Democrats from 1964 to the new century

The end of the New Deal coalition, but surging optimism in the aughts

Over several days we’re sharing a six-part essay on how the Democrats ended up where they are today — as a party that has broken from FDR’s liberal experimentation and change, becoming the conservative party in the traditional sense of being averse to change and innovation. How and why did this happen?

Here’s the outline:

I. A brief review of party history up to 1964 (published April 14)

II. The Democrats from 1964 to the new century

III. The aughts were a hopeful time, but problems lurked under the surface

IV. An electoral deadlock develops between the parties, to the Democrats’ disadvantage

V. 2024: A case study in party dysfunction

VI. The party establishment has its head in the sand, and concluding thoughts

Part I, published April 14, began the review of relevant party history. Today we continue that review by looking at how the party managed (or mismanaged?) the tumultuous late-1960s, the success of the Carter and Clinton campaigns, the breakdown of the New Deal coalition, and finally where the party stood at the beginning of the new century — a time when Democrats were hopeful that demographic trends would reward them with a stable governing majority.

The Democratic establishment in the 1960s
In the 1960s the organizational elements of the Democratic party were in the grip of labor leaders and other establishment figures – mayors, party officials, governors, members of Congress, etc. These people influenced or controlled nominations at all levels of government, including and especially at the presidential level.

In fact the 1968 presidential nomination went to the sitting vice president, Hubert Humphrey, even though he entered none of the primaries that were held that year. The majority of states, 35 of them, had closed processes – caucuses and state conventions – to select delegates to the national convention. These were controlled by party leaders. Humphrey dominated those, securing enough delegates to overwhelm Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had, along with Senator Robert Kennedy of New York, run well in the 15 primary states. Kennedy was assassinated before the convention, but he, like McCarthy, would have had an uphill fight to win over enough party leaders at the convention. Those leaders held all the cards.

One prominent Democrat, George Wallace of Alabama, who had strong support in the south and was also popular among some blue-collar whites outside the south, recognized that his presidential ambitions could not be satisfied that year within a party controlled by establishment figures who opposed his reactionary stance on race. He went the third-party route in the general election, winning five states across the deep south – Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia – and 46 electoral votes.

Wallace served as a kind of way station for lifelong southern Democrats who were thoroughly disenchanted with the direction the national party was taking. The presidential vote in Mississippi through the New Deal era up to 1968 is illustrative of what was happening throughout the region. In 1932 Roosevelt received 95% of the vote in the state (keep in mind very few blacks were even allowed to register to vote in the state at that time) and Adlai Stevenson got 60% of the vote in 1956. By 1968 Humphrey could only manage 23% of the vote (by then many of his supporters in the state were black), with most of the remaining votes secured by Wallace.

1968 Democratic convention
The Democratic convention in Chicago that year was a mess. Riots broke out pitting anti-Vietnam protestors against the Chicago police force. The smoke from tear gas literally wafted into the hotel rooms where delegates and the candidates themselves were staying, and the convention floor itself was not immune from unrest, with numerous demonstrations breaking out on the floor – some squelched with strong arm tactics used by law enforcement.

On national television the party was visibly in disarray, particularly when one considers that the warring parties – the Vietnam protestors and the police – all fit under the Democratic New Deal umbrella, however uneasily. Socially conservative union members and police didn’t see the world in the same way as the mostly better-educated and younger protestors, to put it mildly.

Post 1968: The Commission fix
The national party moved rapidly in an attempt to figure out a way forward. To repair the breach it formed a commission in 1969 that was to make recommendations for reform. It was referred to as the McGovern-Fraser Commission after Senator George McGovern of South Dakota and Congressman Donald Fraser of Minnesota, who led the effort.

Given the disastrous ’68 convention and subsequent defeat of Humphrey in November that year, the focus was on the presidential nomination process. The members of the commission recommended that the process for selecting delegates to the next convention be opened up to those in the rank and file who normally were not directly involved. The recommendations were adopted.

The expectation may have been that the state parties, in order to abide by the new rules, would hold caucuses and conventions that now had to be publicized and open instead of controlled by party leaders. And many states took that route. But more went with primaries that also were consistent with the new open-up-the-party rules. In the end, heading into the 1972 campaign 29 states scheduled primaries to select delegates, with the rest using caucus-convention systems accessible to the public in a way most hadn’t been before.

The impact of McGovern-Fraser
It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of the changes. With McGovern-Fraser the party chose a process that took ultimate control of presidential nominations out of the “smoke-filled room,” away from party leaders. Instead, those in the public identifying as Democrats would directly select delegates through the ballot box in a primary or, more cumbersomely, through a system of meetings (the caucus-convention process). With either method rank and file Democrats had an opportunity to bypass the party’s establishment – which they did in dramatic fashion in 1972.

Taking advantage of the opening provided by the new rules, Alabama’s conservative governor George Wallace returned to the party fold to compete in the 1972 primaries. He proceeded to sweep through southern state primaries and even won Maryland and Michigan shortly after an assassination attempt left him unable to campaign further. In the end, despite being forced to leave the race in midstream, he received about as many primary votes as his two main competitors – McGovern and Humphrey. Yes, indeed, an extreme social conservative taking a hard line on race and crime had legions of followers among the Democratic rank and file.

In the end, McGovern, the left-wing candidate, beat back Humphrey, the labor-backed establishment choice, on the strength of success in the caucus-convention states. His dedicated anti-war supporters had enthusiastically taken advantage of the newly-opened party processes.

Although not understood at the time, in retrospect we can see that the McGovern wing of the party had succeeded in a peaceful overthrow. The party would never again go back to its blue-collar and southern roots. Instead, it would increasingly be the party of the better-educated who were more focused on social issues than the bread-and-butter concerns of labor.

