How did New England actually become Liberal?

[Ignacio Upton]

When we look at those Red State-Blue State maps from 2000 and 2004, we notice that most or all of New England is Blue. Indeed, our Presidential candidates win there by BIG margain (especially in MA, VT, and RI.) However, New England was once a Republican bastion, and not just a Liberal and Moderate one. As recently as 1988, George HW Bush carried every state in New England except Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He won New Hampshire by over 60% of the vote against Michael Dukakis!
Going further back in history, this streak is prominent in the region's political orientation. During the beginning of the 20th Century, Massachusetts had two of the most conservative Senators in the country: Henry Cabot Lodge, and John Weeks. Calvin Coolidge, the same union-busting, economically lassiez-faire President that ran this country was Governor in MA and was originally from VT. VT and ME were also the only two states that did not go to FDR in 1936 against Alf Landon (and I don't think VT ever voted for FDR in any of his elections.) My question is, why was New England so conservative then (at least economically, racism was everywhere at this time but the South just happened to be slightly worse because of more widespread segregation) and how did it become the Liberal fortress it is today?

[MaineDem]

1. Smart people live here

:evilgrin:

Actually in Maine it took until the mid 50s for us to elect a Democratic Governor and change things around. Ed Muskie made that happen.

[Ignacio Upton]

2. I know that NE has a Lincolnesque streak, but it also

elected conservatives. Actually, New Hampshire is kind of what I'm talking about. They elect Sanunu and Gregg and the Republicans control the State Legislature

[usregimechange]

3. Party platforms changed.

[Ignacio Upton]

4. Elaborate

How did the same state that gave us Calvin Coolidge elect Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders and Pat Leahy?

[usregimechange]

8. I don't know about them but...

Dems were the big (racist) social authoritarians back prior to 1940s or so. Republicans were more libertarian. Than religious right conquered the GOP more recently. NE very socially libertarian.

[Ignacio Upton]

10. The Dems became somewhat leftward beginning with the Populists

However, it did not complete full circle until FDR and the New Deal passed.During this time, the principle opponents of the Progressive Era were from the Eastern/New England/New York-Wall Street Establishment. The Congressmen and Senators who fought against some of our best reforms to date were from New England while, ironically, many of the people who pushed for them were from states like North Carolina (where a Senator by the name of Kitchen....can't remember his first name....pumped up the Income Tax during WWI) and kansas where the Populists and later Progressives had a degree of support.

[annabanana]

24. Hotbed of Revolutionary fervor.... always was

The first stirring of the war against GB heppened in New England, where the Enlightenment took hold in this Country.

[CTyankee]

5. CT had "liberal republicans"

who evolved into Democrats. Even our republican governor is no flaming rwinger. And CT is strongly prochoice after activists got sick and tired of going up to Hartford to complain to the state lege about the state's law banning contraceptives. And lo, Griswold v. Connecticut came to pass!

[Ignacio Upton]

7. But CT also gave us the Bushes

[CTyankee]

11. but they decamped to TX

and * never acknowledges that he was born here. Screw 'em, they don't deserve to live here.

[ebal]

6. Democratic politicians in the south

Another interesting question is why many states in the south had super majorities of Democratic politicians from immediately after the reconstruction until recently.

GA for example had a Democratic Governer Immediatly after Federal forces left and reconstruction ended, and went the entire 20th century with only a Democratic Governor.

From 1831 until 2003 there was a Democratic Governor except for:
Brig. Gen. Thomas H. Ruger U.S. Military Governor 1868-1868
Rufus B. Bullock Republican 1868-1871
Benjamin Conley Republican 1871-1872
George E. "Sonny" Perdue III Republican 2003-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_of_Georgia

Florida, Alabama etc. are similar.

[jedr]

9. Michale Lind breaks Texas down into the influence of

German vs Scotch -Irish settelers... German being more liberal and having chosen not to fight the Indians , but to trade and inter-marry and the other to kill and burn all in their way. But my guess on NE is that they have been hit hardest with the neo-con economics of out sourcing and loss of manufacturing.

[EST]

12. Prob'ly cause they were the first to outlaw chastity belts.

[Nite Owl]

13. New Englanders respect the

privacy of others so the agenda of this kind of republican party is not in keeping with their basic priciples. They may or may not be for the right of gays to marry but damned if they will let the government tell them or anyone what to do for example.

[izzie]

14. They were the old GOP

The GOP of to day has my father spinning in his grave. He sure did not like Muskie but he sure did like Muskie's plan to clean up the state. Muskie really did a good job on that.My father did not like a lot of money spent, wars, large govt. and he knew the govt. was a service to make every one in a town live better. As with the Post office and army. They do not pay for them selfs but are a service for the people. He was also in keeping church out of the govt. and so was every other person in the GOP at that time. The two parties are now so mixed up in the basic belief that it is hard to know what they stand for half the time. The Dem of my young years liked the South as it was, so one has to figure this whole mess out.

[BrklynLiberal]

15. Education?

[Ignacio Upton]

16. Huh?

[BrklynLiberal]

33. See next post.

[Totally Committed]

17. I believe it is because it is the home of so many fine

colleges and universtities where thought and speech are still taught and respected.

