The Ring of Fire: Mike Papantonio & Jonathan Haidt: 'The Psychology of Republican Voters'

Source:The Ring of Fire- talking to Professor Jonathan Haidt.

"If the Republican Party is good at only one thing, it's getting middle class people to vote against their own best interest. For years the GOP has convinced average voters that their party really cares about them, and that their policies that only benefit the wealthy are still best for the country. And the voters continue to keep buying this worn out line. Mike Papantonio seeks to find out why voters keep voting against their own interests with Dr. Jonathan Haidt, professor of psychology at New York University's Stern School of Business." 

From The Ring of Fire

I think there a couple major factors for why the blue-collar voters are moving to the Republican Party and away from the Democratic Party and Mike Papantonio and Jon Haidt covered one of then having to do with the civil rights laws of the 1960s. 

Pre-civil rights movement, the Democratic Party was the home of blue-collar voters, even though it's always had a northern, urban, well-educated, wealthy, yuppie, and hipster wing in it, like it has today. But if you were a blue-collar voter in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and even 1970s, you were probably a Democrat if you voted, because Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and even Jimmy Carter, bothered to speak to those voters and even offered programs and solutions to the problems that these voters were dealing with. 

The reason why the Republican Party was such a minority party in America, even when they did have The White House, because their coalition was so small. Up until the 1960s, the Republican Party was mostly country club, northern, midwestern, and western party, of rich people, including African-Americans, Jewish-Americans, and Asian and Latino-Americans. While the rest of the country of all classes, race, and ethnicities, were Democrats. 

Richard Nixon in the mid and late 1960s, even though he was a highly educated and successful, as well as wealthy Republican, saw a major numbers problem for the Republican Party, as he was planning his next presidential campaign, which would've been 1968. He discovered that Republicans were losing almost everywhere, because they didn't have enough voters. Their coalition was simply too small to compete with the Democratic Party. 

Richard Nixon doesn't win the presidency in the 1968, without his campaigning for Congressional Republicans and the successes that they had both in the House and Senate, but also governor's races in 1966, but also with the voters of blue-collar voters, including Independents, but Democrats as well. And Ronald Reagan picks up on this in the late 1970s and even into his failed presidential run in the Republican Party in 1976 and takes that campaign strategy into 1980. 

If you are well-educated, highly successful, wealthy, and even believe in individual freedom, (even if you a so-called leftist who doesn't publicize your belief in individual freedom) you are probably a Democrat. If you are a blue-collar voter, who perhaps just has a high school diploma, who is very fundamentalist when it comes to religion and believes America has been going to hell since the 1960s, you are probably a Republican today. That's how much the two major political parties have changed.