Comment by lapcat

> You should study the economic history.

> You should read the primary sources from the civil war.

Please refrain from this type of comment. You should know as longtime, prolific HN commenter that they are against the guidelines.

> The gap has closed almost completely.

I don't think that's true. Some random links: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Map_of_s... https://www.cnbc.com/select/average-net-worth-by-state/

In any case, it's a red herring, because again, "the political correlation you're implying simply doesn't exist."

> For most of the 20th century, that was exactly the political dichotomy. Democrats were the party of the urban and rural poor, and urban social liberals. Republicans were the party of business and industry, plus religious conservatives.

This is merely a stereotype, an overgeneralization. The reality is much more complex, and inconstant.

But there's an interesting overlap in your claim: "plus religious conservatives". So what happens when "the urban and rural poor" happen to be religious conservatives?

> In states like Georgia, the first places to turn red where affluent educated collar counties around Atlanta, which were benefitting from metro Atlanta’s economic growth.

Given my skepticism of everything else you've already said, I'm not inclined to take anything without proof, but that's not really the issue here. My objection to your theory is not whether it can explain the political situation in the south but rather whether it can explain the political situation in the rest of the country, and I don't see any evidence that it can. Otherwise it's just cherry-picking.

> Abolition was driven by fundamentalist Christians, especially in the midwest.

Not all religion is socially conservative. There are various sects of Christianity in various parts of the country, each with their own social and political tendencies. The civil rights movement also came out of the church, e.g., the Reverend Martin Luther King, the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

> Remember that we didn’t have DNA in the 1850s, so the notion that the races were equal was a moral assertion, not a scientific one.

It's still a moral assertion.