Thread by @Historian_Steve

I'm literally nerding out on this series of maps I've created. Sometimes a bit of repetitive, mundane work can pay off! These maps show Dem v. GOP candidates at the presidential level by county every four years from 1944-2016. historianstevecampbell.com/uploads/4/4/6/…

You can read it from left to right to see change over time through periods of 20 yrs, which has the advantage of smoothing out freakish elections when something rare was going on or when there was a third party candidate, and from top to bottom to see change between each election

I'm focusing on the South because it's arguably the best place to test the influence of race on electoral returns. You can see the shift of voting patterns between white southerners and African Americans.

This is better than electoral maps at the state level because the winner-take-all system may mask when states are competitive. Enjoy!

An update to some of the maps I was looking at. I wanted to look at the margins of victory that Trump had in the southern states in 2016. This wouldn't be too hard since I had saved this spreadsheet. docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

Performing only the most basic of calculations I saw that Trump won the 11 states in the former Confederacy by a margin of 52.2% to HRC's 43.8%. That's a difference of 8.4 percentage points. Pretty substantial, I think.

Hillary won all non-southern states by about 8.7%. And if you're wondering why that could result in an overall popular vote margin of 2.1%, it's because the non-South has a much greater population than the South.

Good news! I have now created a blog series related to those maps (top of thread). I frame the first post this way: Imagine a student in your early-US survey course asks if the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson historianstevecampbell.com/blog/party-rea…

and the Republican Party of Lincoln are the same as the parties we have today? There are at least three ways professors can respond to the question...1) don't compare the parties because so much has changed between back then and today; 2) say that the parties have switched; or

3) say that the parties are essentially the same, which is to say that Republicans have always championed civil rights for African Americans. One of the points of this series is to analyze the merits of each response. In this post I consider Response #1 by pointing to the

fact that the issues over which the parties battle have changed, the definition of liberalism has changed since the 19th cent, the country has changed radically since then, and the presence of perhaps 5 "critical realignment" elections would render tenuous any direct comparisons.

Related to this I move on to the all-too-common Trump-Jackson comparisons. I argue that these comparisons are not that helpful and may do more to obscure than illuminate. To find out exactly why, you'll just have to read the post.

And don't worry, if you want to see me deal with Response #2, which is the narrative most commonly employed by academic historians, that will be coming tomorrow. Enjoy!

Have you ever encountered an alarming level of historical illiteracy on party realignment but don't have the facts readily available to push back? Wait no more! In part 2 of my series, I lay out the substantial body of evidence for a party switch, historianstevecampbell.com/blog/in-progre…

I focus, in particular, on the voting behavior of white southerners and African Americans. It is important to get this out there to promote an informed citizenry and also to combat the persistent misinformation being propagated by non-historians.

We know that there was a party switch because of how the two parties evolved on environmental protection, the regions and counties they won in numerous elections over time, voting blocs, political ideology, civil rights, voting rights, and white nationalism.

There are a lot of helpful maps, figures, and links in this post. Remember that the white South transitioned from the Democratic Party to the GOP in fits and starts. It took a long time to fully materialize. It happened first in the Deep South in the 1960s

but continued to pan out in Appalachia in the twenty-first century. The party switch occurred because of the New Deal and Civil Rights Movement. Today Democratic candidates consistently garner between 80-90% (and sometimes above 90%) of the black vote though you'd never know this

by watching cable news with mainstream media's hopeless addiction to false objectivity and the large number of black Republicans in media and politics. In the current Congress there are 54 Democratic House members who are African American.

Only 1, Will Hurd, is a Republican, and he is retiring. The ethnic composition of the House GOP is comprised almost entirely of white men while two-thirds of the Democratic majority are not.

(why is it so hard to compose continuous Twitter threads?) Only 1, Will Hurd, is a Republican, and he is retiring. The ethnic composition of the House GOP is comprised almost entirely of white men while two-thirds of the Democratic majority are not.

historianstevecampbell.com/blog/in-progre… Here is Part 3 of my series. The position that the two major political parties have changed little over time and reflect their 19th-century origins is the least persuasive and most problematic of the 3 possible responses to the student’s original question.

