The modern Democratic Party is the Gilded Age GOP on steroids

[WhyteRain]

I've been saying for awhile now that the modern Democratic Party has become "the Gilded Age GOP on steroids" -- the party of "negro rights" and big business favoritism.  As a short-cut I use this map of the 1896 election.




I ask, what states will the Democratic nominee definitely win in 2012 that the same party's nominee won in 1896?  (I count only one.)

[WhyteRain]

So Democrats oppose regulation and the right to unionize?

The Rockefeller boys didn't become Democratic Party senators for no reason.

[WhyteRain]

They share the some of the same constituencies (Mainline protestants, upper income liberals, economic nationalists), but there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of differences. For one, the Gilded Age Republican Party wouldn't have any support from Catholic voters, considering that, y'know, they were virulently anti-Catholic.

1.  There are enough similarities that pretty much the entire Gilded Age GOP electorate has gone over to the Democrats (while nearly the entire Democratic constituencies in the South and Mountain West have switched to the GOP).  Look all the way down to county level voting -- it's astounding really.

2.  The Gilded Age GOP wasn't as anti-Catholic as the all-Democratic Ku Klux Klan, was it?  After all, it looks from the maps that the GOP was very strong even in heavily catholic areas of the North (Rhode Island, Connecticut, Mass., Wisc., Minn.) while the Democratic Party was week in Catholic areas of the South (like the French Catholics around New Orleans and the German Catholics in central Texas).

[WhyteRain]

The KKK was in no way all-Democratic in the 20's (their peak of influence).

The 1920s Klan was the popular outgrowth resulting from the movie <i>The Birth of a Nation</i> and the white tribalism promoted by Southern progressives like Tom Watson and Woodrow Wilson (born in Virginia and raised in Georgia).  Yes, there were lots of Midwest Republicans in the Klan in the 1920s -- including Pres. Harding, who was sworn in in the White House, I've read.  Anyway, as we all know, anti-Catholicism was hardly the raison d'etre of the Klan.

But look at the county map for 1896:  The heavily Catholic counties in both the North and the South were correspondingly heavily Republican.