1896 and 2008

I am not the first person to make the connection, but this year's electoral map most closely resembles 1896, when Wm. McKinley defeated Wm. Jennings Bryan. It too featured a great urban-rural divide. In those days, the Democratic Party was the "country party" and the Republicans the "city party," though such descriptions are never truly just.

Here is a link to Eugene Volokh's post on the topic. Here are the 1896 vote totals, and here are this year's.


What the "country" party should remember today is that Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat born in Virginia who became Governor of New Jersey, broke the "city" party's stranglehold sixteen years later and won an electoral landslide in 1912. As a political reward for three lost presidential campaigns, Wilson appointed Bryan as Secretary of State, but Bryan resigned when he differed with Wilson's policies in the Great War.

You can interpret the map any way you want. On Volokh's post, the commentators ascribe the divide to racism and local-yokelism, showing their urban prejudices in doing so. America was a different country in 1896. Half the population was rurul, and rural elites produced much of the nation's leadership. The great fear in the 1890s was populism, and beneath it, anarchism, socialism, and equalitarianism. The Progressives were quite blunt that the disfranchisement of ignorant and poor voters (black and white) was the only way they believed good government and their progressive measures could be implemented. They defined "progressivism" as "Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends." Those who call themselves "liberal" today claim populism and progressivism in their roots, but that was difficult if not impossible in 1896.

The only thing I'll predict is that the map will change in four years and even more in eight.