Liberal lions in deep red states

[quesaisje]

Thersites makes the point that I intended to share here.

Politicians have less agency when it comes to how information about them flows to different audiences If George McGovern were running for Senate in today's media environment, someone would have put his thesis on the Colorado Coalfield War online, and Twitter posters would be riffing on choice quotes.

Mass media has also tended to homogenize and deracinate voters themselves. Plenty of people have experienced this Invasion of the Body Snatchers effect second-hand, in which someone you know becomes a fervent mouthpiece for the party line of some media outlet or online community to which their initial attraction was far more nuanced.

That's not to say that material economic changes were less important. As recently as 1988, a farm crisis had a pronounced effect on the electoral map. Fluctuating milk prices have swung blocks of dairy counties toward Democrats in a presidential election as recently as 2008. Few of the examples named here represent any kind of inconsistency with their states' prior political histories. They only appear incongruent when we look backward from the present and project extremely recent patterns of stereotyped political behavior onto the past.