Bill Stuntz writes on the 1896, 1916, & 2004 election pattern.–

Bill Stuntz, who started as an assistant professor at UVA when I was a visiting professor there in the mid-1980s, is now a professor at the Harvard Law School. He wrote me an email on the voting patterns that I and many others have been noting:

There have been six elections with this basic pattern, South and West versus Northeast (more recently, the Pacific Coast joins the Northeast), with the Midwest divided. The first is 1896, and that’s the only one the candidate of the Northeast wins. The others — 1916, 1948, 1968, 2000, and now 2004 — are all won by the candidate of the South and West, who always wins at least a couple of Midwestern states, always including Ohio and Missouri. The key is that the Midwest has never identified culturally with the Northeast. In a close election, it just isn’t possible for a candidate like Kerry to sweep the region — and he had to nearly sweep the region in order to win.



I did an article that was partly about this pattern (mostly about the similarities of 2004 to 1948) at techcentralstation.com before the election.

I had read his prescient article when it came out, but it had slipped my mind. It was enttitled: “Why Dewey Defeats Truman — And Bush Beats Kerry?”