Begin with the objective conditions. The first is continuing public disenchantment with political, media, financial and cultural establishments.
File that one under “Martin Gurri watch.”
Voters thus will be looking for a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who is reflective, experienced, a unifier rather than divider, and demonstrably capable of serious governance. In other words, not just another pugnacious self-seeker.
How many of the announced Democratic aspirants fit that description? Most thus far appear to be appealing mainly to diehard anti-Trumpers important in early primary and caucus contests. But it’s a mistake to believe that general national opinion conforms to that of party activists. You could ask Presidents Goldwater and McGovern about that mistake.
My thoughts:
1. Prior to what Gurri calls the revolt of the public, our two-party system operated on the median voter model. Party insiders, whose main interest was in winning elections, controlled the nominating process and chose candidates close to the center. But just as Olivier Blanchard declared that “the state of macro is good” just prior to the financial crisis that preceded double-digit unemployment, John Zaller and others published The Party Decides at exactly the moment when their thesis became false. The median voter model does not apply in a Martin Gurri moment.
2. For Democrats currently, it appears that “the hard left decides.” The hard left is committed to policy positions that antagonize members of the Democratic coalition that are not part of the hard left.
3. The Green New deal is in some sense a declaration of war against those workers whose skills are complementary with capital based on the internal combustion engine. The war is being declared by the class whose skills are complementary with capital based on silicon. The AFL-CIO understands which side of the war its members are on. So might many African-Americans and Hispanic American citizens.
4. African-Americans and Hispanic American citizens are also not likely to see themselves as beneficiaries of another hard-left commitment, which is to non-enforcement of immigration laws.
5. Among Jewish Americans, many assign Israel a low priority or are unhappy that it has a right-of-center government. But few American Jews are comfortable with the hard-left position that Israel is inherently a pariah state. My line on Congresswoman Omar is that she will not cost the Democratic nominee even 100 votes in 2020, but she has begun a process that will gradually break the bonds between Jews and Democrats. It took the Democrats a long time to earn the enmity of working-class voters, but in 2016 their efforts to do so paid off, so to speak. The same could happen vis-a-vis Jewish voters after another decade.
6. Progressive gender dogma does not expand the Democratic coalition. I have seen the bathrooms where “men” and “women” have been replaced by signs saying “stalls and urinals” and “stalls only.” That may satisfy the demands of the hard left, but let’s ask the average progressive woman how she feels as she heads toward a “stalls only” bathroom and sees a man preceding her.
The hard left is a splinter party. In a proportional representation system, it would have a solid 15 percent of the vote. In our political system as it exists, the hard left creates opportunities for Republicans and pitfalls for Democrats.
The Democratic Party is made up of factions and its leaders are used to creating platforms that offer something for everyone. For African Americans alienated by the GND, there’s reparations. For members of other minorites, identity politics offers a rationale for feeding at the public trough. For people overcome by white guilt, there’s the offer of redemption. And, of course, Trump provides a unifying object of hatred – one far more plausible than Reagan or the Bushes.
I have a hard time seeing African Americans voting for a party whose members are constantly discussing the relative IQ of black people.
I also have a hard time seeing Hispanics voting for a party that is always trying to deport their friends and relatives. Maybe third generation Hispanics who are fully assimilated and thus don’t know any people affected by immigration law, but not recent immigrants or those who live in communities with many recent immigrants.
The class who skills are complementary with silicon is destined to win regardless of whether there is a “Green New Deal” or not. The ALF-CIO is a dinosaur, showing it’s age and soon to sink into the mud. The fact that the Republican party is considering picking up the DP’s castoffs just to survive shows it’s own decrepit state too.
It’s better to ally with the next generation, and why shouldn’t the Republican party do that? The ALF-CIO is not a traditional conservative ally, and the younger voters are the ones getting screwed by SS and Medicare. Take the side of ex-labor-union dudes over kids who are soon to be forking over their silicon-based livelihoods to pay for their retirements? Why? You can kill two bird with on stone by swinging the other way – advance SS reform AND kill off what’s left of the labor movement!
What Republicans are constantly talking about black people’s IQs?
