and many Cleveland Democrats deserted the party (including the president, who supported McKinley).
The Democratic Party changed in 1896, even if the voter coalition that supported Bryan looked a lot like the old Democratic coalition (the party’s base would change over time). The political scientist John Gerring, in his study of party ideology in American presidential politics, characterizes the pre-1896 Democrats as a party aligned with the principles of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, such as promoting “liberty versus tyranny” and opposing the growth of the state. The post-1896 Democrats are a populist party, he argued, concerned with “the people versus the interests.” The Republican Party’s ideological shift from a nationalist party of promoting “order versus anarchy” to a party defined by “the state versus the individual” came later, in the 1920s, likely as a result of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s growing of government during his term (cemented by Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt’s liberalism during his more than a decade in office).5 In effect, Bryan—who was also the Populist Party nominee—brought the populists into the Democratic Party, but the Democrats lost more than they gained and remained in the presidential wilderness for 16 years, until a Republican Party split allowed the Democrats to win the presidency in 1912 (and then hold it against a unified GOP in 1916).
There’s something symbolic, too, about 1896 from an Ohio perspective. The country in 1896 came to where Ohio already was. Since the founding of the Republican Party in the early 1850s—the party first produced a presidential candidate, Frémont, in 1856—the GOP carried Ohio in every election through 1896.
That coincided with a golden age for Ohio in national politics. McKinley’s victory in 1896 marked the sixth time in eight elections that a native Ohioan was elected to the White House—Grant twice (in 1868 and 1872), Rutherford B. Hayes (1876), James A. Garfield (1880), Benjamin Harrison (1888), and McKinley. Four years later, McKinley would make it seven Ohio victories in nine tries, before he, like Garfield before him, fell victim to an assassin’s bullet shortly after the beginning of his second term.
Ohio would vote Republican in every election from 1856 to 1912, and so would the nation, save for just two elections: Cleveland’s victories in 1884 and 1892. Into the 1910s and throughout the rest of the 20th century into the 21st, the nation would swing back and forth between the parties, with Ohio almost always close to the national average. More narrowly, given that McKinley was an Ohioan—as was his political Svengali, Mark Hanna—that’s also a reason to start with 1896 here.
Table 2.1 shows how many times each state voted for the presidential winner over the 30 elections from 1896 through 2012.6 Some of the states did not exist in 1896, so their record of voting with winners begins in the first election in which they participated. For instance, New Mexico became a state in time for the 1912 election, so it voted in 26 elections over this time frame instead of 30, like Ohio.
Table 2.1. Electoral record of the states over the last 30 elections, 1896–2012
The most Democratic region in the first half of this 30-election time frame was the South, which voted almost uniformly Democratic from Reconstruction through the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. A confluence of factors, including the Democratic Party’s increasing policy liberalism, its post–World War II embrace of civil rights activism on behalf of blacks (who began to vote heavily Democratic during Roosevelt’s term in response to the New Deal), and increasing migration of northern Republicans to growing southern cities like Charlotte, Atlanta, and others, pushed the historically conservative South to align itself with what was becoming the clearly more conservative party, the Republicans.7
But, for the first half of this period, the South voted Democratic almost all the time, and given that the Republicans won the White House in seven of nine elections from 1896 to 1928, many of the southern states racked up a lot of presidential campaign losses by voting for Democrats. By the 2010s, Republicans dominated eight of the 11 states of the old Confederacy—Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas—and thus they all comfortably supported Republicans John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 while the nation was voting for Barack Obama.
Meanwhile, the remaining three ex-Confederate states—Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia—all eventually became swing states, with Virginia moving from rock-solid Republicanism in presidential elections (it was the only southern state to vote against evangelical Christian Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976) to the nation’s political center, closely mirroring the national vote in both 2008 and 2012.
Florida and North Carolina retain slight GOP leans but are battleground states (the Sunshine State) or are trending in that direction (the Tar Heel State). In any event, bloc voting first for Democrats and then for Republicans in the South makes it hard to argue that any of these states are historic bellwethers, even though demographic changes might make those latter three states along the Atlantic Coast among the most reliable bellwethers going forward, perhaps surpassing even a state like Ohio.
In the Northeast, the poor records of Maine and Vermont stand out, primarily because they are the only two states to never vote for FDR, fighting off the eventual four-term president’s advances even in his landslide reelection triumph of 1936.
New England Republicanism, like the South’s Democratic tradition, was a feature of a political system where presidential elections were effectively reruns of the Civil War held every four years, with the North Republican, the South Democratic, and the battlegrounds of the Midwest and Border States oscillating in competitive years. Modern party labels tell us little about the ideology of the time. Just because Maine and Vermont never voted for Roosevelt, while Alabama and Mississippi provided him with such towering totals that the results seem to resemble sham elections held in dictatorships, didn’t necessarily make the former pair “conservative” and the latter pair “liberal” by the 21st-century definitions of the terms.
There’s a saying that “As goes Maine, so goes the nation.” That wasn’t because it was a bellwether; as shown above, Maine was a reliably Republican state in presidential elections for much of its history. The saying comes from the fact that until 1958 the state voted in September as opposed to November for nonpresidential offices, which most states adopted as a national election date following the Civil War. RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende noted in 2010 that “this enabled prognosticators to get a good sense of which way the winds were blowing. If Republicans did well, they could expect a decent year nationally. If the races were close, it was probably not going to be a good year. And if Democrats actually won a few races, Republicans knew to run for cover nationwide.”8 In 1936, Maine’s early vote backed the GOP in multiple statewide offices and the Pine Tree State’s three US House districts, suggesting a Republican turn nationally. Instead, FDR won a smashing reelection, losing only two states (Maine and Vermont, noted above). That led to a revision: “As goes Maine, so goes Vermont.”9
Massachusetts and Rhode Island have better records in part because they turned reliably Democratic much earlier than some of their New England neighbors. Both states voted for Catholic Democrat Al Smith, the governor of New York, in 1928. While Smith was soundly defeated by Republican Herbert Hoover—losing even some states in the South, thanks in part to his religion and his urban politics—his nomination excited his coreligionists and immigrants in big cities, stirring a new base that Roosevelt would bring solidly into the Democratic Party during his presidency.
OHIO’S MIDWESTERN COMPETITION
The Midwest features three states that election watchers have cited at various times as bellwethers: Illinois, Missouri, and Ohio. But while the bellwether label has fit at certain points, developments in Illinois and Missouri, and also nationally, made both these states
