Why didn't Maine and Vermont vote for FDR in 1936?

[Sir Mohamed]

Why didn't ME and VT vote for FDR in the 1936 landslide? The states are/were always liberal and progressive but voted against on of the most liberal presidents in history.

Could FDR have won them and sweep all states?

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Why didn't ME and VT vote for FDR in the 1936 landslide? The states are/were always liberal and progressive but voted against on of the most liberal presidents in history.

Could FDR have won them and sweep all states?

This is patently false.

[Sir Mohamed]

Why didn't ME and VT vote for FDR in the 1936 landslide? The states are/were always liberal and progressive but voted against on of the most liberal presidents in history.

Could FDR have won them and sweep all states?

This is patently false.

They only voted Dem once before, in 1912, when TR and Taft split the GOP vote and Wilson carried these states by a plurality. And before the 1920s, the GOP was the more liberal Party. Especially before the 1900s, the Dems were mostly a racist party.

[Rockefeller GOP]

Why didn't ME and VT vote for FDR in the 1936 landslide? The states are/were always liberal and progressive but voted against on of the most liberal presidents in history.

Could FDR have won them and sweep all states?

This is patently false.

They only voted Dem once before, in 1912, when TR and Taft split the GOP vote and Wilson carried these states by a plurality. And before the 1920s, the GOP was the more liberal Party. Especially before the 1900s, the Dems were mostly a racist party.

LOL, again that is patently false, and you sound like an 18-year old who's taken one history class in his or her life.  Why is it so much easier to believe that two major political parties literally *switched* ideologies (I literally can't say that without laughing) than it is to believe some states drastically changed over time, especially when we have watched certain states do just that (CA, CO, VA, etc.) literally in the past 3 decades??

[Virginiá]

They only voted Dem once before, in 1912, when TR and Taft split the GOP vote and Wilson carried these states by a plurality. And before the 1920s, the GOP was the more liberal Party. Especially before the 1900s, the Dems were mostly a racist party.

I wouldn't say it was a full switch. It was more like swapping a few parts. Both parties had large liberal and conservative wings going back in history, and it was only until recently (as in, 90-now) that the parties finished their ideological realignment.

For instance, Republicans have always been pro-business and gradually over the 60s+ they began to replace their base with Southern voters. What they had to do to make this happen resulted in other more liberal/northern voters leaving the party. Democrats basically controlled the South under one-party rule for a long time, and even still had a lot of state-level control up until 2010. At this point, the Southern realignment towards the GOP is basically finished. With this in mind, Republicans also shed their support for civil rights as well.

There are other changes which resulted in various groups of voters being shed or picked up, but it wasn't a full-on switch, though I wouldn't fault anyone for thinking that at first.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

Simple; as liberal as those states were, they were more Republican.  They were two of the most Republican states in presidential politics of that time.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

Why didn't ME and VT vote for FDR in the 1936 landslide? The states are/were always liberal and progressive but voted against on of the most liberal presidents in history.

Could FDR have won them and sweep all states?

This is patently false.

They only voted Dem once before, in 1912, when TR and Taft split the GOP vote and Wilson carried these states by a plurality. And before the 1920s, the GOP was the more liberal Party. Especially before the 1900s, the Dems were mostly a racist party.

Correction: Wilson carried Maine but not Vermont.  Vermont was one of only two states that Taft carried outright.
And BTW: from the time that both major parties were established until Clinton in 1992, Vermont only voted Democrat for president once (Johnson in 1964).

[RINO Tom]

I will bypass my usual snarky attitude toward this sophomoric belief that the Republican Party was ever a "liberal" party in the way that the Democratic one is today (and vice versa) and actually attempt to educate you on this somewhat, as I see you are an immigrant and probably are interested (if not yet well-versed in the more complicated parts) in US history.

PAGING MECHAMAN TO MAKE THIS THREAD ONE THOUSAND TIMES BETTER!

To say the Republicans used to be liberals or the Democrats used to be conservative is - at the end of the day - a painfully simplistic description of things that is closer to being a convenient lie than it is an oversimplification.  I can see why the misconception exists, but it's again grounded in misconception.  For example:

1) "The Southern Democrats of the 1800s used to support states' rights, and the Northern Republicans supported big government!"  Eh, not really.  They both supported whatever methods were available to get what they wanted, just as Republicans and Democrats do today.  Southern Democrats were all about states' rights when it came to defending their "rights" to their slaves, but what about the Dred Scott case?  Democratic justices literally sh^t all over the Northern states' rights, and every Democrat supported it.  The Confederacy might have been the most centralized government in US history, and it was anything but "conservative" if we are equating small government with conservatism (which seems to be a prerequisite for this theory of "switching").