More to the point: the question isn’t which party they’ll vote for; that’s a given (which is kind of a big reason, I’d note, the GOP doesn’t bother doing much to court black voters; do you honestly think it’d make any difference? If so, why did the utterly inoffensive Romney do worse among black voters than Trump?); it’s a question of whether they’ll feel its worth it vote at all.
Trump’s fairly strong pitch to the Blacks — “look how lousy the results are with Dems, and have been for years, decades. Why not try electing a Rep”.
Plus: “Thanks to Trump, black unemployment is at historic lows. Hispanic unemployment is at historic lows.”
His share of these voters is almost sure to go up. But maybe not enough, tho probably yes if there’s no recession.
Trump is smart to follow where the votes are. Unfortunately, thanks to allowing Dems to dominate colleges and first discriminate against, now demonize Reps, it’s unlikely young college grads will be feeling good about voting Rep. Until a decade or so of experience, but learning bunches not taught in school.
The Reps are also some factions, but right now the Dems are both worse and getting worse. Trump is constantly talking about “all Americans”, tho Dem media always spins, distorts, or misquotes him to seem to be more divisive.
But the Dems are unlikely to split if hard enough left. Too many see results from Perot in ’92, helping Clinton beat Bush because lots of anti-NAFTA type Reps didn’t like the globalism. So I don’t see the head of Starbucks getting the volatile Left young Dems, nor many of the more mature moderate afraid-of-losing Dems.
I even suspect the Dems understand whoever they run will likely lose, if no recession (and it looks like no), but it’s a warm up for 2024. That’s why there are so many candidates.
They ALL need more practice in the “Presidential Screen Test”, to see which one is best at acting like a vote-getting POTUS candidate.
I’m pretty sure black people can read a chart and see that the black unemployment rate started declining under Obama.
But keep dreaming.
I don’t know how many Republican Party “members are constantly discussing the relative IQ of black people.” But 99.9% plus of elected officials will carefully avoid saying anything about the issue. And the less than 0.1% who stray from conventional wisdom will be publicly condemned by the rest of the institutional Party.
I assume the GOP was trying to represent its constituents. My parents collect SS/Medicare. It does me little good if its cut and I have to make up the shortfall myself.
What would allying with the next generation mean? Repudiating your own family? Your people? Your values?
And why would anyone vote for a second rate Democrat when they can just vote democrat?
The GOP can never win black voters because it’s the party of middle class family values and blacks don’t have much of a middle class or nuclear families.
What would allying with the next generation mean? Repudiating your own family? Your people? Your values?
Your family isn’t the next generation?
Cutting SS to pay for reparations definitely doesn’t help my family.
I had similar thoughts before the 2016 election, but Trump way overperformed with black voters and Hispanic voters in Florida relative to my expectation. So I think that there is actually something to Mr. Kling’s point. In a presidential election, in which the outcome is decided by a handful of swing states, small changes can be the difference. So a small increase in the share of blacks or Floridian Hispanics voting for Trump, or a small decrease in the turnout of black voters in key swing states is actually very important to the outcome of the next presidential election.
Hispanics in Florida is a complicated case. There are a lot of Cubans, who don’t exactly have a great relationship with leftism over Castro.
Also, the Cuban community has a lot of “White Hispanics”. In Latin/South America there is a political divide between light skinned Hispanics with mostly European DNA and dark skinned Hispanics that are descendent from natives or slaves. That same divide exists when they come here.
Much of the third world communist fighting in the Cold War was basically between brown majorities and light skinned elites. It was ethnic conflict dressed up in ideology. Many of the Cubans who fled Cuba were light skinned. In Vietnam it was basically brown Vietnamese versus light skinned Chinese.
People keep wondering why 20-40% of Hispanics vote GOP, but aren’t we basically just seeing the results that happen when roughly that proportion of Hispanics are white.
2020 will be decided by the white female voting block. Many of those who went with Trump in 2016 will not in 2020. A good chunk of 2016 R voters switched over in the 2018 mid-terms. I think a big issue in 2016 was pre-existing condition coverage with about every other ad claiming the Republicans would eliminate it. Not sure that it will be as influential an issue in 2020. The Republicans probably ought to come up with some unfunded health benefit expansion so they can run more competitively.
