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I'm not sure that's actually true. There was a great graphic a few years back that showed party allegiance by state over time. You could see how most states use

I'm not sure that's actually true. There was a great graphic a few years back that showed party allegiance by state over time. You could see how most states used to be fairly split between both parties and how they frequently swung from party to party between elections. However, in the 80s or so many states started to align more closely with one party. Given the duration for which that has been going on, I wonder if that's the natural end state of a defacto two party system.

sachdevap 7y ago
That end result is probably strongly favored by gerrymandering.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> You could see how most states used to be fairly split between both parties and how they frequently swung from party to party between elections. That was a short-term artifact of political realignments starting in the 1930s (New Deal Coalition) and—before that one had fully stabilized—1960s (Civil Rights). Those overlapping realignments settled down into s new relatively stable alignment by the late 1980s; before the realignments most states were much stronger one-party states than the solid-red or solid-blue states today, and sometimes the second state party, if it existed at all, wasn't even the other major national party (Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party is a remnant of that: prior to the New Deal coalition, which it became part of and eventually joined the Democratic Party, the party competing with the dominant Republican Party in Minnesota was the Farmer-Labor Party, which was not associated with the Democrats.)
- saghm 7y ago
  > That was a short-term artifact of political realignments starting in the 1930s (New Deal Coalition) and—before that one had fully stabilized—1960s (Civil Rights). To be fair, there were only four elections in the previous 70 years that resulted in a Democrat winning. I think that avoiding something that like in the future is probably worthwhile, which is a minor argument against the electoral college based on past results.

sachdevap 7y ago

That end result is probably strongly favored by gerrymandering.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> You could see how most states used to be fairly split between both parties and how they frequently swung from party to party between elections. That was a short-term artifact of political realignments starting in the 1930s (New Deal Coalition) and—before that one had fully stabilized—1960s (Civil Rights). Those overlapping realignments settled down into s new relatively stable alignment by the late 1980s; before the realignments most states were much stronger one-party states than the solid-red or solid-blue states today, and sometimes the second state party, if it existed at all, wasn't even the other major national party (Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party is a remnant of that: prior to the New Deal coalition, which it became part of and eventually joined the Democratic Party, the party competing with the dominant Republican Party in Minnesota was the Farmer-Labor Party, which was not associated with the Democrats.)

saghm 7y ago
> That was a short-term artifact of political realignments starting in the 1930s (New Deal Coalition) and—before that one had fully stabilized—1960s (Civil Rights). To be fair, there were only four elections in the previous 70 years that resulted in a Democrat winning. I think that avoiding something that like in the future is probably worthwhile, which is a minor argument against the electoral college based on past results.