This perspective is a misleading one propagated mostly by commentators who are not professional historians and which rests on a selective and out-of-context reading of facts, many of them trivial or anecdotal, that ignores quite a bit of countervailing evidence.

I turn to the votes on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 b/c that has been the focus of the conservative activists and non-historians like D'Souza, Kirk, Swain, Owens, Neret, etc. I have used some of the helpful critiques from @KevinMKruse but I also offer thoughts of my own

@KevinMKruse It is among the weakest intellectual defenses out there for an apologist of one political party to have to go back 55 years to find the last time that this party took a praiseworthy stance on civil rights

@KevinMKruse This was a tumultuous period in our nation’s past when the two parties were still in a state of flux and struggling to define themselves. And mountains of accumulated evidence since then point to a very different historical record.

@KevinMKruse I have said this before but it bears repeating that the white South went from the Democratic Party to the GOP over *many* decades, and while electoral maps since 2000 show quite a bit of continuity, the Southern Strategy has continued to transpire in the twenty-first century.

@KevinMKruse Take a look at this chart of party control of the state legislatures. As late as 1990, Republicans only controlled both houses of the state legislatures in 6 states: ND, WY, UT, SD, NH, and CO. None of them were southern.

@KevinMKruse And then look at this map showing how the South has become more red since 2004. From the @nytimes December 2016.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes Perhaps the most serious flaw in the argument of the D'Souza crowd is to assume that a Democrat automatically equals a liberal, no matter what year we are examining.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes So if D'Souza et al. can search through the semi-distant past to find a few examples of Democrats committing racist acts or making racist statements, they can imply that liberals have historically done these things.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes And if they believe that liberals have done racist things in the past, they can leap to the dubious conclusion that liberals today must be the real racists.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes This reasoning misses the extent to which both Democrats and Republicans in the 1960s were ideologically fluid and heterogeneous organizations composed of liberal, moderate, and conservative members.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes Liberal Republicans in the North at this time could easily be more progressive on civil rights than conservative Democrats from the South.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes If one chooses to focus on the party affiliation of members of Congress—and again, this is only one piece of evidence among many—then the key to thing to understand is that liberals from both parties fought for civil rights at the federal level while conservatives opposed them.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes To come at this from another vantage point, it may be more helpful to break down the votes on the Civil Rights Act in Congress according to North versus South, not Democrats versus Republicans.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes The two parties at this time were interregional coalitions with northern and southern members. There were Democrats who voted “no” on the Civil Rights Act because the party still clung to the vestiges of the “Solid South” of the Jim Crow Era.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes Indeed, the formal end to the Jim Crow era only came during 1964-65 with the passage of these landmark laws.

Today the two parties do not have this ideological diversity. If you’re a liberal, you’re almost assuredly a Democrat. And almost all conservatives are Republicans.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes The white South’s voters, a very large percentage of which are conservative, gradually transitioned from Democrats to Republicans because it became clear over time that the GOP, having banished its moderates, was the only conservative party.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes historianstevecampbell.com/blog/party-rea… Part 4 of my series does a deep dive (with helpful links) into the long historical record showing the racial dimensions of limited government philosophy. In her very problematic video for PragerU, Carol Swain dismissed the Southern Strategy by claiming

@KevinMKruse @nytimes it was manufactured by "left-leaning academic elites and journalists." The South, she says, is no longer defined by racism. It turned to the GOP because its people are pro-life, pro-gun, and pro-small-government.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes In theory there is nothing inherently racist about limited government. The problem is that in practice and historical experience, limited govt philosophy has consistently functioned as a more abstract and respectable way of communicating one's preference for racial hierarchy.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes We see this phenomenon at play in white southerners' constitutional objections to federal funding for internal improvements and a national Bank, the founding principles of the KKK, Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board and the Southern Manifesto...