Of course in a proportional representation system, the various identify groups that make up the Democrats would be represented by their own parties and could talk for themselves.
There’s actually a pretty broad base of Democrats who should be frightened by the GND: those who eat food or consume other modern agricultural products; those that use goods and services requiring transportation from one place to another. I’m not sure it’s the wedge Dr. Kling thinks it is; I think the fact that it gets so much celebration proves either that self-interest just isn’t a very big factor; or even those who endorse this policy don’t take it seriously. Or both.
He may be right though regarding black and Hispanic Democrats. They preferred the more moderate Hillary to the radical Bernie, which I found mildly puzzling; I tend to think a demographic group that votes overwhelmingly for one party will on average tend to also be near the extreme side of that party. Perhaps minorities will be a moderating force in the Democratic Party (and perhaps their failure to turn out for a radical will lose it the election).
Blacks and Hispanics may feel they have more at stake and more to lose if the DP loses, so they are more likely to nominate a moderate than a radical.
If this is the case, then black and Hispanic turnout should be most invariant to who gets nominated, but it varies greatly. So in fact, it seems like it’s black/Hispanic turnout that is a determinant of electability. It sounds possible paradoxical for black/Hispanic voters to strategically favor candidates that they think will be able to drive up their own turn out. “It’s so important for us that the party wins that we need to make sure a candidate gets nominated that we’ll be willing to bother to vote for.” It may not be a strictly logically impossible sentiment, but it seems unusual.
Another possibility is that black voters (correctly) perceive that voting as a block increases their political influence. So when various black leadership organizations pick which candidate they favor, everyone falls in line. This also fosters a set of political organization whose purpose is to pick which candidate blacks are going to support. The Clintons may have long-established relationships with black political organizations so they were able to get their commitments early.
Bingo.
Having the same skin color helps (even if you have very little in common below the surface, such as Obama had little in common with African Americans).
So does having a “style” that appeals to blacks. Trump did relatively well on this level for a Republican. If he had run as a Democrats perhaps he would have gotten 90% of the black vote.
But relationships with Black influencers matters a great deal, and that’s a wheel greasing political machine that you just have to put time, money, and effort into. The Clintons had done that for decades.
The Clintons were a known quantity that gave away a lot of free goodies to the black community. Blacks really liked the style of Bill, “our first black president”.
Bernie is the whitest human being on the planet. Also, the stuff he wants to give away didn’t mean much for black people (free college, useless for blacks).
Eventually a “brown Bernie” will come along and win. Maybe this election, maybe some future one. Its so goddamn obvious its an inevitability just based on the math.
Personally, I would love to see Oprah Winfrey run. I would vote for her.
It’s notable that Trump-Oprah was a possible presidential ticket at one point.
Only in Trump’s dreams. Oprah was not on board with it.
Bernie actually might enjoy significantly more appeal among black voters if he were (at least nominally) Christian rather than an irreligious Jew. Anti-semitism and religiosity are both more common in black communities than most people on the left care to acknowledge.
Blacks aren’t religious is an ideological sense. They don’t care about marriage, abortion, or any religious issues. Their religion is just and ethnic cohesion mechanism.
Brown people get a pass no matter how anti-progressive or downright backward their religious/cultural practices are…as long as they will give votes and therefore power to their progressive task masters.
“I tend to think a demographic group that votes overwhelmingly for one party will on average tend to also be near the extreme side of that party.”
That’s one possibility. Another is that is pure signalling. Everyone in the community votes Democrat because that’s what everyone in the community does. In that case, the more conservative members who would normally vote Republican instead vote for the more centrist candidate.
Think of the Democratic Party as a bunch of interest groups. There is an official “ideology” put out by the liberal minded UMC/Elite Silicon set. This is commonly thought of as what “the party” is about, but many of the interest groups couldn’t care less about it. For instance “free college” is a big part of the Silicon set but totally meaningless to blacks. Gay marriage is actually something where they are opposites.
What matters to each interest group is that membership gets them the things they care about most. For some members that can be ideological. Maybe gay marriage actually matters to you.
