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Above all, what I learned from The Emerging Republican Majority is that most shifts in voting behavior from election to election really do have rational explanations rooted in policy and in the candidates' important personal traits. Those who have been able to anticipate these coming shifts have a distinct advantage in winning elections.
Phillips seeks to why certain voting blocs, say, ancestrally German counties in Wisconsin, or Irish Catholic neighborhoods in New York City show unusual Democratic strength in one election while other areas of the country turn in an unusually depressed Democratic vote when compared to four years earlier. What Phillips finds is that these shifts are no fluke. The Catholicism of Democrat Al Smith in 1928 (and of course, of John F. Kennedy in 1960) led to unprecedented Democratic majorities among Catholics. The electoral revolt of German counties in the Midwest against FDR in 1940 was a direct reaction to FDR's desire to contain Nazi aggression, and continued into the war election of 1944. As America moved Westward in the last century, people took their voting behaviors with them, and this is evident in how the Yankee-settled Pacific Northwest behaved compared to the largely Midwestern suburban tracts of Southern California. These sociological realities are readily apparent in election returns. With nearly 200 charts and maps, The Emerging Republican Majority is a book that's unusually full of such historically revealing facts.