Which elections did Jim Crow laws "steal" for the Democratic nominee?

[darklordoftech]

1876 would be likely be one had Tilden won the Electoral vote. 1884 seems likely as well. Any others?

[OSR stands with Israel]

Were there any elections the Dems got under 70% in the South and still won(Before 1948)

[Del Tachi]

Probably none.

[Kyle Rittenhouse is a Political Prisoner]

1916.

[morgankingsley]

I wouldn't really say any of them. If I had to pick one, maybe 1884

[AudmanOut]

1884,1916, maybe 1892

[GMantis]

Almost certainly 1884 - without Jim Crow Blaine would have won South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana (probably Florida as well) - enough to win the election. Also 1916, when Mississippi and South Carolina were still black majority to be won by the Republicans (though Wilson did slightly better with blacks than previous Democratic candidates).

[Sumner 1868]

Not a single Democrat before LBJ other than Franklin Roosevelt would have become President without Jim Crow laws. Southern blacks tilted Republican even after FDR until 1964.

[OSR stands with Israel]

Not a single Democrat before LBJ other than Franklin Roosevelt would have become President without Jim Crow laws. Southern blacks tilted Republican even after FDR until 1964.

Wilson still wins in 1912 due to the split,  Cleveland still wins in 1892 and Truman won it in 1948 without the deep south(the Deep South went to Thurmond).


1884 and 1916 might be doubtful though

[morgankingsley]

Not a single Democrat before LBJ other than Franklin Roosevelt would have become President without Jim Crow laws. Southern blacks tilted Republican even after FDR until 1964.

Wilson still wins in 1912 due to the split,  Cleveland still wins in 1892 and Truman won it in 1948 without the deep south(the Deep South went to Thurmond).


1884 and 1916 might be doubtful though

I honestly think that if Taft was the nominee and no split, a large part of Roosevelt voters would have actually gone Wilson and give him the victory. To assume that the progressive party would have only backed the most conservative of the candidates, especially when Wilson was a progressive is beyond preposterous.

However, if Roosevelt was the nominee and there was no split, then that is debatable. Roosevelt could beat Wilson. But there was no way in any world Taft could have

[RINO Tom]

Not sure 1916 should really be a candidate ... I'm guessing people are using the thought process that Wilson is remembered as a racist, so he must have done horribly with Black voters ... but he did better than any Democrat before him, IIRC.  This is well past the time of Black voters being completely loyal to the GOP.

[President Johnson]

Not sure 1916 should really be a candidate ... I'm guessing people are using the thought process that Wilson is remembered as a racist, so he must have done horribly with Black voters ... but he did better than any Democrat before him, IIRC.  This is well past the time of Black voters being completely loyal to the GOP.

Probably because 1916 was fairly close in the Electoral College. Did Missouri have Jim Crow laws in place at that time? Wilson only won by four points here and 18 electoral votes were at stake.

[TDAS04]

Not sure 1916 should really be a candidate ... I'm guessing people are using the thought process that Wilson is remembered as a racist, so he must have done horribly with Black voters ... but he did better than any Democrat before him, IIRC.  This is well past the time of Black voters being completely loyal to the GOP.

Probably because 1916 was fairly close in the Electoral College. Did Missouri have Jim Crow laws in place at that time? Wilson only won by four points here and 18 electoral votes were at stake.

As far as I know, the border states weren't anywhere near as oppressive against black voting as the more Southern states.

Having said that, I doubt Wilson got many black votes in 1916.  I've heard that he might have done relatively well for a Democrat in 1912 (due to black dissatisfaction with TR and Taft), but 1916 was after he segregated DC.

[Mr. Smith]

Not sure 1916 should really be a candidate ... I'm guessing people are using the thought process that Wilson is remembered as a racist, so he must have done horribly with Black voters ... but he did better than any Democrat before him, IIRC.  This is well past the time of Black voters being completely loyal to the GOP.

He did better in 1912 when he made a lukewarm effort, but by 1916 he eroded that goodwill after all the re-segregation.

[RINO Tom]

Not sure 1916 should really be a candidate ... I'm guessing people are using the thought process that Wilson is remembered as a racist, so he must have done horribly with Black voters ... but he did better than any Democrat before him, IIRC.  This is well past the time of Black voters being completely loyal to the GOP.

He did better in 1912 when he made a lukewarm effort, but by 1916 he eroded that goodwill after all the re-segregation.

Good point.  It's a shame there is so little data/research on the Black vote pre-1932, because it's a lot more fascinating of a shift than I think is often thought.  Wilson made serious inroads in 1912, and I remember reading that by the late Nineteenth Century, almost 40% of Northern Blacks identified with the Democrats due to urban machines and such despite the party's affiliation with the South.  I also remember reading that Southern Blacks remained loyal to the GOP significantly longer than Northern ones, which would make sense, I suppose.  However, like I said, data/research is annoyingly scarce.