With minorities it’s mostly material, who is going to get the most STUFF for blacks. Welfare, sinecures, minority business preference, etc. You can probably lodge “social power” under the STUFF category. There is a certain hard advantage to the power that comes from being able to call people racist.
One of the reasons minorities vote in such a block is because they are not very ideological. When you’re ideological you often split your vote. When you aren’t you just have to ask simple questions like “is this good for my people” to which there are often simple enough answers.
So ask a question. Was Bernie to the left of Hillary on “giving stuff to black people”? How credible was his “bid”? I think Hillary made a strong and credible bid to get cheddar to blacks.
Eventually we will get a Brown Bernie who can bring these two togethor.
I’m just not buying that #3 or #4 are true (the AFL-CIO part of #3 may be true). I don’t think these minorities are ever going to turn away from Democrats no matter what. There is no EVIDENCE of this happening anywhere. Only speculation by people that HOPE it will start happening.
#5 who knows. By the time something like that happened, it will be too late for the switch to matter.
#6 is true. But woman are more afraid of being called some kind of bigot.
As the Dems continue the pro-abortion culture wars, it’s more likely the long-suffering so-far losing pro-life side will be getting energized. Christians are likely to support Trump even more, given the immorality and hypocrisy of the top Dems. With names of women as victims.
The Dems are NOT going to let any pro-life folk be serious Pres. candidates, nor for the Senate or for any Governorship.
Many, maybe most, Christians are not pro-life first/mostly voters. Lots of Catholics are liberals, and just accept that they disagree with the Church on abortion, birth control, sex ed, and same-sex marriage & adoption. But it is the more strongly pro-life churches which are growing, and having more kids. For them, for the future, each Pres. election will seem like a Fight 93 election.
Arnold, I wonder if Brad Delong reads you? You’ll know that he submitted to the rule of the hard left a few days ago.
If moderate and “normal” liberals don’t take back the party, we will have Trump in a landslide.
“we will have Trump in a landslide”
Will we?
I remain convinced that demographics will ensure victory for increasingly unhinged hard left candidates as time goes on.
Re: Ted’s 2nd quote: Yang’s policy page is quite substantial (https://www.yang2020.com/policies/). He’s still a ~fringe candidate but seems to have significant momentum
I think Yang is the most interesting candidate in the field. He’s too far away from me on several issues so I don’t think I could vote for him . . . but he’s the most interesting.
I could’ve been a Jim Webb Democrat but folks like me don’t have a home in either party.
As left center, we will have to see as 2016 nominee was a Clinton and Obama governed very left center. So I don’t see anything to disprove the null hypothesis here although Sanders does look strong.
1) I do find it bizarre for the Party of minorities and women voters, that the three leading candidates are white man. (Biden, O’Rourke & Sanders. Of women only Harris seems to have any real traction in the polls.)
2) Outside of some real D districts, most D House winners won on protecting pre-existing conditions and sensible gun control in 2016. So we hear about Omar & AOC, but Lucy McGrath in Georgia were the main winners. 90% of the 2108 D House campaign was fairly non-populist in nature and we can call the 2018 Midterms as Ds won with voters from PTA meetings. (Note the voters that gave Ds a Midterm victory was Independent voters that lean Republican. Most Republican House districts had more votes in 2018 than 2014 Midterm.)
3) It is expected Jewish voters will move to Republicans but they have not the last 30 years (70% D/30% R with slight movement towards Ds since Trump.) That said I don’t disagree that Ds are moving away from Israel but you have to take into account many young Jewish voters are less concerned with Israel as well.
4) The reality is minority Democrats are more conservative than the average white D so I suspect they support Biden in 2020 and maybe O’Rourke will gain the most votes here. (The Primary calendar is very geared to conservative minority voters in 2020.)
5) I think in most D minds the GND was terrible and should be best forgotten. It was written by a young AOC who does not seem to know the country outside of the city.
6) And how many Ds are complete open borders? While it is true H-A probably benefit most from decreased immigration, they do tend to support more Immigration. (Note WWC in the Rust Belt are the least impacted by modest changes to Immigration.)
