Interesting. I wonder what would happen if you added populist radio presenters who weren't strictly partisan, such as John Brinkley, into the analysis. Could you maybe get a model that predicts the rise of politicians like Goldwater and Agnew, or predicts the potential of George Wallace's 1968 run? Of course, you'd need to be able to model the politics of the politicians and the presenters in a way that goes deeper than the usual linear partisanship measures, and that's hard to gather data on now, with deliberate demographic polling, than it would be to infer in a period where all of that has to be inferred.
Great questions! I do think the George Wallace '68 question is testable -- these hosts overwhelmingly backed him over Nixon -- though this paper focused on congressional elections.
Certainly if they were backing him explicitly (you'd know better than I), that should be detectable. I'm more wondering if you could look at the rhetoric of these and similar hosts circa 1966 and conclude that Wallace '68 is plausible, in a way that wouldn't suggest that, say, Buchanan 2000 had legs.
Depends on how we define "plausible," I suppose. Winning? No, not a chance; even less than the Dixiecrats a decade prior. But matching, say, Ross Perot's 19% a generation later? Perhaps.
Interesting. I wonder what would happen if you added populist radio presenters who weren't strictly partisan, such as John Brinkley, into the analysis. Could you maybe get a model that predicts the rise of politicians like Goldwater and Agnew, or predicts the potential of George Wallace's 1968 run? Of course, you'd need to be able to model the politics of the politicians and the presenters in a way that goes deeper than the usual linear partisanship measures, and that's hard to gather data on now, with deliberate demographic polling, than it would be to infer in a period where all of that has to be inferred.
Great questions! I do think the George Wallace '68 question is testable -- these hosts overwhelmingly backed him over Nixon -- though this paper focused on congressional elections.
Certainly if they were backing him explicitly (you'd know better than I), that should be detectable. I'm more wondering if you could look at the rhetoric of these and similar hosts circa 1966 and conclude that Wallace '68 is plausible, in a way that wouldn't suggest that, say, Buchanan 2000 had legs.
Depends on how we define "plausible," I suppose. Winning? No, not a chance; even less than the Dixiecrats a decade prior. But matching, say, Ross Perot's 19% a generation later? Perhaps.