No. of Recommendations: 3
In the past, partisan identification and voting patterns were largely driven by positive partisanship.
You've got to be talking about what for some folks is ancient history. My recollection of the last significant positive partisanship has to have been around the
Reagan era. The 1980 campaign was mostly about Carter. Carter talked about himself positively (when he was doing the little bit of campaigning he did - he was mostly working on getting the hostages home), and Reagan talked about Carter negatively. That's going to pre-date the memories of a good number of posters here.
But even before then, negative partisanship was commonly used. Nixon is probably a good example with his Southern strategy. Get the Southern Democrats mad at their party to get them to switch to the Republican party. He successfully made those folks believe that the Democrats were the enemy - a feeling that persists to this day. And that event certainly predates my own awareness of political events, even though I was alive at the time (and probably learning to add and subtract).
I'd guess that the majority of folks here see negative partisanship as the norm, with politicians choosing the positive path being oddities. That's what is making the whole Harris campaign feel a bit strange - and possibly refreshing. They're going down the positive path, for the most part. They're letting others (like the Lincoln Project and Republicans for Harris) take the negative road.
--Peter