7) For all the Gurri calls about Populist Right with Trump, please remember he promised to protect Social Security and Medicare while being a Midwest Democrat on trade. So voters considered him more center than HRC.
On #5, Kling gets it. Jewish Americans have some cognitive dissonance in that they passionately identify as Democrats, yet refuse to see the genuine hostility towards them from the rest of the left, and refuse to see the genuine kindness towards them from the right. Kling intuits this confusing phenomenon.
Many regular Democrat voters think all of the major Democratic Party positions are completely outrageously crazy, yet vote Democrat anyway. That’s a similar cognitive dissonance that I’m not convinced Kling understands.
I’ve talked to Democratic voters who, issue by issue, consider all the Democratic agenda insane, and basically agree with the Republican position, yet reliably vote Democrat anyway.
The Green New Deal, eliminating private health insurance, racial reparations, mandatory non-gender bathrooms, third trimester abortions, open borders, all of it is crazy. And many Democrats think so, yet are certain to vote Democrat regardless.
Jews are about 2 percent of the electorate, mostly concentrated in solidly blue states. I sincerely doubt that the Democrats are particularly worried about losing that vote. I’m pretty sure they’d gladly trade the entire national Jewish vote for 500,000 votes in Michigan.
Perhaps the perception of the Republican party as the home of closeted racists is unfair, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
[comment removed. inappropriate personal attack–ed.]
Arnold: You’re feeding the current political dysfunction.
You are effectively allowing one individual to make sweeping attacks on an entire group of people then censoring a specific response of “you sir are an ”
I could say something like “commenters who categorize all their political opponents as racists are clearly idiots” I can do so, but it seems…unnecessarily indirect.
I’ll go back to my usual strategy of selective reading & response, but the noise to signal ratio is increasing.
Please note that I did not say that “Republicans are closeted racists”. I said that there is a *perception* among those voter groups cited by Nick, that the Republican party is full of closeted racists.
That perception may be wrong, it may be unfair, but if you’re casting around mystified about why Jews and blacks and Hispanics don’t vote Republican, open your eyes, you don’t need to look any further. And if you want to change that, you need to address that perception instead of pretending it’s not there because your believe it’s unfair.
If it’s an inevitability then the best way to address it is to decrease turnout and limit demographics…which does appear to be the GOP platform but they don’t pursue it ruthlessly enough.
I can’t find a single country, no matter how well its lead, what its done to uplift its minorities, or how well it tries to make them happy where the low preforming minorities vote for the same party that the majority does. It just never happens no matter what people try.
The perception is more real than the actuality. But there are racist Reps. There are also racist Dems. There might even be more racist Dems, who are even more racist.
But the perception Hazel mentions, which the Reps are not seriously fighting to change, is that the Reps are racist.
I think we treat all people based on their character, not on the color of their skins. That’s why I oppose Affirmative Action. Yet Dems claim anybody and everybody who oppose AA are racist. I claim THEY are the racists.
The (Dem) media agree with the Dems, and declare that those against AA are racists – the perception that more Reps oppose AA is a true perception. Does it follow that Reps are racist? I don’t believe that’s true, but it’s clearly the perception of many black voters.
Racist is just a term that is used to further black interests. They don’t care what it means. Only how it can facilitate their material, status, and power enhancement.
What exactly do you expect them to do? Admit that they are biologically inferior and will be at the bottom of the material/status hierarchy cause hey…in a meritocracy that’s what’s fair.
It would be like asking the Mongol’s to try to ace the Confucian exams. Why should they bother. Why not use the violent skills they have to enslave those confusion bureaucrats and make them work for them.
Perhaps it’s less that many Republican oppose affirmative action on principle, and more that it’s prominence as an issue is disproportionate to it’s actual importance in the larger scheme of things. I think people respect it when they see others take a principled stand on a subject that they disagree with, but when that person starts to seem unusually obsessed with that issue, they start to wonder whether their motivation is really principled or if there is some deeper irrational motivation underlying that stance.
