US Democrats and republicans - civil war and now

[Flying Pig]

Yes. As I said, it doesn't help that the most high-profile business of the Coalition has been reducing the defecit, and the Liberals agreed from the outset to allow the Conservative policy to dominate in this area.

 

[Traitorfish]

The Liberal Democrats and their immediate ancestors haven't actually formed a government since at least the Second World War, and it's only since 2010 that they've had any real influence in policy-making. As such, one could definitely describe it as a 'two and a half' party system.

Scotland and Ulster both seem to be running "two-and-two-halves" party systems (although for the former, that might no longer be the case), while Wales could very well be described as a "one-and-two-halves" system. Strange things, regional parliaments.

 

[Tee Kay]

Meanwhile Queensland is currently a one-party state.

 

[Masada]

I don't see that lasting for long TK.

 

[Tahuti]

Post-WWII Japan was a de-facto democratic single party state under the Minshuto for very long as well.

 

[Antilogic]

The above posts give a pretty good outline on the shifts in US politics, but if you have a half-hour and really want to dive into this take a look at the wiki articles on the US party systems. In the OP's time frame, there are actually 3-4 major shifts in the American political system. The regional and post-slavery-focused party system (3rd) formed around the 1850s and extended into the 1880s. The party system of the Progressive Era (4th) picked up at that point and extended to the 1920s. The next major shift was the New Deal coalition (5th) that lasts until the Civil Rights era, and now we have the post-Civil Rights era system (6th). In each case, it's a major political or economic event that causes the shift in the electorate.

Urban Voters were always in the Democratic Block, AFAIK.

Urban voters are more left-wing, but not necessarily democratic. And by certain standards, the Republican party could be viewed as the more left-wing party until the rise of the New Deal coalition. Of course, you may be right.

Kaiserguard is mostly right here--the US urban vote during the mid-to-late 19th century was dominated by the immigrant communities. Many were fleeing the failed liberal and socialist revolutions in Europe, bringing their left politics to the New World. There are a number of explanations for why this has remained so until today.

There was also a significant element of religion and ethnic division in the local parties as a response to immigration. In places like New York, the "native" people of English and Dutch heritage (mostly Protestants) tended to vote Whig, while the newer German, Irish, and Italian immigrants (mostly Catholic) tended to vote Democratic. This is actually flipped in Louisiana, where the native mixed and French heritage (mostly Catholic) were more Whiggish and the Protestants moving in tended to vote Democratic. Replace Whig with Republican and you have the starting point for the post-ACW era, but it continues to evolve at that point. Labor unions have usually been a Democratic constituency since the Progressive Era, while businessmen and merchants typically favored the Whigs and later the Republicans. Farmers of all scales used to be a strong Democratic constituency until the modern identity politics and the rise of social conservative issues like abortion and gay rights and stuff like that.

If you are talking about exclusively economic issues, the Democratic Party had been shifting left and were the party of economic populism since the Progressive Era. However, if you are focusing on wider social issues like voting rights, civil rights, multiculturalism, etc. then the Democrats were holding on to the reactionary South until the 1960s while quite "liberal" Republicans like Eisenhower, Nixon, and Rockefeller were holding that party to the left. There was a significant left-right overlap between the yesteryear Democratic and Republican parties by modern standards because they weren't quite as ideologically focused, and even then not along the same lines as they are today.

The failure of the Republican government to deal with the problems of the Great Depression effectively led to many traditional Republican voters, specifically minority groups such as African-Americans, to vote for FDR in the 1932 presidential elections. While FDR actually did a fairly poor job of fixing the issues stemming from the Great Depression, he was very charismatic and had good publicity, enabling him to give the impression that he was doing a good job. This meant that the Republicans had lost their monopoly on the African-American vote, along with several other groups, none of them as large, permanently.

Once this happened, the Republicans were faced with either continuous electoral defeat or adapting to the new situation. While they were successful at first after WWII, this was largely because of the immense and bipartisan popularity of Eisenhower, who actually didn't care which of the two parties he ran for, so long as they gave him the power he requested. The Republicans offered him more than the Democrats, so he ran for them.

After Eisenhower retired, his Vice President, Richard Nixon, lost the election to JFK. Nixon owed much of his own popularity to his relationship with Eisenhower, and recognised that the Republican Party could only coast on Ike's coat-tails for so long. He developed the Southern Strategy, which was basically the idea of appealing to white Southerners, largely through racist campaigns and combatting the civil rights movement. It worked, and Nixon won two elections with the strategy. After Nixon, the pattern of today had largely been set, though it remains to be seen how it will change in the future.

The Progressive movement largely started within the Republican party. But competing within that party against the business interests encouraged a shift to the Democrats. A shift that was largely completed during FDR's time. That brought the Blacks almost entirely into the Democratic party, and the Northern Cities became a near Democratic lock from that point on. Southern whites conservatives began to migrate to the Republican party, with a big jump after the 60s, and another jump in the 80s, and pretty well completed during the 90s.

In the Civil War era, the Republican Party was formed out of the ashes of the Whigs as a Northern party opposed to the perceived growth of 'slave power' - the idea that slave-owning southerners wanted to expand slavery throughout the USA and the Americas and so increase their power over the free northerners. Whether this was actually happening is a matter for debate, but this meant that southerners generally thought that the Republicans were abolitionists, which they weren't until halfway through the Civil War. It says something that Abraham Lincoln didn't even appear on the ballot paper in most of the South in the 1861 election: he won entirely because the North had more people in it.

The South remained Democratic, generally, until the 1964 election, where white southerners voted Republican in protest at LBJ's Civil Rights Act, as Goldwater - one of the most conservative Republican nominees until that time - was campaigning against strong federal government, specifically the CRA. Nixon's strategy in 1968 specifically targeted white southerners angry at Civil Rights legislation, essentially changing the geographical positions of the two parties. In general, I suppose you could explain it by arguing that there is a Northern and a Southern party in US politics, and whichever party tends to support the general political outlook of the largest voting bloc in these areas will carry them. This is why the North, being generally more liberal than the South, generally supports the relatively liberal party, while the South, being generally more distrustful of federal government than the North (which I would argue is generally shorthand for racist), generally supports the Democrats.

Couple minor points:

There was a regional element to the African-American vote in the New Deal Era that is not present today. Northern and Southern blacks were voting Republican following the Civil War. However, a combination of shifting economic stances and Democratic concessions to the Southern Democratic leaders in New Deal Era saw the Northern blacks into the Democratic Party but pushed the Southern blacks further to the Republicans.

One of the reasons the Southern Strategy could be implemented so easily was that the Southern Republican Party was so incredibly weak. Many of the Southern states hadn't voted for a Republican since Reconstruction ended. Okay, there is basically one exception when Hoover won by 18%, but even then he didn't win the Deep South belt from Louisiana to South Carolina and his opponent was the first Catholic to run for president. Rarely, Florida would flip because it was very lowly populated back then, and Appalachia would sometimes detach from the lower South despite being part of the modern South. The local party structure was basically nonexistent, so instead of shifting an existing organization it could be crafted from scratch.

 

[JohannaK]

I don't see that lasting for long TK.

Surely Bob Katter will do something about it.