Changing Patterns of Voting in the Northern United States: Electoral Realignment, 1952-1996 (review)

Speel believes that beneath the voter volatility and significant weakening of individual partisan commitments during the past forty years, “a clear electoral realignment has occurred in the Northern United States since 1950” (ix).¹ Whatever short-term forces have been in play, partisanship remains relatively strong, and the North has become more Democratic in presidential elections. Certain social groups have abandoned their formerly rock-ribbed Republican commitments to become steadfast Democratic voters, often by way of support for John Anderson’s candidacy. Unlike previous electoral shocks, this one was not based on one or two critical elections. Rather, Speel eschews critical realignment theory and returns to Keys’ underused notion of secular realignment, a permanent change in voter choice that occurs over a long period.² Moreover, this is “a new form of realignment” in another way—a type that he labels “federalized realignment” because, unlike earlier periods, voter behavior now varies between different office levels (x, 2–3). The Republican defectors remain committed to the gop in state and local contests.

His explanation for these changes is primarily cultural, not economic. Moderate Republican Yankee ethnics with high educational attainments abandoned their traditional partisan home in reaction to the “Southernization” of their national party, with its concommitment espousel of a social conservatism anathema to them. (Conversely, northern Republicans gained support from ethnic French Canadian groups in Northern New England and New York State). The split vote between offices was based on the way that Republican party leaders campaigned, on the different images that they created and different values that they espoused, and on the policies that they supported at the different levels. At the state level in the North, the gop remained moderate.

Speel’s conclusions are based on individual state-level analysis—partly descriptive history and partly based on multiple regression analysis. He begins with a careful, in-depth study of a limited area, northern New England, tracing at township level the transformation underway in Vermont and Maine and its failure to occur in New Hampshire. He broadens his work to survey (at county level) other northern states where realignment has occurred. He relies on voting returns rather than survey responses on the perfectly reasonable grounds that actual behavior is a better indicator than an expressed preference to a pollster, especially when the two differ from one another. He supplements this data with research into a range of literary sources.

This is a book rich in content and imaginative in argument, albeit uneven in its coverage across the North. Speel has raised many interesting questions. What is not clear is whether his “revised approach to realignment” (199) works as well as he argues, or whether he, like others, has fit today’s discordant electorate into a deeply imbedded theory that cannot (and should not) be stretched that far. As a number of scholars have suggested, we may be in a post-realignment era when tinkering with what we mean by realignment—either critical or secular—is not useful.³ If not, further research, built on Speel’s good start, remains to be done.