julia: The cost of drafting me without warning is that I’m going to geek out. The Democrats until the 1930s had the “
two-thirds” rule for nominations, which gave the South a veto on presidential nominations. They lost that under FDR. The South went ape .
natesilver: The difference between the New Deal-era Democrats and today’s Republicans is that the Democrats had a much larger footprint than Republicans do now.
micah: What does that mean?
natesilver: It used to be that 40 or 50 percent of the country identified as Democrats, I think, in part because you had both Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats who didn’t agree on all that much but both called themselves Democrats.
Now, Republicans are 25 to 35 percent of the country, depending on how you measure it. So if 15 percent of the country consists of white nationalists, they have way more impact in a 30-percent coalition than in a 45-percent one.