Party Loyalty

[MFrohike]

255. In short

Harping on Stevenson is like harping on Gennifer Flowers. Well, except for the fact that Gennifer Flowers was marginally more relevant in that she was the first hint of a pattern of conduct. As for the electoral result? Not so much. The ADA, for all the hype, was a better target for Republicans than it ever was some kind of power base for the left. As I recall, LBJ used to refer to Humphrey's friends as "those ADA bomb throwers." They were a lot of flash, but not much fire. It's akin to harping on the Third Way group these days. That group is largely irrelevant, though its alumni and ideas aren't.

Actually, Bobby may have rolled his eyes (that was a bit of license on my part). What he said was something like, "they can yell and scream all they want, they don't have the votes." The whole exercise is NEVER mentioned in analyses of that election. It's only mentioned as a historical oddity and then forgotten. If you want to mention incidents that actually affected that election, you could mention the TV debates, Daley's slow counting on election night, or the Adolphus Hotel incident.

For what it's worth, and one always has to wonder with this source, Wikipedia lists eight of the founding members of the ADA. Three of them, off the top of my head, definitely did not break against Kennedy from the left. Galbraith and Schlesinger were on his team and Humphrey was backing Johnson. I'm not sure you can really say the ADA itself broke against Kennedy at the convention when at least 3 founding members were committed to either him or his soon-to-be running mate.

Thurmond broke from the national party and the sitting president. How he was labeled at the time is irrelevant for our purposes, because, as I recall, his actual party was the States' Rights Party and he was listed as a fusion candidate. Wow, that prior sentence is badly constructed, but I'm feeling a bit lazy. There was no confusion as to which party Strom represented because everybody in the south knew about Humphrey's speech at the convention and the resulting civil rights plank. The people at the time treated it as a break, so I see no reason why we shouldn't.

Thanks for the cite on Dewey. It only reinforces my point that Wallace was irrelevant. Using your evidence, 48 was close because Dewey's voters didn't show up, not because Wallace was worth more, electorally, than a fart in a thunderstorm. Presumably, had his voters showed up, we wouldn't even be able to point to the margin in NY being covered by Wallace because it would be even bigger. Given that Wallace didn't come close to taking electoral votes in a close election, how much more ineffectual would he have been if Dewey's people had showed?

With most of those elections, I wasn't limiting myself to third-party runs anymore than you did. I was observing the years where the effort put in to elect the nominee was far less than winning years, years where there was significant support from right-wing Democrats for the Republican (or sitting out the election), and third-party years. I'll go down the list below.

1920 - Half-assed effort on the part of the national party. Cox won approximately the same amount of popular votes as Wilson 4 years earlier, but managed to lose by about 7 million votes. He took only the south, excepting Tennessee. Given the dramatically higher vote total for this election compared to just 4 years prior, it's a pretty strong indication that the right was voting for Harding.

1924 & 1928 - I was specifically referring to the bigotry against Al Smith. Now, it's kind of funny that Smith, a future critic of FDR from the right, would suffer from this, but there was a campaign waged against him, within the party itself, in areas where anti-Catholicism was strong. Given this, it would be odd that he managed to carry the entire south and Oklahoma if you don't consider the tacit agreement between the southern elites and their Catholic allies in the north to deliver electoral votes in exchange for not asking questions about what would be called civil rights.

1936 - I shouldn't have included this. Oops.

1940 & 1944 - The reference is to the declining victory margins of FDR. He hit his highwater mark in 1936, which is why it was dumb of me to mention to 1936, but was down to 53.4% in 1944. He was clearly being abandoned by some of the electorate, partly due to the third and fourth term issue. While it's possible it could have been defections from the left, as the elder La Follette and Wheeler of Montana had planned in 1936, it's far more likely that it was defections from the right. The federal government took over the economy in WW2. The first, limited civil rights rules were put into place and there was strict rationing. In a fight with Hitler, I find it far more likely that the right would whine over the necessary actions to beat him than the left.