A closer look at the demise of Democrats in the South
It’s worth considering an alternate history with a healthy Wallace taking his campaign to the 1972 Democratic convention. It’s hard to imagine now, but Democrats in those days represented everything from the ultra-liberal coastal elites protesting the Vietnam War, to segregationists in the south who hoped to turn back the clock on the racial progress made in the ‘60s, to a Labor-dominated establishment struggling to hold on somewhere between those two extremes.

A convention with a healthy George Wallace would have resulted in a real donnybrook between conservatives and liberals — there is no imaginable transaction that would have mollified the extreme wings of the party, even though parties are normally nothing if not transactional. In this case it would have been either-or — a ticket satisfactory to Wallace or one satisfactory to McGovern. The notion of a McGovern-Wallace ticket (or the other way around) was a non-starter given their diametrically opposed views on all the major issues of the day. The loser of the struggle would have lost a foothold in the party power structure.

Of course as it was McGovern was nominated, accelerating the exit of culturally conservative populists from the party – an exit that had begun almost a decade earlier. Democrats moved on as an amalgam of left-wing elites and a more moderate liberal-Labor component. Those two groups had their differences, but they could and would work together — which they in fact have done all the way to the present day.

The dynamic for the new post-1972 Democratic coalition can be summarized this way. The elite mostly white component of the party was ascendant along with its emphasis on cultural concerns including the rights of the only recently broadly-enfranchised African American community. The culture issues emphasis alienated some among the industrial labor blue collar voters and many if not most of the southern whites who had grown up in the one-party Democratic system in the South.

And as for the commission that tried to heal the party headed by McGovern – well, as he once drolly observed: “I opened the doors of the Democratic party and 20 million people walked out.” His efforts have reverberated all the way to the present day.

Jimmy Carter and the 1980s
Jimmy Carter’s out-of-nowhere 1976 campaign turned out to be the last gasp of the New Deal coalition at the presidential level. Being from Georgia he managed to keep many (not a majority) of southern whites in the fold – enough to win all the old Confederate states with the help of solid black support, save for Virginia which went for President Gerald Ford. And Carter got over 50% of the national popular vote (barely), something no Democrat would do again for 32 years. He did it with a mix of old-time religion (he stressed his born-again Christianity) and moderate or just simply vague policy positions. He achieved the political ideal of being the Rorschach test candidate – people saw in him what they wanted to see.

Carter suffered a decisive defeat four years later at the hands of Ronald Reagan, which began a dreary decade for the party. The party’s brand of liberalism became associated in the public’s mind with crime, government handouts to the undeserving, weakness in the Cold War, and a bad economy.

Minnesota’s Walter Mondale (1984) and Massachusetts’s Michael Dukakis (1988) were crushed in their presidential bids. The party lost control of the Senate for six years and only held onto the House due to Democratic success in the south. Those southern Democrats won for three reasons: 1) demonstrable success bringing home the bacon in appropriations and other legislation, 2) successfully disassociating themselves from the presidential candidates, and 3) the fact that the still-nascent organization of the Republican party at the sub-statewide level in the region typically produced substandard or even no opposition in House races.

Clinton and the final days of the New Deal coalition
In 1992 Bill Clinton engineered a Democratic revival of sorts, finally taking the White House after a 12-year drought. He won a three-way race against incumbent President George H.W. Bush and third-party candidate Ross Perot, but with just 43% of the vote. He did win back some white rural voters by projecting a more moderate image together with his Tennessee running mate Albert Gore, then a centrist.

The long-fraying New Deal coalition finally fell apart at the congressional level in the 1994 midterms when, against all odds, Republicans scored a huge win by taking the House and Senate – the House for the first time in 40 years. Incoming Speaker Newt Gingrich had been recruiting candidates for years, and his efforts came to fruition.

These candidates ran in traditionally Democratic areas (many in the south and a few in other regions) that had trended GOP at the presidential level in recent decades. They persuaded voters that the Democrats had pursued a culturally liberal agenda that didn’t fit their preferences. And it was true: Democrats had become a litmus test party, inimical to pro-lifers and social conservatives in general. Some of the most powerful Democrats, including the Speaker of the House himself Tom Foley, were thrown out of office. It was truly a Republican Revolution.

Democrats in the new century
As industrial union membership dwindled the culturally liberal wing of the party reigned unchallenged in the 1990s – the only debate being whether to project a center-left Clintonian message or move further in a progressive direction. To boil it down, it was: do we pursue ambitious policies like national health care, or take things incrementally?

As they suffered in minority status in the Congress, eventually there were concerted efforts to find candidates whose style and issue stances were better tailored to key swing districts that might turn the tide on Republican rule that had by that time stretched on for more than decade in the House. Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel spearheaded an effort to identify “majority maker” candidates who didn’t fit the liberal mold – some were pro-gun and even pro-life in a few cases.

His work was successful in 2006 when Democrats returned to power in the House for the first time in more than a decade, and he hit the jackpot in 2008 when Democrats won 257 seats giving Speaker Nancy Pelosi a strong working majority in the service of Barack Obama’s presidency.

The election of Obama with a 53-46 majority over popular Arizona Senator John McCain, together with a 365-173 Electoral College edge which included including seemingly out-of-reach states like Indiana and North Carolina, appeared to indicate that the times were indeed a-changing. Maybe a new era of Democratic dominance was beginning. Lots of Democrats thought so.

But a look under the hood revealed trends that, while initially hopeful, contributed to the party’s inability to achieve a lasting majority.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: Part III — The aughts were a hopeful time, but problems lurked under the surface