@KevinMKruse @nytimes conservative opposition to the Civil Rights Act, Reagan's campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the infamous Lee Atwater interview from 1981, etc. Then there are numerous examples from today's politics: Cliven Bundy, Tea Partiers who have been shown...

@KevinMKruse @nytimes in several peer reviewed studies to spend much more time talking about racial issues than the economic ones for which they presumably organized, the Alt Right, and the Ludwig Von Mises Institute (the statements of Thomas DiLorenzo, Walter Block, and Lew Rockwell deserve scrutiny)

@KevinMKruse @nytimes Included in this post is a wonderful thread written by @HC_Richardson that shows how much of the rhetoric around socialism, inefficient bureaucracies, taxes, and redistribution of wealth can be traced back to the era of Reconstruction in which racial issues took center stage.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson When we think of limited government philosophy in the modern U.S. context, we usually think of fiscal conservatism, lowering taxes, balanced budgets, and cutting funding for government programs.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson My post shows that supporting low taxes is never purely about limtd govt. This is because the consequence of lowering taxes means that the wealthy, who are overwhelmingly white, will be taxed less to fund social insurance programs that help the poor, who are more likely to be PoC

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson people of color. The debates over the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka “Obamacare,” are instructive. Part of the ACA included an expansion of Medicaid. While the framers of the ACA intended the Medicaid expansion to apply to every state, the Supreme Court ruled

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson that this portion of the law (not the entire law) was unconstitutional. According to their version of federalism in which the federal government and state governments have shared, equal authority, the federal government could not compel the state governments to expand Medicaid.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson On the surface, looking at this map shows that southern states resisted the expansion of a "Big Government" program like Medicaid. But the story doesn't end there. There's almost always an important racial component.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson A lot of African Americans live in the southern states that have denied Medicaid expansion. And it is African Americans and other people of color who are most harmed when Medicaid fails to expand.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson If that is the case, then all of a sudden a question that is supposedly abstract and purely about political ideology or jurisprudence ends up having real-life consequences involving questions of racial justice and social equality.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson historianstevecampbell.com/blog/in-progre… The final post in my series examines the world of conservative anti-intellectualism that gave us Dinesh D'Souza. It argues that D'Souza and his allies are engaged in a strategy to help the GOP and undermine higher education.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson I agree with @dr_cdeutsch in concluding that historians need to rebut quackery through public engagement.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson @dr_cdeutsch As I think about what I've done this summer, I realized that what started out as an intellectual curiosity and fooling around with maps turned into a small project that took a couple of weeks to complete (with vacation). Below I'm going to include some folks with a msg at the end

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson @dr_cdeutsch If you're on this list, please wait for the favor I'll ask at the end. @SethCotlar @ProfMSinha @AstorAaron @HerecomesDrBob @markcheathem @LarryGlickman @LawrenceCelani @npcox @pastpunditry @TheTattooedProf @KevinLevin @dwceditor @TimNaftali @t_lacy @AngieMaxwell1 @NotoNixon

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson @dr_cdeutsch @SethCotlar @ProfMSinha @AstorAaron @HerecomesDrBob @markcheathem @LarryGlickman @LawrenceCelani @npcox @pastpunditry @TheTattooedProf @KevinLevin @dwceditor @TimNaftali @t_lacy @AngieMaxwell1 @NotoNixon @DrIbram @KeriLeighMerrit @profmusgrave @PaulMSparrow1 @EmilySenefeld @robbkh @JeanneTheoharis @JuddLegum @NathanKalmoe @kathleen_belew @LeahRigueur @thdemocracydude @MarcusWitcher @CarolynEastman3 @KatinSATX @HistoryCtr @brianros1 @HistoryBrian @Victoria_Woeste