1948 - We've covered it.

1952 - Price Daniel of Texas comes to mind. He was the engineer of the split in the Texas Democratic party. His faction actually endorsed Ike. Johnson and Rayburn would cobble together what was left after the split, but they couldn't deliver the state for Adlai, mostly due to Adlai's own positions on state ownership of offshore oil and gas.

1956 - Same deal.

1960 - Rabid anti-Catholicism throughout the country made more than a few elections close that wouldn't have been otherwise. In fact, the south nearly broke against Kennedy because he was seen as a socialist (as well as taking orders from Rome). It was the Adolphus Hotel incident and the remaining strength of southern party bosses that delivered the necessary votes for Kennedy-Johnson.

1964 - The solid South broke over civil rights. I don't know of a better example of the right turning against the Democratic nominee except for 1948.

1968 - Widespread support for George Wallace around the country. John Connally, Democratic governor of Texas, was accused of covertly helping Nixon in Texas. The support would have been covert because he publicly endorsed Humphrey, likely in part because Humphrey was Johnson's man (Connally had been a Johnson man since the 30s). The accusations are probably correct, given Connally's endorsement of Nixon in the next election and his service in Nixon's cabinet. I could mention the convention and Mayor Daley, but that might turn out to be a wash for our arguments if one considers also the anti-Democratic left present in the Chicago streets.

1972 - The worst ass-whooping in American history. We'll put aside Connally campaigning and fundraising for Nixon. The margin of the vote alone is a strong indication that the right deserted McGovern. The size of Nixon's victory is pretty clear evidence.

1980 - Boll Weevils, Reagan Democrats, etc. I find it unlikely, though always possible, that Ted's run had any influence on them except to confirm that they were to right to support Saint Ron.

1984 - Again, I'm relying on the margin of victory. Huge wins for the right come close to prima facie evidence of right-wing desertion.

1988 - 4 more years of Reagan? Really? More grist for my mill.

1992 - Perot. Nuff said.

1996 - A bit of Perot, but the real point I wanted to make was Clinton's two wins were both with less than 50% of the popular vote. It's a safe bet to assume damn few liberals or further left were voting for Dole or Perot, so that begs us to ask, who was?

2000 - Those 200k Democratic GWB voters in Florida come to mind.

2004 - The worst president in American history, except for maybe James Buchanan, is re-elected? How many Democrats voted for Bush because they were scared of the boogeyman? Given the margin, it had to be more than a few.

2008 - I was thinking of Joe Lieberman and more than a few racists who wouldn't vote for the big, bad black man. This one is kind of funny in a very sad way, because so many of them are so insistent that he's a socialist when it's clear that he's at least right of center. It's like a replay of Al Smith except that Smith wasn't lucky enough to follow maybe the worst president in American history.

2012 - Similar, but not the same. Without getting into it, the administration's policies have provoked a lot of discussion (how's that for a neutral phrase!). There's been no notable third party challenge from the left. That's not to disparage the Greens, it's just an observation that 470k votes in a presidential election is a rounding error. With no third party challenge and a declining vote total, it does seem quite likely that it was the right that defected to Rmoney. I wouldn't be surprised if a liberal or two voted for Rmoney, if for no better reason than to be contrarian, but it seems likely that it was a lot more than a right-winger or two that broke from Obama for Romney.


Now, I'll freely admit, in the effort to save us both time and effort, that not all of the years I've mentioned have definitive proof. Well, not in the same way as a Texas governor campaigning for the other party has. That being said, most of those years can be viewed as the right wing of the party deserting to the GOP when you look at the vote totals. For all the left is accused of losing elections by drawing comparisons between the two major parties, it seems fairly clear that the right definitely sees a difference.

Edit - Sorry for the length, man. I just posted it and had a holy shit moment.

Second edit - The title of this post is hilarious. I really didn't mean to go this long.