A liberal on economics would usually but not always want to vote for a Democrat. In that era, you really did need to ask a lot of specific information about a congressional candidate before voting for him. This meant that even on core liberal-conservative issues the most liberalRepublicans were often more liberal than the most conservative Democrats: A lot of southerners with conservatives views on economics were in the Democratic Party for reasons related to white supremacy, and some northerners with moderate views on economics and liberal views on race were Republicans: They find that most of American politics can be explained with a single liberal-conservative axis, but that at certain points in time - notably the middle of the 20th century - a second axis related to racial equality issues was also very important.ĭuring the time when the racial axis was scrambled, the parties were not perfectly sorted around liberalism versus conservatism. What they do is record every congressional vote from every congress in a way that lets them plot each member's location in a two-dimensional ideological space. A series of charts by political scientist Keith Poole based on his pioneering work with Howard Rosenthal and other co-authors makes the case in more detail and with more complicated math. Regardless of personal qualities, a Democrat is going to vote like a Democrat and a Republican will vote like a Republican. As this great graphic from Congressional Quarterly shows, decades ago it was common for large minorities of Democrats in both the House and the Senate to break with their parties on legislative votes. All you really need to know to decide whether you want to vote for John Walsh or any other congressional candidate is what letter sits next to his name. On the other hand, the fact that he dropped out transformed the race because he had unique personal attributes - incumbency, a military service record - that made him more electable than any feasible Democratic replacement.Īnd yet the overwhelming bulk of the evidence is that none of this matters. On the one hand, it reflected poorly on Walsh and forced him to drop out. The revelation doubly transformed the race. The Montana Senate race, for example, was turned upside down when Democrat John Walsh was revealed to have plagiarized his master's thesis. You hear a lot about candidates' personal attributes, about their gaffes, about their families, and about their scandals. And yet general election campaigns - especially ones fought out in states like Maine or Louisiana whose electorates have a clear tilt toward one party or another - are dedicated to trying to obscure this basic reality. If you usually agree with Republicans, you should vote for the Republican. If you usually agree with Democrats, you should vote for the Democrat.
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