But to opponents of affirmative action, it’s just overt racism/sexism by powerful institutions, including the state itself. If the shoe were on the other foot (and when it was), it’s opponents would never stop talking about and view it as a major issue, not some minor curiosity. To a precooked opponent of racial discrimination, affirmative action and its social acceptability is pretty vexing; and can no more be said to get disproportionate attention than many of the bizarre things that dominate public discourse.
Also, sometimes people just end up caring about or ‘specializing’ in some issues more than others. I don’t think it’s accurate to assume ‘deeper, irrational motivations.’ Some people were extremely focused on legalizing gay marriage. Should one speculate that they were closeted homosexuals? Or people who are particularly passionate about legalizing prostitution or drugs, would it be fair to wonder if they’re just secretly prostitutes or johns, or drug dealers or addicts, respectively?
Most of the people who were extremely focused on legalizing gay marriage were actually uncloseted gay people obviously. When someone has a very focused interest in one topic, it is natural to wonder if they have a personal reason for it. Same with marijuana. Unsurprisingly, many of the advocates of marijuana legalization are marijuana users. Actually, it’s quite abnormal for people to be very focused on one topic when they don’t have a personal reason for it. Highly systematizing, highly principled people are the exception, not the norm.
Hazel, you’ve aggressively commented on race and ethnic identity… I am posting an observation that I hope is a little helpful, clarifying, and not in any way unpleasant.
Ethnocentrism is quite common among humans. When I see people go into this furious rage over racism, it’s generally white people furious against white ethnocentrism. A lot of non-white people, notice ethnocentrism among all ethnic groups including whites, and they see that as a facet of nature. Many non-whites don’t even like white people, but they simply consider it normal for all living humans to have their own ethnocentrism, and see this less as a something to be morally and righteously outraged about.
Also, I know you claim to be libertarian, so I presume you support some non-racial markets and such, but on the subject of race and immigration, you seem to be completely aligned with white progressives.
Secondly, you seem to harbor a large ideological inconsistency, in that you support ethnocentrism and ethnic identities and ethnic preference for other groups, but are uniquely opposed to white identity in particular. I find this inconsistency logically unacceptable.
I don’t support ethnocentrism or ethnic preference for other groups. I do think that having a ethnic identity is fine, such as having a “little Mogadishu”, but note that “little Mogadishu” does not actually exclude white people. In my experience, the people in little ethnic areas are generally happy to have white customers and quite welcoming. They are not excluding white people or exhibiting prejudice or ethnocentrism. Practicing one’s own culture does not require discriminating against people from other cultures in the workplace or excluding them from public establishments like restaurants. I’m against having “blacks only” restaurants the same as whites only. So if there are ethnic subcultures that exhibit prejudice against other groups in the US, that is equally wrong.
To the extent that non-whites are ethnocentric and just aren’t bothered by it, I also think they are in the wrong. I expect people to be better than that. It’s just that white people happen to be my ethnic group so I’m a lot more likely to change behaviors of my own ethnic group. Asking black people to be more open to white people also seems like an absurd thing to do considering most of the prejudice is coming from the other direction.
Arnold, what do you think of the new “Alliance Party” taking form over at Walter Russel Mead’s site?
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2019/03/19/for-unity-community-and-responsibility-the-alliance-party-of-america-is-born/
“yet refuse to see the genuine hostility towards them from the rest of the left, and refuse to see the genuine kindness towards them from the right. Kling intuits this confusing phenomenon.”
Then you are unfamiliar with the alt-right. Do you know what the following means because if you read alt-right stuff you will see it a fair amount?
(( ))
Steve
I’m not sure what the parentheses mean, but the ‘alt right’ must not have a whole lot of political clout on the right given that the current administration has been as stridently pro-Israel as any in history.
The alt-right is such a general term it can mean anything to anyone. It can just mean “alternative”, which could be anything.
If you mean skin heads and neo-nazis that have been around forever then yeah they are anti-Israel. If you mean the rough collection of nationalist-populists that came to the for with Trump then they are obviously pro Israel, to the point of idolizing the country.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/06/the-jewish-cowbell-the-meaning-of-those-double-parentheses-beloved-by-trump-supporters.html
Of course, that isn’t coming from actual Trump supporters talking about what they love, that is coming from rivals who hate Trump who are trying to present Trump supporters in the most unsympathetic light possible.
