Everyone Chillax (Or Not): 2012 Is A Competitive Election
It has been the recent meme among commentators, especially those in the bag for one side, to claim that the election is already “in the bag”. Besides the insidious capability of such statements to be self-fulfilling prophecy by demoralizing supporters from voting (certain members of the media with an agenda? Well I never!), coincidentally the rationale in Canada behind the ban on exit polls and election reporting until all polls close, such hasty conclusions are often anchored on a very questionable assumption.
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Andrew Sullivan: Professional Bullsh*tter
Buy this versatile poster now! Conveniently doubles as both a map of the 1924 Election and the Civil War (Wisconsin WILL rise again).
The age of “public intellectuals” is upon us. In an era where more and more Americans turn to cable news to guide them through a confusing world, one no longer needs to utter things that bear any resemblance to reality in order to be widely read and lauded. The most recent consistently-overrated pundit to hold an unreasonably inflated view of their knowledge and test this new tendency even further, Andrew Sullivan, recently opined,
“I think America is currently in a Cold Civil War. The parties, of course, have switched sides since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The party of the Union and Lincoln is now the Democratic party. The party of the Confederacy is now the GOP. And racial polarization is at record levels, with whites entirely responsible for reversing Obama's 2008 inroads into the old Confederacy in three Southern states. You only have to look at the electoral map in 1992 and 1996, when Clinton won, to see how the consolidation of a Confederacy-based GOP and a Union-based Democratic party has intensified - and now even more under a black president from, ahem, Illinois.”
Although Sullivan sounds very pithy, witty, and dare I say, even “intellectual” to the average high school student who just scraped a 3 on his AP US History test after writing an eloquent essay about the dastardly Iraqi attack on Pearl Harbor, there's one problem with this: it's complete bullsh*t. And I do not use the term lightly. One must literally have no understanding or experience with American political history to try to spin such bullsh*t as legitimate historical commentary with a straight face.
Sullivan's psuedoargument has several blatant historical falsehoods (read: bullsh*t). First, yes, Mitt Romney may be able to eke out a 50-47 victory in Virginia. He might be able to pull out a 51-46 victory in North Carolina. And perhaps in the deep, dark den of the former Confederacy, South Carolina, he could even pull out a 56-41 victory. Maybe he'll even win all of the eleven former Confederate states (along with all of the Great Plains, much of the Midwest, almost all of the Rocky Mountains, and perhaps New Hampshire, but we can ignore that for now). Clearly, after the overwhelming majority of Republicans helped push through the 1964 Civil Rights Act over the objections of outraged Southern Democrats, the GOP blossomed into a neo-Confederate Party, with a solid lock on the South in a sectionally polarized America. Clearly.
His assertion of a new “Solid South” completely ignores what the actual Solid South resembled and how unsurprisingly solid it actually was. Mitt Romney's impending 10-20% victory in South Carolina wouldn't have impressed Southern Democrats of the ye olde days. In 1924, when Republican Calvin Coolidge crushed his Democrat opponent John Davis by over 25%, Davis still managed to best Coolidge in South Carolina, 96.56% to 2.21%. Davis also won every single former Confederate state as well as no other states (polling either in the single digits or low double digits), as the election in every non-Southern state was between former the Republican governor of Massachusetts and the former Republican governor of Wisconsin.
Second, his impression of a Civil Rights-driven alignment that caused the two parties to undergo a geographic switcharoo is also bullsh*t. For one, barring major demographic change or socioeconomic upheaval, almost every single historically Republican region is still solidly Republican. Nowhere can this better be seen than in Eastern Tennessee, one of the most Republican regions in America today. Notable for being a bastion of the South where slavery was very rare (having much more in common with Appalachian West Virginia than the Mississippi Delta), East Tennessee was first a bastion of the Federalist party due to its long-held antipathy towards Southern planter Democrats. After the Federalists' collapse following the Hartford Convention, East Tennessee swung to largely support the Whigs (who had absorbed many former Federalists). After the collapse of the Whigs, East Tennessee became solidly Republican territory and during the Civil War, took up arms against the Confederacy in an ultimately failed attempt to secede from the State of Tennessee and rejoin the Union. In 1932, when FDR crushed Herbert Hoover by 18% in the wake of the Great Depression, Eastern Tennessean Johnson County proudly delivered 84.51% of its vote to Hoover, a stronger preference than even my native Berkeley, California will show for Obama. In contrast, in the previou