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson @dr_cdeutsch @SethCotlar @ProfMSinha @AstorAaron @HerecomesDrBob @markcheathem @LarryGlickman @LawrenceCelani @npcox @pastpunditry @TheTattooedProf @KevinLevin @dwceditor @TimNaftali @t_lacy @AngieMaxwell1 @NotoNixon @DrIbram @KeriLeighMerrit @profmusgrave @PaulMSparrow1 @EmilySenefeld @robbkh @JeanneTheoharis @JuddLegum @NathanKalmoe @kathleen_belew @LeahRigueur @thdemocracydude @MarcusWitcher @CarolynEastman3 @KatinSATX @HistoryCtr @brianros1 @HistoryBrian @Victoria_Woeste @drphillips2001 @madebyhistory @ProfHendershot @RaymondLavertue @Prof_EOB @TropicsM @akbarjenkins @san_frijol @zachdowdle @JYSexton @blumrm...okay, this list is getting too long and I won't keep y'all waiting. I'm bound to leave someone out so my apologies.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson @dr_cdeutsch @SethCotlar @ProfMSinha @AstorAaron @HerecomesDrBob @markcheathem @LarryGlickman @LawrenceCelani @npcox @pastpunditry @TheTattooedProf @KevinLevin @dwceditor @TimNaftali @t_lacy @AngieMaxwell1 @NotoNixon @DrIbram @KeriLeighMerrit @profmusgrave @PaulMSparrow1 @EmilySenefeld @robbkh @JeanneTheoharis @JuddLegum @NathanKalmoe @kathleen_belew @LeahRigueur @thdemocracydude @MarcusWitcher @CarolynEastman3 @KatinSATX @HistoryCtr @brianros1 @HistoryBrian @Victoria_Woeste @drphillips2001 @madebyhistory @ProfHendershot @RaymondLavertue @Prof_EOB @TropicsM @akbarjenkins @san_frijol @zachdowdle @JYSexton @blumrm Here's the favor: if you have some time, please read through my blog series. You can start at the top of this thread. I realize I'm asking a bit of work on your end because it's the end of the summer. So there's no obligation. At the very least maybe consider retweeting?

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson @dr_cdeutsch @SethCotlar @ProfMSinha @AstorAaron @HerecomesDrBob @markcheathem @LarryGlickman @LawrenceCelani @npcox @pastpunditry @TheTattooedProf @KevinLevin @dwceditor @TimNaftali @t_lacy @AngieMaxwell1 @NotoNixon @DrIbram @KeriLeighMerrit @profmusgrave @PaulMSparrow1 @EmilySenefeld @robbkh @JeanneTheoharis @JuddLegum @NathanKalmoe @kathleen_belew @LeahRigueur @thdemocracydude @MarcusWitcher @CarolynEastman3 @KatinSATX @HistoryCtr @brianros1 @HistoryBrian @Victoria_Woeste @drphillips2001 @madebyhistory @ProfHendershot @RaymondLavertue @Prof_EOB @TropicsM @akbarjenkins @san_frijol @zachdowdle @JYSexton @blumrm This is a project that is intended for students and a general audience. But I'd like your suggestions for a "Further Reading" section that you'll see at the end of Part 4 in this series. I'm doing it because I want the best information out there to combat the disinformation.

@KevinMKruse @nytimes @HC_Richardson @dr_cdeutsch @SethCotlar @ProfMSinha @AstorAaron @HerecomesDrBob @markcheathem @LarryGlickman @LawrenceCelani @npcox @pastpunditry @TheTattooedProf @KevinLevin @dwceditor @TimNaftali @t_lacy @AngieMaxwell1 @NotoNixon @DrIbram @KeriLeighMerrit @profmusgrave @PaulMSparrow1 @EmilySenefeld @robbkh @JeanneTheoharis @JuddLegum @NathanKalmoe @kathleen_belew @LeahRigueur @thdemocracydude @MarcusWitcher @CarolynEastman3 @KatinSATX @HistoryCtr @brianros1 @HistoryBrian @Victoria_Woeste @drphillips2001 @madebyhistory @ProfHendershot @RaymondLavertue @Prof_EOB @TropicsM @akbarjenkins @san_frijol @zachdowdle @JYSexton @blumrm Feel free to contact me any way you wish--a comment on Twitter, a Twitter DM, by leaving a comment on one of my blog posts, by looking up my contact information on my website (part of my Twitter profile). Thanks so much for everyone's time and support!