[DabbingSanta]

Not sure 1916 should really be a candidate ... I'm guessing people are using the thought process that Wilson is remembered as a racist, so he must have done horribly with Black voters ... but he did better than any Democrat before him, IIRC.  This is well past the time of Black voters being completely loyal to the GOP.

He did better in 1912 when he made a lukewarm effort, but by 1916 he eroded that goodwill after all the re-segregation.

Good point.  It's a shame there is so little data/research on the Black vote pre-1932, because it's a lot more fascinating of a shift than I think is often thought.  Wilson made serious inroads in 1912, and I remember reading that by the late Nineteenth Century, almost 40% of Northern Blacks identified with the Democrats due to urban machines and such despite the party's affiliation with the South.  I also remember reading that Southern Blacks remained loyal to the GOP significantly longer than Northern ones, which would make sense, I suppose.  However, like I said, data/research is annoyingly scarce.

Rockefeller (R-AR) did well in majority black counties along the Mississippi Delta in 1966 and 1970.

[RINO Tom]

Literally every Democratic presidential victory until FDR depended on disenfranchising black Americans.

Democrats were founded as the party of violent white supremacy, and this remained their dominant tendency until the New Deal. Williams Jennings Bryan aside, it was their sine qua non.

...and yes, that includes the three-way contest in 1912. Taft only won renomination because of the solid support of Republican delegates from Southern states who, in effect, were representing rotten boroughs.

After Roosevelt, neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won without electoral votes obtained through black voter suppression. Obviously, this was not true for Johnson, and in 1968 Nixon became the first, but not the last, Republican president whose victory carried the taint.

Right, assuming this is strictly an answer to the OP ... however, it's still not a satisfying "history" of Black realignment by any means.  Too often, anything one tries to research on this boils down to, "Blacks voted for the Party of Lincoln until not-as-racist FDR came along with his awesome economic reforms and they became solid Democrats overnight and even more solid when the GOP became racist in 1964!"  It's a depressingly undercovered transformation process, specifically pre-1932.  The GOP's relationship with the Black community had been eroding for decades by that point.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Literally every Democratic presidential victory until FDR depended on disenfranchising black Americans.

Democrats were founded as the party of violent white supremacy, and this remained their dominant tendency until the New Deal. Williams Jennings Bryan aside, it was their sine qua non.

...and yes, that includes the three-way contest in 1912. Taft only won renomination because of the solid support of Republican delegates from Southern states who, in effect, were representing rotten boroughs.

After Roosevelt, neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won without electoral votes obtained through black voter suppression. Obviously, this was not true for Johnson, and in 1968 Nixon became the first, but not the last, Republican president whose victory carried the taint.

Right, assuming this is strictly an answer to the OP ... however, it's still not a satisfying "history" of Black realignment by any means.  Too often, anything one tries to research on this boils down to, "Blacks voted for the Party of Lincoln until not-as-racist FDR came along with his awesome economic reforms and they became solid Democrats overnight and even more solid when the GOP became racist in 1964!"  It's a depressingly undercovered transformation process, specifically pre-1932.  The GOP's relationship with the Black community had been eroding for decades by that point.

FDR is an exception here because he won by a large margin. Whether he was more or less racist than previous Democratic nominees was not nearly so important as the Southern vote being less dominant in his coalition.

As far as the transformation of the black vote, after Republicans abandoned Radical Reconstruction their party really had no positive claim to forwarding the interests of black Americans. They happened not to be the coalition that relied on violent Southern segregationists, but contesting the single-party rule in the South ceased to be a priority, and border state Republicans looked for their votes elsewhere.

Every so often we hear accounts of how Nixon was the last Republican to win black voters, but that's trivial. Considering how many black voters were excluded from voting up through the 1970s, those who actually could vote shouldn't be treated as a representative cross-section of black political opinion. The history that you are looking for is dominated by organizing outside of electoral politics and the two major parties.

Great post. Well said.

[Stranger in a strange land]

Literally every Democratic presidential victory until FDR depended on disenfranchising black Americans.

Democrats were founded as the party of violent white supremacy, and this remained their dominant tendency until the New Deal. Williams Jennings Bryan aside, it was their sine qua non.

...and yes, that includes the three-way contest in 1912. Taft only won renomination because of the solid support of Republican delegates from Southern states who, in effect, were representing rotten boroughs.

After Roosevelt, neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won without electoral votes obtained through black voter suppression. Obviously, this was not true for Johnson, and in 1968 Nixon became the first, but not the last, Republican president whose victory carried the taint.

Truman won 77% of the Black Vote (among those who could vote anyway), which won him IL & OH at the very least. Also, remember that the entire reason for Thurmond's candidacy was that Truman had desegregated the military and was taking steps to desegregate the federal government, so Black voters in the Deep South would likely have backed Truman by similar margins if they could have voted.

[RINO Tom]

Literally every Democratic presidential victory until FDR depended on disenfranchising black Americans.