2) "The North was Republican and the South was Democrat, the opposite of today!"  Okay, true.  However, the North and South were very different places then than they are today.  There was a ton of "corporatist" and "moralist" sentiment in the North (for lack of better words) during and before those time periods, two huge indicators of historic Republican strength.  Things like the Blue Laws were passed by Northern conservatives and have for whatever reason totally been disassociated with the same Northerners who supported Republicanism.  If you look at primary sources, the criticisms Southerners levied on Northerners back then (specifically New Englanders) was not at all the same as today; a Southerner in the 1800s might rail against an elitist WASP New Englander for his holier-than-thou and in-your-face moralism while one today might phrase a New Englander as a godless secular jerk who doesn't understand his values ... Similarities in tone?  Absolutely.  But not the same at all.  Additionally, the South was almost entirely agrarian and "populist" sentiment (for lack of better word) stayed very strong in the South until well into the mid-20th Century.  The Southern Democrats were some of the most vocal and loyal supporters of the early New Deal (until it started to benefit Blacks, of course), an objectively liberal set of programs (I'd argue our modern terms "liberal" and "conservative" largely mean nothing pre-New Deal).  Republican strength in the South started to grew well before the Civil Rights Era, and it started in the emerging Southern suburbs.  I'm not saying it's a direct relationship because of cause, but there is a direct relationship between urbanization and more civil rights in the South and growing Republican strength.  It's simply a lie that Republicans usurped traditional Democratic dominance (i.e., they just put their name on what is more or less the same situation); they took advantage of a rapidly changing South and were able to slowly outnumber "the old Dixiecrats," especially once many of them died off in the '90s and 2000s.  Conversely, the Northern states you mentioned are wildly different places (especially VT) than they were even a few decades ago.  These are states that voted against FDR every single time, they voted for conservatives from McKinley to Coolidge to Reagan ... to say they were always liberal is not true.

2) "Blacks used to vote Republican and now they vote Democrat" ... So?  Coal miners voted heavily Democratic in the 1990s and now vote heavily Republican; have the parties switched since then, even though several other groups still vote for the exact same parties?  Things are not that simple.  Black voters voted for the party that had supported their freedom ... and the loyalty wasn't that high for that long.  I mean Black voters were voicing frustration with the GOP for SEVERAL decades by the time the Great Depression hit, and they never came back (in majority) afterwards.

Yes, things about the parties have changed, but many have stayed the same; don't those things carry equal weight?  I mean, the Republican Party has always preached about the greatness of upward mobility in a free labor, capitalistic society.  It has always largely supported a restrictive immigration policy.  It has always had a pension for legislating morality and trying to eradicate what its base saw as "sin" from society through legislation.  Has much of that really changed?  Things are a lot more complicated than "who was the liberal party in year x, and when did they switch?" because no one "switched" anything.





To answer your question, the answer is because Maine and Vermont were two homogeneous, WASP-heavy, conservative states that didn't benefit from New Deal programs as much, and many of its voters saw voters in other areas of the country (specifically inner-city folks and Southerners ... i.e., Democrats) as godless moochers who weren't the honest hard workers that they were.  Something a Republican today would just never say about anyone...

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

If you need an example of where Vermont fell politically, Calvin Coolidge was born there and was later Governor of Massachusetts. Moreover, it's not only just "muh Yankee Republicanism"; Maine had its own KKK! If you look at the type of folks who were elected from these respective states over the years, it changed drastically. You had very conservative Republicans being elected in Vermont up through the 1940's. It was only around then that the progressive/liberal wing of the VT GOP started to take over and you had guys like George Aiken representing Vermont as Republicans. In 1924, New England had the option of voting for a perfectly acceptable, non-Democrat "Progressive" candidate; they resoundingly chose not to.  I don't have the wealth of example that someone such as Mechaman* would have, so I'll stop there.

*Mechaman, by the way, appears to have forgotten his password and is too lazy to make a sock account in order to contact Dave to get his password back. Sorry.

[Rockefeller GOP]

If you need an example of where Vermont fell politically, Calvin Coolidge was born there and was later Governor of Massachusetts. Moreover, it's not only just "muh Yankee Republicanism"; Maine had its own KKK! If you look at the type of folks who were elected from these respective states over the years, it changed drastically. You had very conservative Republicans being elected in Vermont up through the 1940's. It was only around then that the progressive/liberal wing of the VT GOP started to take over and you had guys like George Aiken representing Vermont as Republicans. In 1924, New England had the option of voting for a perfectly acceptable, non-Democrat "Progressive" candidate; they resoundingly chose not to.  I don't have the wealth of example that someone such as Mechaman* would have, so I'll stop there.

