摘要：Charles D. Hadley has made several interesting points, including some legitimate criticisms of our study. Some criticisms, however, are less relevant and do not undermine the integrity of our effort. We shall discuss his points in sequence: Confusion over “critical” and “realigning” elections. Hadley contends that we have confused critical and realigning elections. We acknowledge that perhaps we have been too loose with our use of terminology. His point that critical elections, representing a fundamental shift in the political attitudes and preferences of the populace, may be divided into realigning and converting subsets is well taken. We have erred in using the terms “critical election” and “realigning election” interchangeably, and should have restricted ourselves to using the former. This misuse of terms, however, is incidental to our analysis, since we have analyzed all critical elections from the founding of the country to the present, with special attention to the four critical elections about which there is the greatest agreement (1828, 1860, 1896, and 1932).
