New Deal coalition

The coalition made the Democratic Party the majority party nationally for decades. From 1933 to 1968, Democrats only lost control of the White House when Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president in 1952 and was then reelected in 1956 due to his broad popularity. The Democrats typically controlled both Houses of Congress before the 1990s. The coalition began to weaken with the collapse of big city machines after 1940, the steady decline of labor unions after 1970, the bitter factionalism during the 1968 election, the turn of northern white ethnics and southern whites toward conservatism on racial issues, and the rise of neoliberalism under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, with its opposition to regulation. The coalition is generally considered to have been extinguished upon the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency alongside the introduction of the Third Way's faction into mainstream American politics.

History

Formation

The Great Depression in the United States began in 1929 and was often blamed on Republicans and their big business allies. Republican president Herbert Hoover opposed federal relief efforts as unwarranted, believing that market actors and local governments were better suited to address the situation. As the depression worsened, voters became increasingly dissatisfied with this approach and came to view President Hoover as indifferent to their economic struggles. Franklin D. Roosevelt won a landslide in 1932 and spent his time in office building a powerful nationwide coalition and keeping his partners from squabbling with each other.

Over the course of the 1930s, Roosevelt forged a coalition of liberals, labor unions, Northern religious and ethnic minorities (Catholic, Jewish, and Black), and (few) liberal White Southerners. These voting blocs together formed a majority of voters and handed the Democratic Party seven victories out of nine presidential elections (1932–1948, 1960, 1964), as well as control of both houses of Congress during all but four years between the years 1932–1980 (Republicans won small majorities in 1946 and 1952). Political scientists describe this realignment as the "Fifth Party System", in contrast to the Fourth Party System of the 1896–1932 era that proceeded it.

City machines had major roles to play. Most important, the New Deal coalition had to carry entire states, not just cities. The largest possible landslide was needed, and the city machines came through in 1940, 1944, and 1948. They kept the voters by providing federal jobs aimed at the unemployed—the Civil Works Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps (where the boys' wages went to the unemployed father), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and especially the Works Progress Administration (WPA). A representative transition came in Pittsburgh, which had long been a Republican stronghold with a promise of prosperity. The worsening depression enabled the Democrats to convince some Republicans to switch parties while mobilizing large numbers of ethnics who had not voted before. Democrats capitalized on Roosevelt's popularity to win the 1933 mayoral race. The WPA then played a critical role in the consolidation of the Democratic machine. By 1936 the Democrats had a majority in the registration rolls for the first time since the Civil War. That November FDR won 70% of the Pittsburgh vote.

Roosevelt moves left

The president in 1933 wanted to bring all major groups together, business and labor, banker and borrower, farms and towns, liberals and conservatives. The escalating attacks from the right, typified by the American Liberty League led by his old friend Al Smith, spoiled the dream. Sensing how quickly public opinion was becoming more radical, Roosevelt moved left. He attacked big business. His major innovations now were social security for the elderly, the WPA for the unemployed, and a new labor relations act to support and encourage labor unions. Running for reelection in 1936, Roosevelt personalized the campaign and downplayed the Democratic Party name. In contrast to his 1933 position as a neutral moderator between business and workers, he now became a strong labor union supporter. He crusaded against the rich upper class, denouncing the "economic royalists". He worked with third parties on the left: the Minnesota Farmer–Labor Party, the Wisconsin Progressive Party, and the American Labor Party (ALP) in New York state. In New York City he collaborated closely with Republican Fiorello La Guardia, against the conservatives of Tammany Hall who had controlled city hall. La Guardia was the candidate of the ad-hoc City Fusion Party, winning the mayoralty in 1933 and reelection in 1937 and 1941. La Guardia was also the nominee of the American Labor Party (ALP), a union-dominated left-wing group that supported Roosevelt in 1936, 1940, and 1944. The role of the ALP was to funnel socialists who distrusted the Democratic Party into the New Deal coalition. In 1940 La Guardia chaired the nationwide Committee of Independent Voters for Roosevelt; in return, the president put him in charge of the Office of Civilian Defense. He retired and was replaced as mayor in 1945 by William O'Dwyer, the Tammany candidate.

WPA jobs and Democratic party organizations

Roosevelt's top aide in distributing patronage was James Farley, who served simultaneously as chair of the New York State Democratic Party, chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and Postmaster General in FDR's cabinet, as well as FDR's campaign manager in 1932 and 1940. He handled traditional patronage for the Post Office. He helped with the new agencies aimed at the unemployed, especially the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, as well as other job agencies. He helped state and local Democratic organizations set up systems to select likely candidates for the federal payroll. In the 1940s most of the big city machines collapsed, with a few exceptions such as Chicago and Albany, New York.

Being a voter or a Democrat was not a prerequisite for a relief job. Federal law specifically prohibited any political discrimination regarding WPA workers. Vague charges were bandied about at the time. The consensus of experts is that: “In the distribution of WPA project jobs as opposed to those of a supervisory and administrative nature politics plays only a minor in a comparatively insignificant role." However those who were hired were reminded at election time that FDR created their job and the Republicans would take it away. The great majority voted accordingly.