*Mechaman, by the way, appears to have forgotten his password and is too lazy to make a sock account in order to contact Dave to get his password back. Sorry.

Yeah, this perception that New Englanders (specifically upper New Englanders) have always been moderate to liberal and simply lost their affections for the Party of Lincoln are just wrong.  My grandparents always used to talk about how "true New Englanders" were conservative.  Sure, many were pro-choice and pro-civil rights, but (at the time) they didn't see those as necessarily liberal positions.

[Sumner 1868]

Neil R. Pierce, who wrote books about all the nation's regions in the 1970s, wrote this in his book The New England States about the Vermont Republicans of the 1930s:

"Vermont's 'conservative' leaders-those who frequently won office-would be called outrageous spenders and socialist meddlers in a state like next door New Hampshire, or in many states in the South and the Mountain West."

So Vermont wasn't really more conservative than the rest of the nation.

[VPH]

How come Teddy Roosevelt performed so well in Vermont and Maine? He was decidedly progressive, especially in 1912.

[RINO Tom]

How come Teddy Roosevelt performed so well in Vermont and Maine? He was decidedly progressive, especially in 1912.

Considering Woodrow Wilson was the archetype of the modern Democrat and Roosevelt was outraged at Taft for busting up TOO MANY trusts, I think you can make a coherent argument that Roosevelt might even have been the most conservative person running in 1912.

[Asian Nazi]

How come Teddy Roosevelt performed so well in Vermont and Maine? He was decidedly progressive, especially in 1912.

Considering Woodrow Wilson was the archetype of the modern Democrat and Roosevelt was outraged at Taft for busting up TOO MANY trusts, I think you can make a coherent argument that Roosevelt might even have been the most conservative person running in 1912.

Also, while "progressive" is used as a synonym for white American liberalism today, it meant something very different 104 years ago. 

[VPH]

How come Teddy Roosevelt performed so well in Vermont and Maine? He was decidedly progressive, especially in 1912.

Considering Woodrow Wilson was the archetype of the modern Democrat and Roosevelt was outraged at Taft for busting up TOO MANY trusts, I think you can make a coherent argument that Roosevelt might even have been the most conservative person running in 1912.

Also, while "progressive" is used as a synonym for white American liberalism today, it meant something very different 104 years ago. 

I mean, he was in favor of minimum wage, 8 hour workdays, regulating the stock market, an inheritance tax, a national health service, a department of labor, and social insurance. That's all pretty left-leaning.

[RINO Tom]

How come Teddy Roosevelt performed so well in Vermont and Maine? He was decidedly progressive, especially in 1912.

Considering Woodrow Wilson was the archetype of the modern Democrat and Roosevelt was outraged at Taft for busting up TOO MANY trusts, I think you can make a coherent argument that Roosevelt might even have been the most conservative person running in 1912.

Also, while "progressive" is used as a synonym for white American liberalism today, it meant something very different 104 years ago. 

I mean, he was in favor of minimum wage, 8 hour workdays, regulating the stock market, an inheritance tax, a national health service, a department of labor, and social insurance. That's all pretty left-leaning.

Yeah, but so did his opponents ... He was running in an extremely progressive era.  Just as Clinton had to run to the right of where he (and fellow Democrats) probably wanted to in the '90s, Republicans had to be to the left of where they probably wanted to be until 1920 when Harding could run on a "return to normalcy."  All I said was that you can make an argument that Roosevelt was to the right of Taft and Wilson in 1912, and I think you can; none of your stated positions of his disagree with that.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

I recall the claim (whether metaphorical or literal) that TR's 1912 platform had been written by the head of U.S. Steel. Keep that in mind. Also the fact that a Socialist ticket still got 6% in an election of three purportedly progressive tickets.

Two competing claims you can run against this "liberal New England" thing in 1912:
-"Vermont voted for Taft, the conservative Republican in the race"
-"Roosevelt was arguably as or more conservative than Taft, so of course he did well in New England"

From what I've seen and read, conservative Republicans actually proliferated in New England. While in Maine you had conservative Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed, in Ohio there was moderate William McKinley, and west of him were the progressives Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin, George Norris of Nebraska, and Hiram Johnson of California. Look at the state of the 1896 GOP! The conservative/establishment folks were based in states like Pennsylvania and New York. On the other side were the pro-silver William B. Allison and Henry Teller.

Rick Perlstein in "Before the Storm" asserted that Mid-Western Republicans became isolationist, protectionist, and conservative whilst Northeastern Republicans became internationalist, globalist, and liberal. While this might have been true in 1952 (Taft v. Dewey), such was not (as/nearly) the case a half-century prior.

