Discuss when African Americans began to attain political power in ...

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Discuss when African Americans began to attain political power in the United States and describe their current political alignments.
 
  Answer:

Question 2

Define sectional differences and explain their importance in the American political scene.
 
  Answer:

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Answer to Question 1

An ideal response will:
1. Discuss how African Americans began to attain political power after World War II due to the efforts of Franklin Roosevelt and later the civil rights movement.
2. Explain that African Americans initially identified with the Republican Party, but that this loyalty began to shift to the Democratic Party in the 1930s and 1940s and then solidified during the 1960s civil rights era. Further note that Democratic presidential candidates now receive nearly 90 percent of the African American vote.

Answer to Question 2

An ideal response will:
1. Define sectional differences as groups of states that share common characteristics, for example, the Rust Belt, the Bible Belt, and the Sun Belt.
2. Explain that these sectional differences matter because their commonality of interests leads their citizens to vote in certain ways overall (for example, the Republican South) or generates specific conflicts (for example, the states versus the federal government in the struggle over land use in the interior West).