User talk:The Four Deuces#Misuse of user warning templates

I've worked really hard on the Solid South article, covering the political history of the Southern United States after Reconstruction to the present. I've been trying to get it to become a Good Article, but nobody has reviewed after my resubmission. (My first attempt was rejected because of insufficient inline citations, which I fixed.) This has been my favorite article to write and update in Wikipedia, and I really think it merits being a GA.

I have other interests besides making statistical plots and analyzing data. This is my best article IMO.

I think that the South's realignment from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party was part of the underlying educational realignment in the United States.JohnAdams1800 (talk) 15:26, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

:It seems good. It might however be too long. Make sure it is within article length even if that means spinning out sections to separate articles.

:Also, it should explain in more detail why the coalition was built.

:When you use terms such as white supremacy, you should define them in the article. White supremacy is a term coined in the antebellum south which is almost entirely used in the U.S. TFD (talk) 15:49, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

::Can you give me more feedback on this? The article is mainly about electoral results and party dominance in the South, not Disfranchisement after the Reconstruction era on how specifically and thoroughly African Americans and poor whites were disenfranchised, which has its own article. It also includes a detailed section about the "Southern Strategy," about how the South went from a Democratic to a Republican stronghold from 1964 to the 2010s.

::I'm willing to split the article or spin out other sections, but I feel the article sticks to the main topic about the electoral coalitions in the Southern United States after Reconstruction. The article goes from the disenfranchising period (1870s to 1910s), to the fall of the Jim Crow order (1920s to 1960s), and then the Southern strategy (1970s to 2010s). It's mainly about electoral results and geography. I'm considering adding new content about Republican gains with Hispanics in South Texas and South Florida, but I need more data and elections from the future to see if Trump's gains in majority-Hispanic areas will last among Republicans.

::The coalition was built to maintain a Dominant-party system in the 11 former Confederate states and enforce White supremacy, including "separate but equal" Jim Crow laws. I included Benjamin Tillman's white supremacist speech on how he led the 1895 state constitutional convention to disenfranchise African Americans in South Carolina. JohnAdams1800 (talk) 16:24, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

:::What was the dominant party system supposed to achieve that a two party system could not? And why did they try to exclude blacks from voting?

:::Also, the origins of primary voting need more attention. I had always thought of it as a progressive era reform, but apparently it was pioneered in the South. TFD (talk) 16:37, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

::::The Deep South was majority-Black before the Great Migration, and during Reconstruction and even after, African Americans could have joined in a coalition with some Whites to win Republican control of the South. These are two really depressing stories. I could add them to the article, but the article is mainly about party dominance, not the disenfranchisement.

::::* In fact, this happened in North Carolina, with the 1898 Wilmington massacre and Republican governor Daniel Lindsay Russell was unable to be elected again. It's a really depressing event, and I added a paragraph about it in the article.

::::* In South Carolina, the 1876 South Carolina gubernatorial election was absolutely chaotic. Daniel Henry Chamberlain narrowly lost re-election, in what may have been fraudulent, amidst the extremely close 1876 presidential election in the state that tipped the electoral college by a single EV.

::::JohnAdams1800 (talk) 17:08, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

:BTW have you tried regression analysis using both income and education as variables? Unless you do that, you can't made any assumptions about how the two relate to voting. TFD (talk) 15:52, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

::Regarding the South realigning from the Democrats to the Republicans, I haven't run regression analysis and haven't added any content making such claims yet. I probably will in the future, but fundamentally I believe that the educational realignment is best highlighted by the South's realignment.

::Specifically, it took both much longer than people realize for the South to realign from the Democrats to the Republicans--1994 for Congress, 21st century for presidential elections, 2010s for state legislatures. After reading Polarized by Degrees, I realized that the process of educational polarization strongly overlaps with the Democratic Party's loss of the South (lowest educational attainment) and gains in the Northeast (highest educational attainment).

::The South's realignment highlights how it took much longer than people realize for the Democratic Party to lose what was once its base of the "working class," that is non-college voters. It took decades for educational attainment to increase and non-college voters to vote so heavily Republican like they do in the Trump era.

::* Jimmy Carter, who recently died, won all the former Confederate states in 1976 except for Virginia. If you look at the exit polls, Carter won voters without college degrees while losing voters with college degrees. In 2024, Harris only won Virginia, lost voters without college degrees, and won voters with college degrees.

::JohnAdams1800 (talk) 16:32, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

:::The higher one's income, the more likely one is to vote Republican, the lower one's income, the more likely one is to vote Democratic. That's been true since the beginnings of both parties. That's supported in the literature. Instead of repeating your opinion, prove it through linear regression analysis. TFD (talk) 20:29, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

::::The main purpose of this thread is to improve the Solid South article. My remarks, inspired by the death of Jimmy Carter, were mainly about the two modern parties in the 21st century and educational polarization. The Solid South article is about the Southern United States in particular, not educational polarization.

::::Do you have any feedback for improving the section about the Southern strategy in the article, that is the section on how the South realigned from the Democrats to the Republicans? I think I covered it all, and I don't think Republicans can gain mathematically any further with White Southerners. (Hispanics in South Texas and South Florida seem to be realigning to support Republicans. I'll need future election data to confirm this.)

::::* I incorporated your suggestion about how Jim Crow-era Southern Democrats disenfranchised African Americans and poor Whites in order to prevent fusion (cross-racial) majority coalitions, which was briefly achieved in North Carolina.

