When did the parties switch platforms?

[mianfei]

It is easy to look at a map and ignore the context within each of those states during those periods. The Depression saw the mobilization of a New Deal Coalition, including ethnic whites, minorities and Jeffersonian-Jacksonian Democrats (Southern Illinois for instance). The growth and organization power of unions, gave Democrats a permenant advantage in most of the cities, out voting the urban based GOP middle class base. At the time rural areas were split with places like rural New England, upstate NY, Central and Northern PA and the rural portions of Northern OH, ILL, and Indiana voting Republican. Meanwhile the Southern portions of ILL, IN and OH and even parts of Southern PA voted Democratic.

The effect of this was that Republicans could no longer win in the North at the levels necessary to sustain majorities and everytime things went bad, the GOP imploded like 1948 and 1958. Only people with substantial union support like Rockefeller could win. Prior to the New Deal Coalition, you had people like Republican James Wadsworth getting elected as Senator of New York. Wadsworth opposed women voting and the FDA. Harding got 60% in New York and Coolidge was the last Republican to win New York City. Upstate could actually outvote the city or at least come close to it, and in the city you had a substantial WASP middle class Republican vote. You also had far left Italian Progressives like Fio join the Republicans because the Democratic establishment in Tammany Hall was hostile to them. And of course African-Americans were still voting Republican. After the New Deal, only Liberal Republicans of the mold of Thomas Dewey and his heirs could win in the state.

After World War II, the WASP Middle class moved to the suburbs as did a good number of first Irish and German, and then Italian new middle class voters and powered Republican strength in places like Suffolk, Nassau and Westchester, as well as Staten Island within the city. But the Democratic margins in the city were thus increased and the growth in the city was amongst Democratic leaning demographics, Hispanics and African Americans, as well as more recent ethnic white immigrants, who were thus poorer.  Beginning in the post-war period you had a simultaneous move to the sunbelt, by largely the same group of middle class Republicans. This ramped up in the 1970's and 1980's and helped make Florida so Republican during the Reagan era until the movement diversified and even became Democratic leaning towards the late 1980's.

You cannot look at a map and presume everything else remains the same. Demographic change has a big impact and it is not just in cities. As the new group comes in, the old group's areas of majority are pushed further and further out. The only English majority/plurality counties in New York are in the central upstate. The Irish majority/plurality counties are in the Hudson valley and the Italian majority/plurality ones are NYC suburbs. In 1860, most every county in the state would be English Majority and even super majority with the city being Irish plurality or majority. One hundred or more years before that it was the same story with the Dutch being pushed further and further out by the English. Note this does not mean their presence in the city disappeared, merely that it was swamped by larger and newer demographics. It also doesn't mean there was necessary a flight of people, just that rural counties are naturally behind the city in terms of demographic change by two or three groups.

A massive inmigration of people occured into Vermont and New Hampshire. The one going into New Hampshire was largely Republican leaning consisting of the right demographics leaving Taxachusetts. The opposite was true of Vermont as liberals from Boston and New York located there. Both states as well as Maine, naturally drifted to the Democrats in the 1960's and early 1970's, but New Hampshire swung back hard to the GOP in the 1970's and 1980's, becoming one of 41s best states, largely because of that inmigration. More recent groups moving into NH have been Democratic leaning.

The native demographics of both states fit the GOP like a glove. WASP, rural and Northern. NH had pockets of working class ethnics and more residual Jacksonian Democrats hence why Wilson won it and it was the least Republican of the three Northern New England states. However, that native population changed in its attitudes. It became far more secular over the course of the 20th century. Environmentalism became a big concern as religion became less of one and that was a big thing in the 1960s and 1970s. They were also non-interventionist, protectionist and hostile to immigration, both of which meant that the new sunbelt GOP was a horrible fit for them across the board. Even so there was still a negative reaction to the influx of urban liberals on the part of the Vermont natives and it created a reaction in the late 1990's, which crested in a 10% loss to Howard Dean and Bush losing by about 10% to Gore in 2000.

Remember the two cores of GOP support in the North. Forget Ideology and forget limited government/bigger government for a minute.

Urban/suburban Middle and upper class WASPs - inherited from the Federalists
Select Rural Areas - inherited in waves from Jeffersonian Republicans and eventually Jacksonian Democrats.