Democrats were founded as the party of violent white supremacy, and this remained their dominant tendency until the New Deal. Williams Jennings Bryan aside, it was their sine qua non.

...and yes, that includes the three-way contest in 1912. Taft only won renomination because of the solid support of Republican delegates from Southern states who, in effect, were representing rotten boroughs.

After Roosevelt, neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won without electoral votes obtained through black voter suppression. Obviously, this was not true for Johnson, and in 1968 Nixon became the first, but not the last, Republican president whose victory carried the taint.

Truman won 77% of the Black Vote (among those who could vote anyway), which won him IL & OH at the very least. Also, remember that the entire reason for Thurmond's candidacy was that Truman had desegregated the military and was taking steps to desegregate the federal government, so Black voters in the Deep South would likely have backed Truman by similar margins if they could have voted.

As I stated earlier, some scholars have claimed the Black vote in the South was more Republican for longer than in the North.  Considering Dewey's good civil rights record, I don't think it's a sure thing that Truman would have done THAT well with Southern Black voters.  Maybe Stevenson vs. Eisenhower '52-type numbers, IMO.

[TDAS04]

After Roosevelt, neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won without electoral votes obtained through black voter suppression. Obviously, this was not true for Johnson, and in 1968 Nixon became the first, but not the last, Republican president whose victory carried the taint.

I'm pretty sure neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won the Electoral College without the black voters in the North.  Stranger in a strange land explained Truman.  JFK is estimated to have carried the black vote 68-32.  Look at the narrow Kennedy victories in Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

[All Along The Watchtower]

After Roosevelt, neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won without electoral votes obtained through black voter suppression. Obviously, this was not true for Johnson, and in 1968 Nixon became the first, but not the last, Republican president whose victory carried the taint.

I'm pretty sure neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won the Electoral College without the black voters in the North.  Stranger in a strange land explained Truman.  JFK is estimated to have carried the black vote 68-32.  Look at the narrow Kennedy victories in Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

...and yet both relied on Jim Crow states for majorities in the electoral vote. There's limited value in pointing out partisan lean among voters when you're talking about voter suppression.

Related: One underrated aspect of the 1964 presidential election is that LBJ lost five Deep South/Dixiecrat states by landslide margins in an election in which he won every other state (minus Goldwater's Arizona - which FWIW, Goldwater won by a margin of one point, in contrast to those five Southern states) - for 486 EVs - and a 61-38 nationwide popular vote margin. "Landslide Lyndon" was actually a justified moniker this time, except for most of the Deep South, where the exact opposite happened.

The fact that a Democratic presidential nominee, running on an openly pro-civil rights platform and and having already signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and on his way to signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, could win a nationwide landslide in both the Electoral College and the national popular vote without the help of the Deep South (regardless of LBJ's past history as a segregationist - white Texas Democrat, after all - or at least, friend and ally of segregationists) is a historical watershed, especially when you consider that the Republican presidential nominee in that same election was "Mr. Conservative", being propped up by the modern "movement conservatives" who were rapidly taking over the Republican Party.

[All Along The Watchtower]

After Roosevelt, neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won without electoral votes obtained through black voter suppression. Obviously, this was not true for Johnson, and in 1968 Nixon became the first, but not the last, Republican president whose victory carried the taint.

I'm pretty sure neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won the Electoral College without the black voters in the North.  Stranger in a strange land explained Truman.  JFK is estimated to have carried the black vote 68-32.  Look at the narrow Kennedy victories in Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

Also, to tie your post into Averroes's response: Truman and JFK both proved that Democrats could narrowly win the Presidency without all of the Jim Crow states, and rely more on black voters in non-Jim Crow states than FDR, whose electoral landslides including the South. This demonstrated to the Dixiecrats that their stranglehold on the national party was slipping, but at the presidential level, it was still a slow process until 1964.

[darklordoftech]

I suspect that had William Tecumseh Sherman been the GOP nominee, the South would have doubled down on voter suppression and lynching black voters.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

After Roosevelt, neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won without electoral votes obtained through black voter suppression. Obviously, this was not true for Johnson, and in 1968 Nixon became the first, but not the last, Republican president whose victory carried the taint.

I'm pretty sure neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won the Electoral College without the black voters in the North.  Stranger in a strange land explained Truman.  JFK is estimated to have carried the black vote 68-32.  Look at the narrow Kennedy victories in Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

...and yet both relied on Jim Crow states for majorities in the electoral vote. There's limited value in pointing out partisan lean among voters when you're talking about voter suppression.

So your thesis is that disenfranchised black voters in Jim Crow states would have voted Republican in such numbers to overturn a 114 EV margin in favour of Dewey? Against Truman, who had just desegregated the US military and was running on a pro-civil rights platform which had caused the segregationist Democrats to bolt the party? This #analysis is beyond stupid.

If anything black voter suppression in Southern states *hurt* Truman in 1948, at least costing him Louisiana (Thurmond won by 70,000 votes) and Maryland (Dewey won by 8,000 votes).