BTW, for whatever reason earlier today I was looking at the 1976 Electoral College map. It’s trippy to imagine this was the Red-Blue map for an election in my lifetime.
possibly the most remarkable first sentence of a political ad i have ever seen
BTW, for whatever reason earlier today I was looking at the 1976 Electoral College map. It’s trippy to imagine this was the Red-Blue map for an election in my lifetime.
scatterplot 
Much of the appeal of Carter in the South was that he was an evangelical Christian. Michael Lindsay makes the point that he was the first national candidate to openly use his evangelical religious identity to get elected.
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I’m still amazed by the start of the McCain ad. Or, I’m amazed that he is saddled with an incumbent president so unpopular that he would need to run ads like this, and yet the race is still in single digits.
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@2: ya, agreed. ‘We can all agree that the failed policies of the last 8 years have sucked, and your nest egg is in the toilet. Vote for me!’ I mean, the alternative is to pretend like everything’s rainbows and unicorns, which sounds surreal as well.
I’m guessing (out of my hat, no doubt) the closeness has to do with the fact that the US is pretty evenly divided political-identity-wise, and so even if you are going to vote against the last 8 years, it requires more identity work than if people didn’t come into the scene already as Repubicans, Democrats, or what-have-you’s. I suspect that ‘Reagan Democrat’ as an identity occurred after the fact rather than before the election.
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