Mechaman, again on the other forum, offered that there was a change in economic circumstances that caused conservatives to change their tone in order to prevent economic conditions worsening to the point that popular revolt occurred. This actually mirrored how conservatives such as Bismarck addressed economic issues; allowing for enough liberal reform to appease the masses. Teddy Roosevelt's decided change in tune between his, for example, 1896 campaign stump speeches and his 1901-1909 presidency could be attributed to that phenomenon.

[Sumner 1868]

Interesting that in both states support for FDR peaked in 1940.

[Rockefeller GOP]

Interesting that in both states support for FDR peaked in 1940.

My guess is wartime support/Rally Around the Flag.  In the period following the Civil War until the counterculture revolution, New England was extremely unionistic and patriotic.

[TDAS04]

Interesting that in both states support for FDR peaked in 1940.

My guess is wartime support/Rally Around the Flag.  In the period following the Civil War until the counterculture revolution, New England was extremely unionistic and patriotic.

New Hampshire too.  I may have read somewhere that FDR performed especially well among French-Canadians that year.

[H. Ross Peron]

Because like today they hated corporatist neoliberal warmonger shills like FDR and Hillary, instead preferring genuine progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alf Landon.

[President Johnson]

These states were more Republican for historical and structural reasons. You could switch the question: Why did all former confederate states, which were/are actually conservative, vote for the progressive FDR in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944, although the GOP candidates were more conservative?

[Rockefeller GOP]

These states were more Republican for historical and structural reasons. You could switch the question: Why did all former confederate states, which were/are actually conservative, vote for the progressive FDR in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944, although the GOP candidates were more conservative?

Again, this is an incorrect, fairly tale simplification of history meant to make modern "progressives" look and feel good.

[DS0816]

These states were more Republican for historical and structural reasons. You could switch the question: Why did all former confederate states, which were/are actually conservative, vote for the progressive FDR in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944, although the GOP candidates were more conservative?

Excellent point!

You're referring to voting patterns. They don't switch up easily—not even in a two-party contest when it would seem like the states' electorates should be able to keep score over the candidates' leanings.

No state has been loyal more times to the Republican Party, since they first competed in 1856, than Vermont. It carried Republican in every election from 1856 to 1988 with exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964; and 1964 was a preview of how the map would realign because Goldwater became the first Republican to carry Georgia (and that made Lyndon Johnson the first winning Democrat elected without Georgia). Five of Goldwater's six states were on what was the turf of the Democrats: Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and the two deep-south neighbors Alabama and Mississippi, which come off as the historical antithesis of Vermont. (Take a look at just how often Alabama and Mississippi, on one side, and Vermont, on the other side, agreed in given presidential elections! Since the Republicans-vs.-Democrats duopoly began in 1856, just five times during this period have the trio of states agreed: 1872, 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988. And they were all from elections in which the winners carried more than 80 percent of the nation's states.)

Vermont did not carry for Franklin Roosevelt because it was regularly rock solid with the Republicans. Had Roosevelt been able to dislodge Vermont from the Republicans' grip…he would have ended up with all 48 states with his blowout re-election of 1936.

[Rockefeller GOP]

These states were more Republican for historical and structural reasons. You could switch the question: Why did all former confederate states, which were/are actually conservative, vote for the progressive FDR in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944, although the GOP candidates were more conservative?

Excellent point!

You're referring to voting patterns. They don't switch up easily—not even in a two-party contest when it would seem like the states' electorates should be able to keep score over the candidates' leanings.

No state has been loyal more times to the Republican Party, since they first competed in 1856, than Vermont. It carried Republican in every election from 1856 to 1988 with exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964; and 1964 was a preview of how the map would realign because Goldwater became the first Republican to carry Georgia (and that made Lyndon Johnson the first winning Democrat elected without Georgia). Five of Goldwater's six states were on what was the turf of the Democrats: Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and the two deep-south neighbors Alabama and Mississippi, which come off as the historical antithesis of Vermont. (Take a look at just how often Alabama and Mississippi, on one side, and Vermont, on the other side, agreed in given presidential elections! Since the Republicans-vs.-Democrats duopoly began in 1856, just five times during this period have the trio of states agreed: 1872, 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988. And they were all from elections in which the winners carried more than 80 percent of the nation's states.)

Vermont did not carry for Franklin Roosevelt because it was regularly rock solid with the Republicans. Had Roosevelt been able to dislodge Vermont from the Republicans' grip…he would have ended up with all 48 states with his blowout re-election of 1936.

The electorates were perfectly able to keep score.  Your theories are trash.