How Long Has Election Corruption Been Going On? Behind the Blue Wall (Part I of II)

Topic: Elections

I get the following question all the time:

How long do you think election fraud has been going on?

That requires a more complicated explanation.  Clearly, cheating has been going on as long as elections have existed.  One needs only to look at New York City and the actions of “Boss” Tweed in the mid-1800s, who committed the same types of fraudulent actions in local elections as are done today, but with less technologically advanced means of executing them.

Widespread election manipulation can only occur with corrupted voter rolls, centralized technology infrastructure, and sophisticated data collection, all combined with loose practices like no-excuse mail and early voting, and corrupt practices like ballot harvesting and drop boxes amplifying the cheating.

This is the first of a two-part series that will examine the origins of manipulated elections in the United States.  This article will examine the what and when of manipulated election outcomes, seeking to highlight the formerly malleable nature of states that have suddenly become extremely polarized in three decades.

When harvesting the data for this article, I had to decide how far back to go to produce relevant findings.  I decided to scrutinize election results from 1932 to 1988, covering 15 presidential elections.  1932 saw Franklin Roosevelt elected President on the “New Deal” platform, which modernized politics to align the working man with the Democrats, and with it, the major metro areas like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, which had previously been willing to back Republicans like Calvin Coolidge.

To dig up elections prior to 1932 would be to apply political sentiment related to slavery and the Civil War to modern analysis, making my findings here irrelevant.  The Georgia of 1876 is not the same as today’s Georgia, nor is the Minnesota of Cleveland’s day the same as Nixon’s Land of 10,000 Lakes.  Politics has always changed, aided by a political pendulum effect that is governed partly by science, and in other ways, by the events of the time.  Voters tire of the same governing coalitions, and even faster when they become corrupt.  That alone ushers in the reign of the non-dominant party given enough time.

States are intended to flip.  Polarization to the point in which roughly 40 states are decided before voting even begins is neither healthy, nor survivable; however, analysts should be asking themselves, “is this polarization real, or even possible, based on what history tells us about states that never flip?”

From 1948 until 1968, a span of just 6 elections, every single state voted for each of the two major parties at least once.  The most polarized state in modern history was Arizona, which voted Republican in 11 straight elections from 1952 to 1992 (after the Democrat Truman won it in 1948), flipping narrowly to Bill Clinton in 1996 before returning to its Republican roots for another five elections before the 2020 travesty.  Our political nature is for coalitions to shift, and for the underdog to eventually take over – that is, unless people have the means to prevent that pendulum from shifting.

For all the talk of the vaunted “blue wall,” which Donald Trump toppled in 2016 by snatching three states the Democrats were caught napping on, there is a “red wall,” as well.  I will eliminate my own bias by examining the legitimacy of those states never flipping first.

“Red Wall”

There are 13 states that have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, and they are currently worth 99 electoral votes (one electoral vote in Nebraska is a swing vote, not included here).

Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Wyoming

Deep South

Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina

These states resisted Bill Clinton’s southern charm in the 1990s and had similar voting patterns since 1932 (Alabama’s and Mississippi’s are nearly identical), with South Carolina going for Nixon in 1968.  They stay in the “red wall” due to continued Democrat decadence, lack of major population centers to overwhelm the rural white vote, and the value placed on individual rights, like the 2^nd Amendment.

Great Plains

Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota

These states all had a soft spot for LBJ in 1964 and went right back to voting Republican after beginning to transition in the mid-1900s.  They rely heavily on agriculture, are free of dominant metropolitan areas like Denver, which cost the GOP Colorado and prevents the takeover of Minnesota, and are socially conservative.

Texas

The Lone Star State once resembled the Solid South politically, with little room for Republican success, even though the cities were “red” and the countryside was “blue.”  This began to shift under Eisenhower, though Texas went “blue” in four of five elections between 1960 and 1976.  Reagan flipped it big time, and as the GOP came to be aligned with big oil and Bible-belt conservatism, Texas came into the fold, where it remains to this day.

Mountain West

Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming

These states, like their Great Plains cohorts, are loaded with voters who value individual liberties, as well as notoriously Republican LDS voters.  Two of those states, Alaska and Wyoming, are also heavily reliant on the oil industry.  These haven’t taken a pass at a Democrat nominee since 1964, a Johnson national landslide.

It makes sense to me that these 13 states would belong to a “red wall” that hasn’t crumbled in 11 straight elections.  There are other states like Louisiana, Kentucky, Montana, and probably even Florida that are part of this coalition now, but for the purpose of showing the unlikely nature of the “blue wall” having never collapsed, are left out of this mix, as they’ve voted for Democrats since 1980 at least once.

“Blue Wall”

Reagan wiped the floor with the Democrats twice, capturing 44 states in 1980, and then almost completing a clean sweep in 1984, which would have happened had Walter Mondale, his opponent that year, not hailed from Minnesota.  He was so effective in restoring American economic dominance and crushing his communist adversaries that he propped up George H.W. Bush, his far inferior Vice President, for a 40-state victory in 1988.  That victory marks the only occasion since the conclusion of World War II-era politics that any party has won three consecutive terms in the White House.  Put otherwise, Reagan was so dominant politically that his stamp of approval kept the political pendulum from swinging far enough to remove the incumbent party from power, even though history would have suggested it was time for a Democrat.