Is A Blue Texas Coming?
In a recent journal article, Professor Seth McKee, Oklahoma State University, assesses party identification (PID) in the South. He covers all of the states of the confederacy both in terms of PID and voting behavior. He uses data that allow him to analyze PID from 1992 to 2020 and voting behavior from 2008 to 2020. He first defines PID and its importance in political science and indicates how it will be conceptualized in his study. He follows the common practice of considering Independents who lean to one of the major political parties (Democratic Party or Republican Party) as partisans. I have previously posted on my problem with that conceptualization; so I won’t consider it in this post. His findings lead to the following conclusion: . . . The principal findings in this study reiterate Republican dominance in contemporary southern politics. In the last several presidential elections, the white electorate has increased their GOP ID, and especially rural white voters who continu...