General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Party Loyalty [View all]MFrohike
(1,980 posts)Of the examples you cited, only Wallace is worth considering. The Stevenson rally was a joke. Bobby rolled his eyes when it happened because he knew it didn't matter. The only result was that JFK backtracked on his vague promise to make Stevenson Secretary of State. Put the word backtracked in air quotes because all Kennedy said was, "I don't think any Democratic president wouldn't have him as Secretary of State."
Ted Kennedy's lunge at the nomination was, as polite as I can say it, incompetent and sad. He couldn't answer the question of why he wanted to be president. That's more or less the key question to be answered and he couldn't do it. Was it a factor in Carter's defeat? Unlikely. The millions of moderate and conservative Democrats who voted for Reagan were unlikely to be influenced, even negatively, by the fumblings of Ted. Reagan explicitly repudiated Carter's "let's be grownups" stance about Vietnam and energy by campaigning on American exceptionalism and pretending that real problems didn't exist. That kind of campaign was extremely hard for a man like Carter to combat.
Wallace, though, is an interesting case. Also interesting is the other Democrat who bolted the party to run for president that year, Strom Thurmond. Ultimately, Truman would pull off the win in probably the most unbelievable fashion in American history. The south broke and Dewey won NY, NJ, MI, IL, and PA. Wallace, on the other hand, won no states. In fact, Thurmond won more votes overall than Wallace as well. Yet, Truman managed to win with an electoral map that looks more like Bush's than Obama's.
The Wallace break was a true break of part of the left, though not nearly all of it. It was, oddly enough, over foreign policy. Usually, foreign policy is little more than a hype factor for lazy historians, but it actually mattered in 48. Wallace opposed the Cold War and a little over 1.1m voters agreed with him. Now, there doesn't appear to be a breakdown of exactly how many Democrats actually voted for him. Given the paltry amount of votes he got, you have to wonder how much of the non-Democratic left supported him.
I don't dispute the idea that "the left" has, on occasion, broken with, or hampered, the Democratic party during an election. I do dispute the idea that it's ever been consequential. If the Wallace run wasn't enough to elect Dewey, a man who came off decidedly moderate to much of the country, then I have to wonder what kind of damage your other examples did? It's not like Ted or Adlai can be blamed for losing states (though Adlai would have been blamed for Texas had LBJ not pulled it off). Wallace could be potentially blamed for losing two states, NY the most notable, because his vote total was more than Dewey's margin of victory in those states. Of course, you'd need to show that Truman would have taken all of those votes absent Wallace, which would be a hard case to make in Dewey's home state of NY. Maryland might be a stronger case, though one wonders about the potential effect of the unmentioned Hubert Humphrey, the actual cause of the Thurmond campaign.
For all that I've written, I have to note that you've made no mention of the repeated breaks of the right against the party. I see no mention of 1920, 1924, 1928, 1936, 1940, 1944, 1948, 1952, 1956, 1960, 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012. The Democratic party is 9-12 in the elections I cited. 12 times the right has broken with the party and the party failed to gain the White House. With that kind of track record, I have to wonder why you've chosen to harp on the left side of the party when the right's breaks have been decisively disastrous for the party and the country. Take a look at who they elected. Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Ike (over-romanticised and misunderstood), Nixon, Reagan, and GWB. That's a hell of a track record.