::::JohnAdams1800 (talk) 22:51, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

:::::There's a view that the Southern Strategy was a myth. People did not reverse party affiliation, but the demographics changed with more wealth people who were more likely to vote Republican. Democratic politicians were replaced with Republicans who were both less racist and less supportive of social welfare programs. I don't know what support this position has, but the article should explain in the lead how accepted the Southern Strategy theory is. TFD (talk) 23:02, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

::::::I don't think the article lead's third paragraph should be changed. The Southern strategy has its own article, while Solid South is about electoral results/geography and how the realignment took place, not the specific reasons for why. The Southern Strategy was long-term and the only thing that is clear is that the electoral realignment occurred, not the specific reasons why it occurred. I have incorporated content mentioning ideology, ticket-splitting, and officeholders switching parties. In particular, even after the Civil Rights Act, White Southern Democrats were still generally ideologically conservative similar to say Joe Manchin. The section on the Southern strategy has a very detailed introduction explaining the scholarly debate. Are you able to provide a review on the article as a whole, I know WP:VOLUNTEER, sometime soon. I want to be able to get my first Good Article, and potentially make Solid South a featured article.

::::::JohnAdams1800 (talk) 23:18, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

File:College white vote by state.jpg

File:Non-College White vote by state.jpg

This is to provide an update, as I further analyze data about White voters. I found two maps, which I have permission from Split Ticket to publish on Wikipedia, for the 2020 presidential election for the college White (CW) and non-college White (NCW) vote by state. Do you have any relevant feedback or commentary? I've posted these two maps for the Republican Party (United States) article. I'l probably include commentary and paraphrased analysis from the two maps.

Here are some relevant takeaways from the article, linked below. This is not original research, but me paraphrasing non-partisan electoral analysis. In particular, some of my assumptions without the actual state-level data were wrong.

• NCW voters are more Republican than CW voters in all 50 states. NCW voters only vote Democratic in the 3 West Coast states, and 3 New England states. Although in the Deep South NCW vote basically as Republican as African Americans vote Democratic, they are a Republican-voting constituency except in all but a handful of very Democratic states.
• CW voters are generally more Democratic than their states, except in the South where things can vary. In particular, CW voters voted for Biden in Montana, Kansas, and Iowa despite the fact Biden lost those states.
• In the Deep South, CW voters are a strongly Republican constituency. Biden won Georgia despite CW in the state voting against him. In North Carolina both CW and the state as a whole narrowly voted against Biden. On the other hand, Biden won Virginia and CW in the state.

Source link: https://split-ticket.org/2022/01/03/the-white-vote-and-educational-polarization/ JohnAdams1800 (talk) 01:59, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

File:Information icon4.svg There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 13:23, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

@The Four Deuces

I mentioned this on my own talk page, but I wanted to apologize for deleting our discussions on the Democratic Party's talk page as well on your own talk page as well.

I'm working on revamping both parties' pages, among other editing I do on Wikipedia. I go through multiple revisions and do a lot of sourcing before I write content, and your discussions with me are very helpful. Fundamentally, I'm just often frustrated with my inability to understand the Enigma that is American politics, and delete discussions when I feel I've learned enough.

• The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama has got to have the worst title ever. In the 2020s, we had the COVID-19 pandemic and the assorted instability that followed.

In this age, it seems that extreme variants of the right are growing across the Western world. Far-right parties and right-wing populism are gaining in popularity almost everywhere, sometimes in the places least expected. And sometimes these parties outright win.

Link: https://www.newstatesman.com/new-statesman-view/2025/01/strange-death-of-centre-right (2025 version) JohnAdams1800 (talk) 23:07, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

I'm continuing to work on adding content to Solid South, my masterpiece article on Wikipedia. I think it's the best article I've ever written and sourced, and deserves to be a Good Article and maybe even a Featured Article.

If you have the time, could you please consider reading it in its entirety and give it a review to become a Good Article (GA)? My new section Solid South#Compromise_of_1877 tells the largely unknown story of how in three former Confederate (Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina), particularly South Carolina, in which two razor-thin elections handed the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Wade Hampton III, Hayes despite having lost the popular vote and Hampton despite committing violence and almost certainly electoral fraud against African Americans, in a state that was majority-African American. JohnAdams1800 (talk) 15:59, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

Do you have a source for the claim that Hjalmar Schacht was an economic liberal? Liberty5000 (talk) 21:10, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

:It was my conclusion and I don't plan to add it to any article. Schacht was a pro-business liberal who fought inflation, encouraged U.S. investment, privatized government-owned corporations and suppressed trade unions. That puts him a lot closer to Ronald Reagan than Chairman Mao. OTOH, Schacht was not concerned about traditional liberal social concerns such as due process or modern concerns such as DEI. TFD (talk) 03:57, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

::Do you have a source for any of this? Liberty5000 (talk) 22:49, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

:::It's all in the article about him, Hjalmar Schacht. Perhaps he wouldn't meet your ideological purity test, but he was certainly a pro-business liberal. TFD (talk) 01:09, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

::::If Hjalmar Schacht was an economic liberal he must have been opposed to the socialist Four Year Plan. Liberty5000 (talk) 22:49, 9 May 2025 (UTC)

:::::I don't know why you call it socialist, it could have been designed by Donald Trump. It was about protectionism and taking over foreign countries, a commitment to economic self-sufficiency, fighting communism and increased military spending.

:::::In fact Schacht opposed the plan, which was written by Goering, who would replace him as economics minister the following year. TFD (talk) 23:10, 9 May 2025 (UTC)