Red States and Blue States

Today’s tight party split resembles nothing so much as the late 19th century:

1876 Hayes-R 185, Tilden-D 184 (369) (Tilden had 51.% to 48.4% of the vote)
1880 Garfield-R 214, Hancock-D 155 (369) (Garfield won 48.4% to 48.3% of the vote)
1884 Cleveland-D 218, Blaine-R 182 (400) (Cleveland had 50.1% of the vote)
1888 Harrison-R 233, Cleveland-D 168 (401) (Cleveland had 49.3% to 48.4% of the vote)
1892 Cleveland-D 277, Harrison-R 145 (444) Weaver-P 22. Cleveland had 46.2% of the vote)

The electoral maps for 1876-1888 look extremely similar to one another. Indeed, they look similar to today’s maps, but reversed: the South is Democratic, the North and far West are Republican. This is a reminder that the anomaly of Southern cohesion and racial/cultural issues has persisted since the Civil War as the most salient fact in American electoral politics.

The election of 1876 was decided by Congress in electoral vote shenanigans.
The 1888 election favored a minority candidate in the Electoral college.

However, the Mountain West had yet to join the electorate.
Six western states were admitted between 1888 and 1892: N. Dakota, S. Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Wyoming. Two states (Idaho and N. Dakota) split their electoral votes. Some have theoried that the intention was to gerrymander the electoral college in favor of Republicans. Of the new votes, Cleveland received 1, Weaver 4, and Harrison 15 in 1892. Still, Cleveland won that year because the three-way split cost Harrison a few other key states. The mountain west states were the subject of fierce electoral competition thereafter.

The lesson of this period may be that we are not entering a new political age, as returning to an older one of intense electoral competition and not a small bit of political corruption. Red State/Blue State is not a new "armageddon" phenomenon (as Zogby puts it) but a return to more familiar patterns of partisanship.