Thread by @kerry62189

1986: "...state Senate president [Billy] Bulger maintains one of the vital traditions of Massachusetts politics: Yankee baiting."

washingtonpost.com/archive/opinio…

"In an economic inversion of the traditional New Deal coalition, the Massachusetts Democratic Party has, over the past decade, increasingly become the party of affluent, liberal, middle-class suburbanites."

"Blue-collar white Catholics, once the mainstay of the Massachusetts Democratic coalition, have in large part been dealt out of the system. They vote in far fewer numbers than in the past, and their votes are no longer reliably Democratic, particularly in presidential contests."

"However, they have not formed a new base for the [MA] GOP, which is floundering as patrician Yankees have lost their grip on the party structure...In economic terms, the change in the [MA Dems].. clashes head-on with a realignment that has taken place in the in the ...South."

"[In the south,] affluent suburbs that were once the hard core of a one-party Democratic system are now the precincts most firmly in the hands of the GOP...Democrats in the South increasingly gain the loyalties of the poor & working class, while Republicans [gain the affluent.]"

"Cheap, clean, smart, un-Irish, Dukakis seems built to deliver rational services..."

Ummm...

"It is not too much to say that the modern, increasingly yuppified and technocratic Democratic Party simply doesn't offer such lower-class potential voters any particular incentive to participate."