 1896 or whenever.

[Alcon]

Do you really need exit polls to tell today, after all?

Look at heavily Hispanic, Native American, black counties, poor counties - Democratic.

Agricultural, wealthy, southern - Republican.

That doesn't even account for oral history.

[Beet]

The viewing of American politics through the clash of various voting blocs rearranging themselves from time to time along party lines, each rearrangement which results in a new "alignment" or "party system" is a view that fits heavily with realignment theory. It is also a theory that its critics charge is derived from Marx's conception of society as classes.

For example, critics of realignment (notably David Mayhew) charge that Walter Dean Burnham, who took the realignment theory the farthest, sees the 1860, 1896 and 1932 realignments as the juxtaposition of the industrial classes against agrarian aristocracy, of the tragic rejection of the working class consciousness in 1896, and of the reawakening of this consciousness in 1932. This view is supposedly Marxist because it divides American politics into blocs much like Marx's classes, and because realignments under this view are generated by "pressures" that built up within society over time that boil over once in a generation or two, much like Marx predicted tensions within capitalism eventually boiling over.

Just something to be aware of.

[A18]

I've read some pretty specific things... for example, it's been said that virtually every group shifted to the GOP in 1896.

[Beet]

I've read some pretty specific things... for example, it's been said that virtually every group shifted to the GOP in 1896.

That's true (it is probably based on aggregate voting data, I dont think there were polls at that time), though the realignment theorists would say the long-term importance of the 1894-96 cycle is in solidifying the Northeastern Republican vote, since the GOP's gains in the South turned out to be useless and ephemeral. In the 1894 midterm, the GOP made no electoral gains in the South or West, despite making big gains in all other regions and picking up a record 125 seats.

[A18]

What do you mean "aggregate voting data?" Do you mean state-by-state shifts?

[Beet]

What do you mean "aggregate voting data?" Do you mean state-by-state shifts?

At the electoral level this is exactly defined as state-level partisan vote shifts.

[memphis]

In 1896, people lived mainly in ethnic neighborhoods, so all one would have to do is to look at precint data.