How Air Conditioning led to the Reagan Revolution

HereWeGoAgain · Apr 22, 2018

It's not an exaggeration to say that Carrier's innovation shaped 20th-century America. In the 1930s, air conditioning spread to department stores, rail cars, and offices, sending workers' summer productivity soaring. Until then, central courtyards and wide-open windows had offered the only relief. Residential air conditioning was slower to take hold: As late as 1965, just 10 percent of U.S. homes had it, according to the Carrier Corporation. Families in the South made do by sleeping on the porch or even putting their underwear in the icebox. By 2007, however, the number was 86 percent. As cool air spread across the country, Sun Belt cities that had been unbearable in the summer became more attractive places to live and work, facilitating a long-term shift in U.S. population.
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2011/07/a_history_of_air_conditioning.html

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Suddenly, that means people could live in sweltering Southern cities without discomfort — or, in the case of the elderly, even heat-related death. "All of a sudden it triggers this extraordinary migration of human beings," Johnson says. "There are changes in population centers that are visible from space, thanks to air conditioners."

And of course, where people go, so do votes. "There's this big transfer of electoral college votes from the north to the south," Johnson says. "You have more conservative retirees moving to the South now because of air conditioning."

And that's where we come back to Ronald Reagan: "A very important component of Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 is kind of the Sun Belt bloc of conservative voters that just would not have existed," Johnson says, without air conditioning.

Johnson realizes the connection sounds odd on the face of it. "It sounds crazy to be like, a guy in Brooklyn is trying to stop the ink from smearing on the page and it ends up helping to elect Ronald Reagan," he says. "But it's actually just a couple of steps between those two things...
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https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-10-04/how-air-conditioning-got-ronald-reagan-elected-president

xwsmithx · May 8, 2018

Silly. Those same people would have voted the same even if air conditioning hadn't been invented and they hadn't moved south. Reagan won in the "rust belt" states as well as the south, places where the Democrats had held a commanding presence. Trump did the same.

HereWeGoAgain · May 8, 2018

xwsmithx said: ↑

Silly. Those same people would have voted the same even if air conditioning hadn't been invented and they hadn't moved south. Reagan won in the "rust belt" states as well as the south, places where the Democrats had held a commanding presence. Trump did the same.
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Their votes wouldn't have been in the South. The States he won in the North wouldn't have changed.

You do understand how the Electoral College works, right?

xwsmithx · May 8, 2018

HereWeGoAgain said: ↑

Their votes wouldn't have been in the South. The States he won in the North wouldn't have changed.

You do understand how the Electoral College works, right?
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So the northern states wouldn't have lost population and electoral college votes and the southern states wouldn't have gained population and electoral college votes. You do understand how the census works, right?

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How Air Conditioning led to the Reagan Revolution

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