Conservatives were split between militant Democrats and militant Republicans. Liberals and moderates decided every presidential election. You have to think about it to fully realize how purely evil this obsession was. It ruined America. So the old words will no longer be accepted without question.
Conservatives tend to be blindly loyal, but liberals have a hard and ruthless core.
When I was in graduate school, the very, very close Kennedy-Nixon race was recent history, so close elections were discussed a good deal. In seminar, we described more and more situations which were more and more difficult to decide. Finally, we got to one in which even the professor could not imagine how a clear choice could be made. Democratic politics is a substitute for settling things by violence, as is done in a police state. In 1960, the officer corps in all services was overwhelmingly conservative.