How and Why Political Parties CHANGE [AP Gov Review, Unit 5 Topic 4 (5.4)]

hey there and welcome back to heimlich's history now we've been going through unit 5 of the ap government curriculum and in this video it's time to talk about how political parties change over time and realign themselves to better reflect the attitudes and preferences of americans so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked let's get to it so here's our learning objective for this video explain why and how political parties change and adapt okay so in the last video we talked about how political parties act as linkage institutions that help average people engage in the political process and in that video we had a look at the party platforms for the democratic and republican parties but those platforms and the way parties get their people elected have changed over time so let's look at a few of those changes first the way parties interact with candidates has changed it used to be that it was the party that mattered and the candidate was secondary but now it's the candidate that matters and the party is secondary a big part of this is new media technology which allows candidates to speak directly to their supporters and gather a following around themselves and that has had the effect of weakening the party's role in nominating candidates now some people have criticized this new candidate-centered nomination process on account if it can lead to opposing factions within the party but political scientists who have studied this have shown that certain candidates who build their own following can actually have a benefit to the party and this is especially true of candidates who champion underrepresented opinions in the electorate like they have argued that even if the candidate doesn't win the nomination their followers are still likely to engage in the political process of voting and supporting the winning candidate second parties have changed their platforms over time in order to appeal to a larger swath of the electorate now the changing platform will almost never contradict the larger ideology of the party like you're never going to hear the republicans say you know a lot of people are saying that america was built on racism and that we ought to atone for those sins so you know let's put it in the platform you know even if they don't contradict their ideology parties have shifted emphasis in their platforms or even change their messaging in order to appeal to more voters this is especially true when it comes to coalitions of voters now a coalition is a demographic group like millennials or retired persons or evangelical christians and if they vote as a block they can significantly alter the outcome of an election therefore parties do everything they can to appeal to different coalitions so when you see candidates giving speeches or debating other candidates pay attention to the topics that they mention there are a gajillion things that they could talk about but the topics that they choose say a lot about the coalitions that the politician is trying to win to his or her side so if a candidate promises to uphold or even expand gun rights they are appealing to a coalition mainly of conservative white males on the other hand if a candidate promises protections for immigrants and their families they are appealing to america's large immigrant population okay the third way parties have changed over time is by altering the entire party's structure and there are three main ways that this happens first is party realignment and this is exactly what it sounds like the party realigns itself and why would they do that well usually this occurs after an election or a series of elections where the party is badly defeated like if the opposing party keeps winning and winning big that is a sign to the losing party that their priorities compared to the general electorate's priorities are to use the political science term a wonky asset so for example the democrats won big in the presidential elections of 1932 and 1936 as you can see here this was in the midst of the great depression and while republicans were criticizing franklin roosevelt's liberal policies and social programs to alleviate the devastating effects of the depression apparently the average american was okay with it okay so should i uphold my principles or should i eat yeah i'm gonna take a sandwich and that led the republican party to a major realignment of their future platforms and priorities but realignment can also happen from the bottom up now you'll recall that it was the republican party with abraham lincoln at the helm that ultimately abolished slavery and so for a long time much of the black american population were aligned with the republican party however starting in the 1920s the republicans failure to pursue civil rights legislation on behalf of black americans combined with the grinding poverty caused by the great depression led a majority of black americans to switch to the democratic party which had a lot going for it in terms of alleviating poverty and fighting for civil rights at least more than the republicans did okay the second way party structure has changed is through changes to campaign finance laws since the 1970s campaign finance laws and supreme court decisions have changed how much money can be lawfully given to candidates and parties we're going to talk more about that in topic 11 so i'm just going to leave it there for now and the third way party structure has changed is because of changes in communication and data management technology as technology is advanced so too has a party's ability to mine data on certain groups and use that data to win elections i'm going to give you two examples both from the 2012 presidential election in that election republican candidate mitt romney's campaign developed what they called project orca which was a web app which voters could use to let the campaign know that they voted and so with this information romney's campaign could see in real time the areas in which there was low voter turnout and they could engage in some last minute efforts to get those people to the polls hey that sounds like a pretty good idea to me but instead of being a killer whale project orca turned out to be more like a beached whale because the technology just didn't work but whether it worked or not the point is the thinking behind project orca was a massive shift in how the party got their people to put their doritos down get off the couch and go vote now project orca was in fact a response to romney's opponent in that election barack obama obama's campaign had developed some new technology under the name project narwhal and just for poops and giggles you should know that the only natural predator to the narwhal is the orca so you know romney he's saucy anyway project narwhal was a significant leap forward in canvassing techniques with this technology obama's campaign could target emails and text messages to people not only based on their demographics but also based on their psychographics now demographics classify people according to their external traits like race gender age and region psychographics on the other hand classify people according to their inner life like their personality their attitudes their aspirations their desires these traits explain why a voter votes the way that he or she does you know they can get this information from your online shopping habits and the kinds of shows you watched etc as it turned out narwhal was far more successful than orca but again who won and lost is less the emphasis here than on how this fundamentally changed how parties and campaigns try to convince people to vote okay thanks for watching click right here to grab a view packet which is going to help you get an a in your class and a five on your exam in may whether you're an orca fan or a narwhal fan i got videos here on this channel for all so if you want me to keep making them then by all means subscribe and i shall oblige heimler out

Channel: Heimler's History

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Length: 6min 3sec (363 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021