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.

Bush claimed the White House with a smaller popular vote margin and few states than Reagan carried in 1984, and by 1992, the pendulum could no longer be held back, and may have swung for Clinton even if Bush had not been suffering with a recession and a few notable blunders.  Bush had lost nine of Reagan’s states in 1988, including six that have never come back around with Republican electors – Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington.

If 1988 brought a wave of Republican losses, but not enough to usher in a Democrat president, then 1992 brought the tidal wave.  The dam break was so large, Bush lost 22 states he had carried just four years before.  These are the states he lost then that have never been Republican at the presidential level since:

California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, Vermont

Additionally, Bush lost many states that have only been Republican once since then and have since been fused to the “blue wall” – like Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.  Republicans have also since succeeded in giving away power in Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia after they remained “red,” or at least competitive, through 2004.

Is it believable that 15 states and Washington, D.C, a “blue wall” worth 190 electoral votes today, have ALL been “blue” since at least 1992, for eight consecutive elections?

Looking at the graphic above, showing election results from those 15 states and Washington, D.C., the “blue wall,” we can see some of the states are very loyal to Democrats, and typically only vote Republican for a re-election campaign, like Minnesota, Hawaii, and Rhode Island.  Most of these states voted against Carter’s re-election in 1980.

These states voted for every incumbent seeking re-election (not including LBJ or Ford, who were not elected initially):

Hawaii, Maryland, Rhode Island

The only states to vote against any Republican re-election in this period (Ford not included):
Massachusetts, Minnesota  

Political realignments do happen.  The Cold War did come to an end, and the nation was on a leftward trend in 1988, but not enough of one to land Dukakis in the White House.  The political science, statistics, and Ross Perot’s presence on the 1992 stage lead me to believe that these states did move en masse to Bill Clinton, and given their behavior when presidents seek re-election, also would have backed him in 1996 without manipulation.  Notably, Oregon and Washington voted Democrat for the third consecutive election.

Here are states that never voted Democrat three times in a row since 1960:

California, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, New Jersey, Vermont

All six of those voted for Al Gore, the Democrat, in 2000, which happens to be the same year the divisive “red state, blue state” narrative came into popular distribution.  The hanging chads incident in Florida created a popular narrative that more sophisticated technology was needed to run our elections, and much of that was in place by 2004, when George W. Bush was re-elected, with a very narrow coalition of states to get him over the 270-vote threshold.

Now have a look at the “blue wall”:

With malleability being a hallmark of states as pertains to their political behavior, do we really believe that none of these states have accidentally voted Republican even one single time, not even for a re-election campaign?

Or are these states part of a controlled coalition of states that is used to make national elections, and their inherent corruption, easier to sell to the public?

What, California? Nope, it’s gonna go blue this year, just like Washington and Oregon.  Just don’t go looking at history to see that these states like to change sides from time to time.

Conclusion of Part I – Five Takeaways

1)         The 13 states making up the “red wall,” which have voted Republican in every election since 1980, are states that fit a profile of likely to have voted Republican based on ideology, current events, and historical tendency.

2)         The 15 states, plus Washington, D.C., making up the “blue wall,” which have voted Democrat in every election since 1992, have deviated substantially from their historical tendencies to flip their support from one party to the other, and to back Republican re-election campaigns specifically.  They have now created a streak of Democrat support that was impossible even for Democrats to replicate in the former “Solid South.”

3)         Bill Clinton legitimately won the election of 1992 even without Ross Perot, as the political pendulum was in full acceleration against Republicans, who had held three straight terms in the White House.

4)         Bill Clinton, given the voting nature of the “blue wall” to support incumbents, was legitimately re-elected in 1996.  Local corruption in place by 2000 appears to have retained certain states that wouldn’t usually vote Democrat in three straight elections in the Democrat column, and by 2004, elections are fully controlled by media narratives, technology, and loosening practices.  Only a 2016 Trump end-around coalition shift in the Rust Belt, which wasn’t expected, could break this “blue wall” temporarily.

5)         I have never seen a more cheerful concession speech than George H.W. Bush’s such speech in 1992, given two years after he described the “New World Order” and just before the emergence of George W. Bush as a key political figure.  What did they know then that we are figuring out now?