The predictions of “Alben Barkley” make sense. Hawaii is a (minor) case missed because it swung firmly against the anti-war McGovern, but Muskie would probably have held it as his only electoral votes outside the northeastern core.
However, when I read
The Emerging Republican Majority (an absolutely essential resource for me confined at home due to Melbourne’s COVID-19 disaster to work on Wikipedia), I thought recently that a Muskie candidacy would have hastened some of the political trends observed only since the 1990s.
When he wrote
The Emerging Republican Majority, Kevin Phillips predicted that Southern Democrats would switch
en masse to the Republican Party in the 1970s:
“All fourteen Southern and Border states—Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Missouri—cast a majority of their vote against the national Democratic Party’s presidential candidate but elected a vast preponderance of conservative Democrats at traditionalist odds with the ideological stance of the national party. Only by this anomaly of nomenclature, which cannot long survive the evolution of the national Democrats into the party of the Establishmentarian Northeast and Negro South, did the Great Society maintain the image of public support. The presidential election of 1968 marked a historic first occasion—the Negrophobe Deep South and modern Outer South simultaneously abandoned the Democratic Party. And before long, the conservative cycle thus begun ought to witness movement of congressional, state and local Southern Democrats into the ascending Republican Party.”
Phillips also predicted the disappearance of rural Democratic voting in the western border states (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia) much earlier than after the Clinton Administration when it actually occurred:
“Nobody can comprehend the vulnerability of the contemporary Democratic Party in the Border without appreciating the extent to which local support has been premised on the coincidence of geography, demography and history rather than empathy (there is not very much) with urban minority group bias in the Great Society vein. The factors which built Democratic hegemony throughout most of the Border a century ago—local traditions of Southern, if not secessionist sympathy—leave today’s Democratic Party on sociological quicksand. As the South forswears the Democratic Party, rural Democratic tradition must ebb in the Border.”
Paradoxically, since reading that book I have felt that the McGovern disaster and the effect it had on the Democratic Party
delayed the trends Phillips expected. If the Democratic Party had not done so badly, or had chosen a more establishmentarian candidate than George McGovern, we might have seen mass party-switching to the Republicans by Southern politicians during the 1970s. Then, the South would have been established as solidly, or more solidly Republican at all levels by 1980 as it has been since the late 1990s (excluding states influenced by the Northeast or Latino migration).
If the South have become solidly Republican by the 1980s, that might have meant that the GOP would have began efforts to disenfranchise black and other nonwhite voters quite widely in that decade, rather than in the 2000s. On the other hand, the exit of moderate-conservative Southerners in the 1970s might have meant that in the 1980s, the Democrats would have been far less compliant about a mass incarceration policy whose political effect, I feel, has been to stop and reverse potential growth of parties
far to the left of the Democratic Party – that is, radical left parties like the
Socialist Equality Party,
Workers’ World, or Socialist Workers Party.
