United States
In the United States' political landscape, dominated by its two-party system, switches generally occur between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, although a number of notable switches to and from third parties (and even between different third parties) have occurred. Since 2004, in a reversal of a trend that had seen predominantly Democratic office-holders switching labels, a number of Republican elected officials in states throughout the country have opted to become Democrats. One other notable "switch" took place in 2001 when Senator Jim Jeffords defected from the Republican Party to become a political independent, which placed the Senate in Democratic control. Use of the term party switch often connotes a transfer of held power from one party to another. The majority of party-switchers in the modern era have switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. This behavior has occurred mostly in the South, due to the gains of the Republican Party since 1950 and has proven somewhat beneficial to the Democrats overall, resulting in increasing the ideological coherence of the Democratic Party as Southern conservative Democrats left the party.
Read more about this topic: List Of Politicians Who Switched Parties
Famous quotes related to united states:
“Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)