Political Science Quarterly
Volume 114 No. 2 (Summer 1999)

 

Changing Patterns of Voting in the Northern United States: Electoral Realignment, 1952-1996
By Robert W. Speel. Philadelphia, Penn State University Press, 1998
Reviewed by Everett Ladd

 

The United Sates has undergone in the last 40 years a major political realignment, but its extent has been underrecognized. Robert W. Speel, who teaches political science at the Behrand College, the Penn State campus at Erie, takes issue with this underrecognition and seeks, successfully, I think to set the record straight with regard to one key aspect of the realignment—that involving the positions of America’s regions in the party competition. The changes of the last several decades in regional support for the major parties are among the most dramatic in the country’s history. Indeed, they may be the single largest realigning shift the United States has ever experienced.

Speel concentrates on the move of the Northeast, especially New England, away from the Republicans into the Democratic camp. The move is certainly striking. I was raised in southern Maine, and I remember often seeing reproduced in my boyhood a photograph of a sign posted on the bridge across the Piscataqua River from Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Kittery, Maine just after the 1936 presidential election: “You are now leaving the United States.” This witticism was prompted, of course, by the fact that Maine was one of only two states to back the Republican presidential nominee, Alfred Landon. Vermont was the other-prompting the famous revision of historical lore: “As goes Maine, so goes Vermont.” That seems a long time ago. Maine, Vermont and the other New England states are now a key part of the Democratic heartland.

Historically, New England was first the most Federalist section of the country, then the most Whig, and in the Civil War era, the most Republican. The region retained its strong Republican loyalties through the New Deal period and well into the postwar era. Today, New England remains exceptional politically, but now as the most Democratic section of the United States. The region’s shift from the first off-year election of this century (1902) to the last (1998) is extraordinary. The Middle Atlantic states have also moved Democratic over this century, though not as strongly as New England.

Equally extraordinary is the shift of the South over this span away from the Democratic party to the Republicans. In 1902, the six states of the Deep South had no Republican senators, no Republicans in the U.S. House, and were a near cipher in the state legislatures of the region. Now Republicans hold majorities of U.S. House and Senate seats and have made big advances in the state houses. The Rim South also shifted Republican, though not quite as dramatically as the Deep South.

By emphasizing the extent of New England’s (and in general the Northeast’s) shift to the Democratic party, Speel helps us better appreciate the extent of the regional realignment that has played so large a part in redefining contemporary American politics. His book deserves a wide reading by students of American regionalism and its role in the country’s electoral competition.

The one dimension of this issue that Speel doesn’t discuss sufficiently is why the great post-New Deal regional realignment has occurred. To begin to understand it, one needs to note that New England and the Deep South have always been this nation’s most dissimilar sections. Consider the issue of slavery. New England was home to the Abolitionist Movement, while the Deep South gave the strongest backing to the maintenance of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War. Today, New England remains ideologically distinct. Though the slavery issue is happily long since past, it is the most liberal section of the United States—with the possible exception of parts of the urban Pacific coast. This is true both for political elites (members of Congress) and the general public. On the other hand, the states of the Deep South are in all regards the country’s most conservative. Both regions have maintained their ideological distinctiveness and much of their underlying character. But this positional continuity ideologically has carried them in opposite directions in party support.

It would take far more space than I have available to explain why New England’s move from what some historians have mistakenly labeled “conservative” to its present position, called “liberal,” has not in fact involved any fundamental shift in the defining properties of the region’s culture. But the essential factor is that throughout U.S. history, New England has been America’s liberal individualist heartland.