Looking over my recent outlays—nothing else to do—and extrapolating, I conclude that providers of cable tv, internet, and cell phone services are still gouging, I mean prospering, while bars and restaurants suffer. Depressing, because I love bars and restaurants! I've googled my favorite, The Lowbrow, 43rd & Nicollet in south Minneapolis, and see that, while their dining room is closed (of course), they are now offering curbside pickup and pushing their gift cards. If you have a favorite joint, you can help them through a hard time by patronizing them to the degree possible. I say "them." Probably "it" is correct, a singular and impersonal "joint," but if you're a regular you associate the "joint" with the people you know who work there. Sometimes, if on a Wednesday I don't feel like cooking I'll suggest Lowbrow for supper, and the girls invariably say, "No, let's go tomorrow, because Dominic works on Thursdays." Kids' menu items are practically free, which I think must be part of the business plan, because, looking around on Thursday evenings, it's crowded with young families, kids eating for barely anything as mom and dad have apps, a meal, and a couple of adult beverages. You cannot recapture that trade with curbside pickup.
Speaking of adult beverages, I get a little bit of a kick out of the occasional news item about how liquor stores have been deemed "essential services" and are still open. Living in the middle of the city, I'm used to walking everywhere, including to Boulevard Liquors on South Lyndale, but yesterday I drove there in order to lay in a decent store. On other hoarding fronts, however, I plead Not Guilty. Only six rolls of toilet paper, for example, and two of those currently half unfurled.
I've also been looking at the results of presidential elections—nothing else to do. At Wikipedia, the article on a presidential election has arrows that allow you to jump to the article on the next one, or the previous one, so it's super easy to surf around and be amazed. When Clinton was first elected, in 1992, he won Arkansas and Tennessee. Maybe that's not too surprising, since those are the home states of him and his running mate, Al Gore. But he also won Georgia while losing Florida, and he carried Missouri, Louisiana, Kentucky and West Virginia despite losing Virginia. When he was reelected four years later, Georgia and Florida switched columns, but the result was the same in the other aforementioned states: Virginia, red; Missouri, Louisiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia all blue.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton won Virginia. But she lost Kentucky by 30 points, and she lost West Virginia by more than 40 points. Of course she got slaughtered in Missouri and Louisiana, too. Household income was formerly a somewhat reliable indicator of political preference. No more! Democrats have lost working class whites while making big gains among people who know that bruschetta is an Italian menu item.
The FDR elections are interesting. I think of him as being an electoral powerhouse, and he was, but the details are a little more complicated than I'd imagined. He was first elected in 1932, defeating Hoover in a landslide, 57 to 40 percent. Hoover managed to win six states—Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Delaware—all in the northeast, now pretty much a Republican graveyard. Four years later, having passed into law landmark New Deal legislation, including preeminently the Social Security Act, his popular vote margin increased to 61-37, and he carried every state save Maine and Vermont. But that was his biggest landslide. In 1940, he lost Maine, Vermont, and a bunch of what back then might have been called "western states"—Indiana, Michigan, both Dakotas, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado. His popular vote victory was, in percent terms, shy of double-digits: 54.7-44.8. His last reelection occurred on November 7, 1944, five months and a day after allied forces, led by America, had launched the assault that wrested the European mainland from the Nazis. His winning margin slipped to 53-46, and the list of states he lost included every one from the 1940 election plus Ohio, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
I got sucked into these researches when trying to determine the name of the politician responsible for one of my favorite quips of all time. For the period running from roughly the Civil War to the Great Depression, Maine had a reputation for being "the bellwether state." For some unknown reason, it conducted its gubernatorial elections in September, and over the course of almost 100 years the party of Maine's gubernatorial winner consistently predicted the party of the presidential winner two months later. Somehow, its small population, housed at a geographic extremity, seemed to reflect perfectly the national political mood and thus the saying, "As Maine goes, so goes the land." Then Roosevelt, in his 1936 reelection, carried 46 of the 48 states, the only exceptions being Maine and Vermont, thereby inspiring some wit to comment, "As Maine goes ... so goes Vermont."
It was James Farley, FDR's campaign manager.
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