It’s an explanation of what an actual symbol used by Trump supporters means. It’s meant to denote that a person being referred to is Jewish. You can ignore the rest, but the fact is that people on alt-right websites do this.
Lol, these boomers …
I dunno, I have the perception that this is nothing new for the (hard) left. They threw the elections in 1968 and 1972 by insisting on candidates the party regulars knew were unelectable – and one could argue they did it in 1980 too. And not just in the US – I mean, any history of the Labour Party in the UK is a long string of “elections they could have won if only the radical backbenchers had been more disciplined (see especially all three elections that sent Thatcher to Downing St.).”
Kling: do you think this year is different in kind, or is it yet another in this long string of examples? Bringing this up in the context of Gurri implies the former, but I can see the case for the latter too and am curious which perception you favor.
1968 was Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice-president and a long-time party stalwart. Who do you think would have done better?
Don’t be obtuse. Obviously I’m talking about the “get clean for Gene” challenge to Humphrey, eventually superceded by Bobby Kennedy’s run, culminating in the riots outside the DNC in Chicago when Humphrey was granted the nomination by the party elite in the face of a populist challenge. Fallout from this led to the changes in party governance that allowed McGovern to win the nomination in 1972 (would’ve been unthinkable otherwise) – and I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial in holding that absent the (ideology-driven) internal divisions among Democrats in 1968, either Johnson would’ve won a second term – or (if you believe the theory that he dropped out due to health reasons rather than the relatively weak win in NH) Humphrey would’ve carried on. Nixon only won in 1968 because the Democrats imploded on live TV.
There certainly were “ideology-driven” divisions of the Democrats in 1968 but overwhelming them was the war in Vietnam. Are you really saying that it would have been possible for LBJ to go through the primaries with no anti-war opposition, get the nomination, and then go on to victory as antiwar people “held their noses” and voted for him anyway?
More or less, yes – but I don’t think that’s quite the right way to look at it. Keep in mind that when the election season started, the idea that an anti-war candidate was on offer wasn’t really on anyone’s radar. Conventional wisdom was that Johnson would obviously be the nominee and would probably also win reelection. When “Get Clean for Gene” started, no one took it seriously. It was only when they polled a lot better than expected in NH (albeit still well behind Johnson) that the ground shifted. To me, that fits the pattern I was outlining: a quixotic hard left campaign leads to a chain of events that arguably costs the candidate they would otherwise prefer to win to lose. However, I concede I may be stretching it in at least two ways. (1) “Get Clean for Gene” really just ended up showing everyone there was blood in the water, and it was Bobby Kennedy rather than McCarthy who mounted the real challenge. I supposed if you wanted to take that to say “it wasn’t really the hard left in 1968 but a more general insurgency,” it would be challenging for me to counter. (2) I admit I’m sort of thinking of the anti-war movement as “hard left,” which needs qualification. It definitely started out that way, but by 1968 it was well on its way to mainstream. To clarify – my argument isn’t so much that general public sentiment was solidly in favor of the war, because it wasn’t (not by ’68, anyway). Rather, it’s that before the hard left pulled the curtain back on Johnson’s weakness, no one knew an anti-war candidate was on offer. (With the possible exception of George Romney – who was, of course, already out of the race by the time of the NH breakthrough.) So, while I get that 1968 isn’t an entirely unproblematic example, I’d like to leave it on my list.
All this haggling over 1968 leave us pretty far from my original question, though, so I probably should’ve just withdrawn it when you first responded. Oh well.
1968 was also complicated by the fact that many people in the Democratic Party saw LBJ as a usurper, an accidental president. And one or more of too old, too southern, too low class. They wanted a more Kennedy-esque person–and this seemed like an electoral winner since his assassination had turned JFK into a wildly popular figure.
1972 is definitely an example of “I want him to be president and I don’t care if he’s not electable”, though it is remarkable how many people convinced themselves that there really was a hidden majority for McGovern.
The GOP is winning the same proportion of whites it won in those landslide elections, but they are now losing due to Demographics.
The left indeed never wanted to compromise, but it took a generation of immigration to make it so they could do so without losing elections.