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In my view it goes back to Albion's seed. See how many modern characteristics of each tribe you see in their descriptions here.
The blue tribe is the Roundheads who left England in the time leading up to Cromwell's revolution and then after the restoration of the monarchy and the Quakers.
The red tribe is the Cavaliers who were given lands in the US as a parting gift of Charles I before he was beheaded along with the Borderers.
The Cavaliers and Roundheads have both hated each other for more than 400 years, with fundamentally incompatible views of how society should look. Most of the US governmental quirks are ways to keep the two groups separated and they only really worked until the stakes got big enough to be meaningful as the post New Deal government became more influential on citizens lives than their state government and the US dominates the political and financial worlds.
I've always thought that, considering the full Albion's Seed descriptions and Scott's summaries of them, the blues are primarily remiscient of the Quakers and the reds primarily of Borderers. Particularly the "blues are Puritans" narrative just seems like an attempt to associate the blues with a word that immediately would cause a negative reaction in most everyone.
I associate 'Puritans' with one of the most productive groups that ever existed, but I'm not from US.
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Don’t leave out the part where the Founding Fathers were made up of both Roundheads and Cavaliers (were any prominent ones Borderers?) and the constitution was designed as a truce on the culture war of the time, while allowing states to have the bulk of the power to define how life would go.
The culture war of the time was of course Protestants vs. Catholics/insufficiently Puritan Protestants, and the Founding Fathers probably all had recent ancestors directly affected by those civil wars in the UK.
The modern day culture war is more about Borderers vs. Roundheads (now puritan progressives), whereas the Cavaliers strike me as more of the business wing of the GOP.
Of course, this is very loose. The Bushes are New England WASPs, as is say Mitt Romney’s ancestry.
GHW Bush was Blue Tribe and everyone knew it - in 1988 that was perfectly compatible with being a conservative (to the extent that he was) and a Republican because the party system had not fully aligned with the culture war, but the Red Tribe ultimately rejected him - the 1992 presidential election was the last time a Republican underperformed in the South.
GW Bush became Red Tribe by religious conversion - he left the (predominantly Blue Tribe) Episcopal Church and joined the (mixed-tribe, but he was in an evangelical-aligned congregation) United Methodist Church, announced that he had been through a born-again conversion experience, and generally said and did the things that Red Tribe Christianity requires of its adherents with visible sincerity. (He also bought and lived on a dude ranch, but that wasn't decisive.) Jeb Bush didn't, so the Red Tribe treated him as outgroup and decisively rejected him in the 2016 primary.
Mormons are neither Red nor Blue Tribe - they are their own tribe. They are political allies of the Red Tribe, but they are not part of it (just as African-Americans are not part of the Blue Tribe). Romney was only able to win the 2012 primary because Gingrich and Santorum split the tribal Red vote, allowing him to pick up a lot of delegates with narrow pluralities in winner-takes-almost-all states.
I think this is correct.
Though at this point, some Utah Mormons have gone full Red Tribe and there are internal divisions in the Utah GOP along “Mike Lee vs. Mitt Romney” lines.
Also the LDS church is fairly pro-immigration and pro-vaccination, which caused issues for some of the faithful.
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