feels too great. This feeling has strengthened in the last few decades as researchers have found that voters are increasingly dissatisfied with the two main parties. The percentage of Americans who feel that the two parties fail to "make the government pay attention to what the people think rose from a mere 13 percent in 1964 to 30 percent in 1995"(Collett 431). In 1992 polls determined that, though Americans still held that the two-party system was necessary, there has been a steadily growing antipathy toward the two-party system and its ability to provide compelling ideas and solutions to the chronic problems of the nation.This gradual change in attitudes toward the parties is due, in large part, to the fact that the Republican and Democratic parties no longer offer clear-cut alternatives in the eyes of many voters. In the past whichever two parties dominated U. S. politics were often able to build on sharp divisions in the voting population. But today's parties offer nothing like the divide between agricultural and commercial interests found in the early nineteenth century or the "pro-management and pro-labor-union blocs of voters that polarized American politics half a century ago"(Barone 65). Shifts in party affiliation by enormous parts of the population have made for significant changes in the groups and regions that support the Democratic and Republican parties.The best known of the changes in party affiliation has been the shift of the solidly Democratic South into the Republican party. Southern voters, who were once known as "yellow-dog Democrats, so loyal to their party that they would rather vote for a yellow dog than a Republican have left for the Republican party in great numbers"(Leiter 9). The change, which began with the civil-rights revolution, meant that while in the 1930s Roosevelt could win an amazing 85 percent of the Southern white populist vote, in 1960 Kennedy won half, by 1968 Hubert Humphrey "held on...
