The New Democratic Majority -- It's Realignment -- Part III

[stevekamp]

Below the radar of the Roaring Twenties Slumber Party, a potential Democratic majority was coming to fruition. The 1924 Robert LaFollette Progressive candidacy won Wisconsin and finished second in 11 states. The Democratic nomination of Catholic Al Smith in 1928 moved urban voters out of the Republican column.  The Great Depression by 1932 kept or moved every county Democratic. Democrats won back the House in 1930-1946 and the White House in 1932-1944 with a Southern-based coalition, whose 46-state breadth in 1936 masked the fact that the top 11 states in the Old Confederacy, led by South Carolina with 98.57% of an all-Caucasian electorate, and the McGovern state of Massachusetts far back at 51.22%.
1928
 
1936
 
1932
 



The 333-Democrat U.S. House elected in 1936 – the largest Democratic caucus in history – consisted of 100 Old Confederacy seats that Republicans rarely engaged, and 233 seats from the North. Republicans had only 89 seats – 2 in the South and 87 in the North. Between 1932 and 1950, not a single Southern House seat flipped, but beginning in 1938, Republicans made inroads into the Northern Democratic 233, reducing it to 161 in 1938, 119 in 1942, and 85 in 1946.  In 1948, Democrats won back the House in a spectacular fashion, increasing the Northern number from 85 to 160. The year 1948 also saw Harry Truman achieve a fifth consecutive Democratic White House win with 7 of 11 Old Confederacy states, more than any Democrat other than Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter would carry between 1956 and 2012.
The 1948 Presidential Map
Democratic 1944, 1948 (Texas, Ark., Tenn., Va., NC,  Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Okla., N.M., Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Washington, California, Missouri, West Virginia, Minnesota)
Democratic 1944, Dixiecrat 1948 (SC, Alab., La., Miss.)
Republican 1944, Democratic 1948 (Ohio, Colorado, Wyoming, Wis., Iowa) 
Democratic 1944, Republican 1948 (NH, Conn., NY, NJ, Penna., Delaware, Maryland, Mich., Oregon)
Republican 1944, 1948 – Maine, Vermont, Indiana, ND, SD, Nebraska, Kansas
1948
 
   The 1952 and 1956 Eisenhower landslides decimated the Democrats outside the Old Confederacy, but below the Eisenhower radar Democrats in 1953  began making inroads into longtime Republican U.S. House seats with progressive candidates, starting with the 1953 special election flip of the Wisconsin-9 Green Bay U.S. House district by Lester Johnson, who as Wisconsin Assembly Chief Clerk in 1935 and Jackson County District Attorney was a Progressive, but who became a Democrat in 1952; the current Barbara Lee Berkeley, California district, which elected its’ last Republican in 1956; as well as the Wisconsin Class I U.S. Senate seat, once held by Progressive Robert Lafollette, which flipped from disgraced Joe McCarthy to Democrat William Proxmire on August 28, 1958, and has been continuously Democratic ever since (Proxmire, Herb Kohl and Tammy Baldwin).  At the same time, Republicans were making inroads into the Old Confederacy through urban Outer South districts (such as the current Florida-13 in St. Petersburg, continuously Republican since 1954), but between 1952 and 1990, routinely failed to run House candidates in 20-40 Southern districts carried by Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Bush the Elder, which delayed the Republican House majority until 1994. 
In essence, the progressives from the old Republican Party of the 1904 Theodore Roosevelt urban GOP landslides – symbolized by FDR Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, Sr. and Eleanor Roosevelt – began to take over the Democratic Party in the fashion contemplated by FDR, Wendell Willkie and FDR advisor Samuel Rosenman in their 1944 correspondence about creating a liberal party from Northern Democratic and Republican constituencies, leaving the “reactionary Southerners” to a conservative party.   

The 1960 Presidential Map
Democratic 1956, 1960 – (Missouri, Alab., Georgia, S.C., N.C., Arkansas)   
Rep. 1956, Dem. 1960 – (Mass., RI, Conn., NY, Penna., Dela., Md., West Virginia, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas, Louisiana, NM, Nevada)

Democratic 1956, Unpledged 1960 -- Mississippi

Republican 1956, 1960 – (Tenn., Ky., Florida, Virginia, Indiana, Maine, Vermont, N.H., Wisconsin, Iowa, ND, SD, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, California)
    