When people think, they almost always see the Liberal side of things as the correct side of things. Open minds are liberal minds and people who think are liberal thinkers. I'm not saying there are no exception to this rule, but I feel it is overwhelmingly true.

[Joe Chi Minh]

18. They are surely more like the politically savvy Europeans,

on the Continent, in the sense that they are less amenable to being conned by the surreal bullsh*t that passes for news and current affairs in the US. Indeed, less amenable virtually anywhere else in the world.

Even smart Democrat activists sometimes lose sight of the full enormity of what's been going on, because they have been under constant siege by the full panoply of a perjurious "meeja".
Nowhere else in the world would some of the things that have occurred in the US, have been able to occurred, still less glossed over.

[Clark2008]

28. Maybe, but voting records show the poor also vote liberal.

And, by and large, they don't have access to those colleges and universities.

I'm not disagreeing, just pointing out that it's not the SOLE case.

[TayTay]

19. There are distinct differences from state to state in NE

Massachusetts is blue for a lot of reasons, some of which are as simple as out-birthing the opposition, to the Blue-blood Yankee versus the immigrant battles that began in the state really in the 1840's. (Boston's population doubled in one ten year span in the 1840's. The doubling was the result of dirt-poor Irish coming to town.) The history of much of vote rich Boston is a history of pitting one group against another with the prize being power. (But, for much of the time, not money. The money left the city.) The Irish registered as Dems in order to establish themselves in city government. Patronage went with the power and the ability to reward followers with money, good steady jobs and income. The immigrants, in turn, rewarded the Dems with loyalty and votes. (Sounds nice, but some of the pols who achieved office in this time were among the most corrupt in MA history. Curley was a very bad guy and harmed the city and the State by being so corrupt.) As time went by, a lot of union guys (like my Dad) moved out to the suburbs and took their Dem affiliation with them and changed the State to a solid Dem vote. (But it's more complicated than that, especially today when it's the working class vote that can waver and go Rethug, witness out Gov. races recently. Oh Gawd, you would have to look up busing in Boston to see a big dividing line in aligning libs and working class Dems.)

Massachusetts was a heavy industrial state and became a heavy union state. While many people envision Massachusetts as the home of blue-bloods, this is, of course, not the case. There are and were a lot of blue-collar workers here and they happily aligned with FDR and his promise for a New Deal that would bring them jobs. (Massachusetts entered recession in the 1910's. It didn't really emerge from bad economic times until the late 1970's.)

See, it's complicated, as politics always is. New Hamshireites can speak for themselves, but my relatives from there were all Swamp Yankees with a natural predilection to thriftiness and wanted no part of patronage jobs, budget busting programs that rewarded lazy people and so forth. And remember, Maine is a poor state. It has it's own history that is distant from MA or CT. IT's complicated.

[AspenRose]

22. My husband is from New Hampshire, and boy

did you nail it:

".....a natural predilection to thriftiness and wanted no part of patronage jobs, budget busting programs that rewarded lazy people and so forth."

My father in law borders on Libertarian....and my husband calls Vermont "the People's Republic of Vermont" (he's a repug). No offense meant, but it's almost like NH is the redneck state of New England.

I have noticed that people in NH don't like being told what to do or how to vote.

[SpiralHawk]

23. New Hampshire: It's a Granite State of Mind

[Gormy Cuss]

25. NH state motto: "Live Free or Die"

I've always thought that sums up the political philosophy in NH.

New England isn't liberal, it's blue. Each state arrived at that designation through its own philosophies. Some states are barely blue, some are so blue it's hard to find the red spots.

IMO, that NH is skewing blue is the most extraordinary change in recent years. The shift is due in part to changing demographics. In some parts of southern NH the Massachusetts natives outnumber the locals. I don't think the natives have veered to the left but they do seem to be tilting in that direction because bottom line for all Yankees is they have an inherent distrust of big government, and while they believe in personal responsibility and autonomy they also believe that communities are responsible for the care of their weakest members. The neocons aren't traditional conservatives and Yankee Republicans just don't buy what they're selling.

[bee]

30. As someone who's lived in New England all my life

I assure you that NH has no more rednecks than VT, ME, or even MA (away from the coast). Sure, we have our areas... but name me a state that doesnt. We're pretty liberal and progressive overall. Especially here on the coast & in the south.

But youre right, we dont like to be told what to do, or how to vote.
And we dont take to kindly to being called rednecks. :P :hug:

[GreenPartyVoter]

20. Here in Maine moderate Republicanism was the thing. As far as turning

blue I would suggest that perhaps the Dems are now closer to the moderate policies many Mainers want, plus we also have a larger progressive voting bloc these days.

Sadly, there are plenty of fundies and ** lovers as well. Just like in any other state.

But as to how to turn other states blue I couldn't say that we have a winning formula here that can be applied elsewhere. Best bet is to clean up the media, get rid of the slant, report the facts and educate the viewers and readers well enough to think for themselves.

[GreenPartyVoter]

31. GreenLantern says

1) We have a strong education system.

