Partisan Appraisals of Party Defectors: Looking Back at the Reagan Democrats
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.2374-7781.2005.26.0.323-346Abstract
Using data from the 1980-1992 National Election Studies, this paper compares the policy and partisan views of three sets of voters: (1) “loyal” Democrats who voted for their party’s presidential candidates; (2)“defecting” Democrats who voted for Ronald Reagan or George Bush; (3) loyal Republicans. During the 1980s, the defectors were commonly labeled “Reagan Democrats,” and the conventional wisdom at the time was that Reagan Democrats were disenchanted with the liberal tilt of the “national” Democratic Party, especially on issues related to race and redistribution. The analysis shows that defecting Democrats were indeed strikingly conservative on racial policy questions, and in some cases were statistically indistinguishable from Republicans. At the same time, Reagan Democrats expressed preferences on “safety net” issues like Social Security that put them squarely within the Democratic Party mainstream. In response to open-ended questions asking what they liked or disliked about the two major parties, Reagan Democrats offered generally favorable appraisals of their party.References
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