This is by nature an at-least center right coalition. It is also not a winning a coalition even before the New Deal. Republicans used tariffs to augment it with workers and some Republicans were rather pro-labor because it was necessary to sustain a pro-industrial party to prevent poor farmers from uniting with poor workers in a Democratic coalition, which is what happened in the 1930s. There was thus substantial space for Progressives to operate within the GOP as well not just with the Civil War legacy, but this geographic necessity of appealing to labor.

What changed was after World War II, the anti-New Deal right realized there was no going back to 1924 in the Northeast and Midwest. Numerous Republicans were moving to the South and Ikes popularity loosened people up to at least considering a Republican in the South. This process began in 1952 with places like Virginia and Tennessee, which had the largest residual bases of GOP support of any of the Southern states, and the fast growing cities of the South like Charlotte, Dallas, Tampa and going further west, Phoenix. Beginning in 1948 and doubled up in 1964, many Southerners no longer regarded the Democrats as their champions on Civil Rights and while some switched solely because of Goldwater, most who switched at these points because they were conservative pro-business suburbanites who viewed their home party not only has hostile on race issues but also on economic ones. They saw the Republicans as a viable alternative for the first time now that there was "not a dimes worth a difference" on Civil Rights anymore. Even use of the dog whistle tactics mentioned by Democrats in this thread was an attempt to be the "lesser of two evils" on the issue and those issues like busing had as much appeal in Michigan, as the Dallas suburbs.

Excellent post! The importance of the Sun Belt migration in causing a large scale partisan reversal by providing opportunities for an anti-New-Deal party. In essence, the Sun Belt takeover of politics was what permitted the Republicans to win seven of ten Presidential elections (and nearly win two of the other three) between 1952 and 1988. Middle class white suburbanites were a perfect fit for an economically conservative low-tax party hostile to the very high income tax rates introduced to fund World War II, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War and the Great Society. They also were desperate to see the government stay out of social engineering to deal with racial problems caused by the “Great Migration” which had begun in the 1910s and accelerated during the Civil Rights era.

The one bug I have in your analysis is the omission of the Pacific Northwest (at least that area west of the Cascades). This region has been the most socially liberal of the nation since long before party vote correlations reversed at a state level in the 1960s. Washington, Oregon and California (also Hawaii which was far from statehood at this stage) were single-party Republican bastions between the Panic of 1893 and the New Deal. However, these states turned overwhelmingly to FDR in 1932 and 1936 (Landon was a terrible fit for these states even vis-à-vis most of the rest of the nation) but until a major Democratic revolution in 1954 remained strongly Republican at the state level. Especially in Washington, the GOP was frequently threatened by leftist third party movements, up to William Hope Harvey in 1932 reaching 20 percent in Thurston County. Big-government New Deal Democrats were – despite their social conservatism and Catholic influence – a better fit than a free-market GOP.

[mianfei]

On an economic level, from ~1860 to ~1925 the two were roughly even, but after this the Democrats became markedly more economically liberal. On social issues, the switch happened on a presidential level from ~1964 to ~1984, but took some time to percolate down ballot. As a result, it would be accurate to say the GOP during much of the 19th and 20th centuries was the more “liberal” party. Nowadays, this is clearly not true.

As David Carlin pointed out in his 2006 book Can a Catholic Be a Democrat?, although the GOP was economically more conservative (in general) from 1896 onwards, the New Deal Democrats were always socially extremely conservative by today’s standards, and much more morally conservative than Northern and Pacific state Republicans.

As one illustration, it was the FDR administration that introduced the Hays Code for motion pictures, which was extremely restrictive compared to what could be filmed in Europe where the working classes were extremely anti-religion (especially Catholicism). As another, the New Deal saw the development of the “family wage” as an effort to hold and encourage permanent marriages, because it was felt that women working depressed wages, increased unemployment, and had been encouraged (if wholly tacitly) by the free-market GOP administrations in the 1920s.

However, the crises brought about by attempts to enforce facility integration in the 1950s and 1960s forcibly turned the Democratic Party away from ideals of the “natural family” and toward social engineering and acceptance of “alternative” lifestyles like homosexuality and cohabitation. As I said in my previous post, the “Revolution of 1954” in the Pacific States was the prelude to this change, and led to elimination of laws on abortion and homosexuality for the first time in US history in these states. In fact, this 1954 revolution was in my view an undoubted factor reversing historic party alignments in the rest of the nation.

[mianfei]

When did the Republicans become the party of free trade?

When was the first time that Republicans preached "fiscal responsibility"?

By and large, these changes came with Warren Harding in the 1920s after the crisis of World War I. The “Depression of 1920” cited by the radical right as proof that smaller government will cure depressions, was the most decisive event.