Stalker rdmcandie wrote:
Thats what happens when you spend 30 years remapping districts to guarantee wins.
Except, as was mentioned earlier, the second chart kinda steps on the premise of the first. I think it has a lot more to do with how our definition of "liberal" and "conservative" has changed over time, and how the parties are more aligned with our current definitions than they were 30 years ago. It's frankly not surprising given that today's conservatism is most associated with principles that only emerged as the winning Republican political platform with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Recall that in the 1970s Reagan was not viewed as a good conservative, but today he's considered the standard of what conservative is.
I suspect that we could probably look any point in time and find that the ideological axis at that specific point in time wasn't as well aligned with the political parties of 30+ years earlier to that point in time. Politics does change.
Edited, Apr 16th 2014 6:30pm by gbaji