Why aren't presidential races as national anymore?

[dazzleman]

Prior to 2000, the last close election was 1976.

Many more states were competitive in 1976 than in 2000.  Western states that now turn in a heavy Republican vote went relatively narrowly for Gerald Ford.  Ford also did well in the northeast, and even the states lost like New York and Massachusetts were not by the huge margins that happen today.

Even in the 1980 landslide election, the vote in many southern states was razor-thin, and they were highly competitive and could have gone the other way, conceivably.

I think some people are shedding their old ethnic and regional prejudices and voting more in line with their philosophical opinions. 

Two generations ago, my family voted almost completely Democratic, though many of them became "Reagan Democrats" by the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Sometimes, their vote depended on the candidate's ethnic background.  I remember my great-aunt was gung ho for Ted Kennedy in 1980, and when he lost the nomination to Carter, she turned right around and voted for Ronald Reagan.  It makes no sense, until you consider that both were of Irish descent.  That was her reason for voting for them.

Many of these people, by the late 1970s, were really no longer Democrats in terms of their political philosophy.  Socially, they were more conservative than the typical Republican today, and economically many of them weren't too far behind.  Yet that generation never fully abandoned the Democrats, though they largely eventually stopped voting for them at the national level.  And I am talking here about urban/suburban northeasterns.  My mom was the first in her family to simply drop her allegiance to the Democratic party completely, and fully switch to the Republicans unambiguously.

Similar metamorphoses took place in the south, as southerns began to get over their aversion to the Republican party and became increasingly reluctant to vote for the Democrats, given their stands on many issues.

It seems to me that people who vote Democratic or Republican now do it more because they believe in the party's philosophy, rather than the old reasons of habit and ethnicity that used to predominate.  Blacks are the major exception to this rule, as far as I can tell.