Decline and fall

After the end of the Great Depression around 1941, the next challenge was to keep Democratic majorities alive. It seemed impossible after the GOP landslide in 1946. Journalist Samuel Lubell found in his in-depth interviews of voters after the 1948 presidential election that Democrat Harry Truman, not Republican Thomas E. Dewey, seemed the safer, more conservative candidate to the "new middle class" that had developed over the previous 20 years. He wrote that "to an appreciable part of the electorate, the Democrats had replaced the Republicans as the party of prosperity."

In 1952 and 1956 Republican Dwight Eisenhower had been able to temporarily peel several elements of the coalition into the Republican column, notably some Northern farmers and manual workers and middle-class voters in the Border South. In the 1960 election, John F. Kennedy and his running mate Lyndon Johnson won back Southern voters.

After the smashing election victory of President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, the heavily Democratic Congress passed a raft of liberal legislation. Labor union leaders claimed credit for the widest range of liberal laws since the New Deal era, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the War on Poverty; aid to cities and education; increased Social Security benefits; and Medicare for the elderly. The 1966 elections were an unexpected disaster, with defeats for many of the more liberal Democrats. According to Alan Draper, the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Action (COPE) was the main electioneering unit of the labor movement. It ignored the White backlash against civil rights, which had become a main Republican attack point. The COPE assumed falsely that union members were interested in issues of greatest salience to union leadership, but polls showed this was not true as the members were much more conservative. The younger ones were much more concerned about taxes and crime, and the older ones had not overcome racial biases. Labor unions began to lose their members and influence in the 1970s as the economy became more service-oriented and the proportion of manufacturing jobs declined. Companies began relocating manufacturing jobs to Sun Belt states, free of labor union influences, and many Americans followed suit. As a result, union membership steadily declined. Labor unions were painted as corrupt, ineffective, and outdated by the Republican Party.

During the 1960s, issues as civil rights and racial integration, the Vietnam War and the counterculture of the 1960s, affirmative action, and large-scale urban riots further split the coalition and drove many Whites away, signalling that the coalition started to fall. The War in Vietnam split the liberal coalition into hawks (led by Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey) and doves (led by Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy). In addition after the John F. Kennedy assassination, the coalition lacked a leader of the stature of Roosevelt. The closest was Lyndon B. Johnson (president 1963–1969), who tried to reinvigorate the old coalition but was unable to hold together the feuding components, especially after his handling of the Vietnam War alienated the emerging New Left. Besides Johnson, another who came closest was Robert Kennedy, the likely Democratic candidate in 1968. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, in the space of just two months, seem to have been an almost fatal blow to the New Deal coalition prospects.

Reagan Era and the Southern Strategy

During the Presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), Republicans took control of prosperity issues, largely because of the poor performance of Jimmy Carter (1977–1981) in dealing with stagflation. Reagan's new economic policy of neoliberalism held that regulation was bad for economic growth and that tax cuts would bring sustained prosperity. In 1994, the Republicans scored a landslide victory, and swept control of Congress for the first time since 1952. The response of incumbent Democratic President Bill Clinton to the conservative wave was to adopt certain aspects of conservatism into the broader liberal platform, including an emphasis on fiscal conservatism and deregulation, through the process of "triangulation," leading to his 1996 State of the Union Address: “We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there's not a program for every problem....The era of big government is over.” Republican-designed bills, such as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which cut back select New Deal-era programs, were signed into law under his presidency, as were laws that rolled-back banking regulations dating to the days of the Great Depression. Clinton largely accepted the neoliberal argument, thereby abandoning the New Deal coalition's claim to the prosperity issue.

While most Northerners supported the original civil rights movement, many conservative blue collar voters disliked the goal of racial integration and became fearful of rising urban crime. The Republicans, first under Richard Nixon, then later under Reagan, were able to corral these voters with promises to be tough on law and order. The votes of blue-collar workers contributed heavily to the Republican landslides of 1972 and 1984, and to a lesser extent 1980 and 1988. At the presidential level, the GOP made inroads among urban, middle-class White Southerners as early as 1928 and later in 1952. Starting in 1980, Reagan pulled together both middle-class and working-class White Southerners. At the state and local level the GOP made steady gains in both White groups until reaching majority status in most of the South by 2000.

Scholars debate exactly why the New Deal coalition collapsed so completely. Most emphasize a Southern Strategy by Republicans to appeal to a backlash against Democratic national support for civil rights. However, a minority of scholars consider a demographic change in addition to race. They argue that the collapse of cotton agriculture, the growth of a suburban middle class, and the large-scale arrival of Northern migrants outweighed the racist factor. Both viewpoints agree that the politicization of religious issues important to White Southern Protestants (i.e. opposition to abortion and LGBT rights) in the "Bible Belt" made for a strong Republican appeal.