2) We retain the town meeting form of gov't. (The real kind...not the Bush one)

[Hippo_Tron]

21. Bill Clinton and the GOP moving to the right

If you look at the electoral maps, Clinton was the first Democrat (besides Johnson and FDR who both won basically every state in the country) to sweep New England (Wilson also did very well in the region, but I think that the modern day Democratic party mostly starts with FDR).

With Ronald Reagan, the Republican party took a significant turn to the right especially on social issues. New England continued to vote for him, because well, the entire country voted for him. Dukakis probably would've swept New England and many other parts of the country had it not been from his demise from the Willie Horton ad and other things. Again, the entire country except for very traditional Democratic areas went for the Republican.

But in 1992, the Democrats fielded a candidate who could win. Clinton was socially liberal and Bush was a tool of the religious wrong. That turned off New Englanders. Also, as mentioned above, there is lots of union power in New England. Clinton campaigned on improving conditions for the working man.

One thing that people don't seem to notice about the Democratic party over the past few years is how we have come to take over the "blue states". It's always been presumed that we had the "blue states", when in reality, we didn't. The only traditional blue states that have stayed blue are really Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York. While everybody pays attention to how the Democrats have been getting our asses kicked in the south and the plains states since 1994, people forget the gains we have made in The Northeast, Midwest, California, and Illinois.

As recent as 1998, New York had a Republican Senator named Alfnose D'Amato until Chuck Schummer unseated him. In 2000, Deleware had a Republican Senator. Thomas Carper took over that seat. Jim Jeffords served as a Republican Senator from Vermont for a long time until switching parties. As blue as Massachusetts is, John Kerry actually had to fight for his re-election in 1996. The California legislature was Republican until the Clinton machine put an effort into making it blue. And what about Illinois? Until the 1990's Illinois was still GOP country, it was the "Land of Lincoln". Dick Durbin and Carol Moseley Braun were elected in the 1990's and while Braun lost her seat, we picked it up with extreme ease only one term later. The Illinois legislature wasn't Democratic until, I believe, 2002.

[Ignacio Upton]

34. I think that this is helped by the suburbs becoming blue

And. this may be argueable, but maybe Clinton's "New Democrat" platform (but not Al From cowardice, that's something else) allowed for say, Westchester County, NY to morph from a red bastion into a blue one (my county was the only suburban NYC county north of NYC, which includes Rockland, Putnam, and Dutchess, not to vote for Bush and Kerry won by 15% in a county that voted Republican in every election from 1964 to 1992) and Long Island has also been getting bluer. In Connecticut, Fairfield County, home of Greenwich and other "Country Club Republican" strongholds has gotten blue as well. Same holds true in NJ (except for Morris County, which avoided the political realignment) and MA and NH and PA near Philadelphia.

[mainegreen]

26. Easy! The south scares us silly!

Just look at what their doing and do the opposite!
:crazy:

[Clark2008]

27. I don't know, but I'm one Southern gal who is happy as

hell to be marrying a New England liberal.

Took me long enough to find him down here in red-state land, but, I did and damnit, he's mine. :)

:loveya:

[WilliamPitt]

29. An odd amalgam of people and a tide of history

NE was Republican back when 'Republican' meant Lincoln and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Several major events changed this:

1. Immigration: Millions of Irish and Italian immigrants came in looking for work, and took over the police/political apparatus;

2. Exodus: Millions of African Americans swept north to find factory work;

3. The Republican Party swung to the right during the civil rights fight, and so-called Democratic 'Dixiecrats' jumped ship. New England was the main base for abolition, and so the populace left GOP behind;

4. The labor movement was adopted by the Democrats, and all those unionized Irish and Italian immigrants built machines for the party to defend their work rights.

[Lexingtonian]

32. Ultimately, blame the Puritans, Quakers, and local Indians

New Englanders got rid of almost all of them but kept the attitudes.

From Puritans and Quakers it's the idea that if we want anything good to happen as we like it we have to see to it ourselves and give it all the time, deliberation, effort, and care of ours it requires. And every day should be mostly about getting these important things done, not prioritizing the really selfish stuff. It's not a rigid sense of duty, but New Englanders by and large consider it a waste of time to deal with people without enough of it and coldly offensive if the effort to deliver isn't there.

From the local Algonquian tribes I believe New Englanders got that tacit but rather keen skepticism, a pragmatic expectation (rarely disappointed) based on experience that people you don't know well are all partly sane and partly insane. The more foreign they are, the more curious and unbelieveable or irrelevant or deceitful the things they insist on being true tend to be, though that's not a strict rule. Intangibles such as Theories or Big Ideas, e.g. God talk, tend to be particularly suspect from a long history of bad experiences.

This makes for conversations with unusual, often quite blunt, questions and assertions and topical twists and turns.

Let's just say that white Southerners have historically red flagged on both points more than any other group (Europeans, New Yorkers, Canadians, Midwesterners, Westerners, black Southerners) and the clashes of style of conversation have also been noted.

[formernaderite]

35. Alot of the New england repubs are the country club variety...

they can't stand Bush and his redneck following. I know his accent is fake, but I'm sure it grates on their nerves as well.