ABSTRACT
The 1980 election was certainly a triumph for the Republican party, and economic issues can be shown to have dominated public concerns to an unusual degree during the 1980 campaign. The geographic patterns of modern American voting behavior suggest two distinct issue dimensions: a partisan dimension related primarily to economic issues, and an ideological dimension reflecting social and cultural conflict. State-level election returns reveal that these two dimensions account for the nationwide pattern of the vote in presidential and congressional elections since 1900, with each dimension representing a historically continuous alignment. The ideological differentiation between Democrats and Republicans increased markedly, but in a direction exactly the reverse of the historic pattern. In the 1930s and 1940s the distinction between liberals and conservatives referred to one's position on the New Deal. Liberals were pro—New Deal, pro-Roosevelt, and pro-labor. Conservatives were anti—New Deal, anti-Roosevelt, and pro-management.