1960
 
After winning the 1960 photo finish election, the Kennedy-Johnson Administration began transforming the Democratic Party of the United States from a Southern-based coalition to a Northern one. Even though the infamous Sheriff Bull Connor was the Democratic National Committeeman from Alabama, JFK and LBJ eliminated Dixiecrat domination of the House Rules Committee, ended malapportionment, used federal troops to integrate the universities of Mississippi and Alabama, and desegregated interstate commerce.  In doing so, they engaged (and enraged) voters in Southern rural counties that gave landslide percentages to Adlai Stevenson in 1956 and JFK in 1960, but that would flip to Barry Goldwater in 1964, and today are super-landslide Republican or African-American Democratic counties.
The southern reaction to the Democrats was negative.  In 1962, Alabama came within 6,842 votes of electing a Republican Senator to the seat Democrat-turned-Republican Richard Shelby now holds. However, the Northern reaction was positive: in 1962, Vermont elected its first Democratic Governor, and New Hampshire elected its first Democratic Governor since 1922, and its first Democratic Senator ever to the Class II seat.  In 1964, the Goldwater Republicans swept the 1960 Kennedy target state of Mississippi along with the 1960 Democratic states of Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, but the Democrats won everything outside the Deep South (and almost won Arizona), and ran their U.S. House seat number to a post-1936 record 295 – 205 in the North and 90 in the South.
The 1964 and 2008, and 2012 Presidential Maps 
1964
  2008
 

2012
 
Beginning with the 1968 election, the new Emerging Republican Majority appeared, first based in suburbia, with the South added in 1972.  After the Watergate-enhanced Carter single term of a South/urban North Democratic majority, the Emerging Republican Majority roared back in 1980 with a western and suburban base, and a Dixie tail.  However, the Reagan and Bush the Elder policies slowly alienated the North, causing largely unnoticed Northern rural counties and one trendy California suburban county (Marin) to flip to Mondale in 1984.  In 1988, Bush the Elder won only by holding on to narrow “Lower North” majorities from New Jersey to California, as Dukakis easily won Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County, which voted for a Democratic national loser for the first time since 1868 or 1876. In 1988 all 11 Old Confederacy states gave Bush higher percentages than his national 53.37%, whereas in 1952-1956, the South was the Adlai Stevenson overperformance zone.
   The 1991 recession and Ross Perot 1992 cratered the Bush 1988 coalition into two parts: a Southern remnant, with Mississippi the Number One Bush 1992 state, and a Baltimore-Brazos-Bakersfield Diamond that essentially split between Ross Perot and Bill Clinton.  Bill Clinton became President as Ross Perot destroyed the 1952-1988 Republican suburban majorities, allowing Clinton to win with below-Dukakis percentages in most states.  Bill Clinton stayed President by converting into 1996 majorities the 1992 pluralities in the East, Great Lakes, upper Farm Belt and Pacific; the encore Perot run enabled him to win with pluralities Ohio and Florida despite the first Ralph Nader siphon.  Had small amounts of the second and biggest Ralph Nader siphon (2000) been stopped in either 2000 New Hampshire or Florida, Al Gore would have become President. In 2004, Kerry flipped New Hampshire, and would have gone to the White House with 120,000 additional or 60,000 flipped Ohio votes.  Between 2004 and 2008, an urban core county vote surge flipped Ohio and another eight states to the Democrats, who held all but two in 2012, as President Obama achieved majority percentages in all but Florida, and Republican Romney came no closer than the 0.88 margin in Florida. 
   These are not random scatterings of states.  Rather, the new Democratic cycle is the logical growth progression of metropolitan America and the movement of the Republican Progressives from the Republicans to the Democrats between 1910 and 2008, followed by the counter-movement of the Southern Jeffersonian electorate to the Republicans between 1948 and 2008.  We now have the metropolitan-based Democratic Party of the United States of the Twenty-first Century versus the Grumpy Old Party. 
Driving these electoral shifts is the continuing clash between forward-looking versus backward-looking values.  The Hamiltonians and Federalists correctly saw manufacturing as the future of the United States, and President John Quincy Adams in his first inaugural address (1825) called for a federal astronomical observatory, thus anticipating the Space Age by more than a century.  However, in the four-way 1824 Presidential race, Adams had received only 30.92 percent and electoral votes only in  New England, New York, Delaware, three in Maryland and two in Louisiana. Thus, in 1828, 1824 loser Andrew Jackson easily overcame Adams simply by adding the Southern William Crawford states. Nevertheless, the Whig argument for an “American system” of federally funded internal improvements and a manufacturing-protective tariff prevailed in New England, jumpstarted the Whig rise in the 1840’s, and by 1860 flipped Pennsylvania and the rest of the North into the Republican column, to the point that Pennsylvania actually went for Herbert Hoover in 1932, and its’ Republican Machine lost only three statewide contests between 1860 and 1932, in large part because their winners included progressives such as forest preserver Gifford Pinchot (who helped Theodore Roosevelt win Pennsylvania in 1912). The Republicans lost the urban North in 1932 after they refused to nominate Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and nominated candidates whose solution to the Great Depression was (in the words of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon) “liquidate everything.” They won it back with Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan, but lost it on the watch of the first Bush, and abandoned it under the second.


Continued in next post -- Part IV