This will be a mini-TL written in the style of Jay Roosevelt's excellent 'The Future of the American Electorate (2012-2052)' TL, mostly focusing on American presidential and other elections, with some expansion into other areas here and there where necessary. It is a documentation of a realignment in American politics that never happened IOTL, and the way that a leftward shift in American politics in the 1970s might still be impacting us, even to this day.
Without further adieu, I give you...
The Sixth Party System in American Politics (1976-2012)
1976: HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN
For most of Gerald Ford's short-lived administration, he was faced to deal with a Democratic supermajority in not only the House of Representatives, but in the Senate, as well. Only two months after taking office in August of 1974, the Democrats would win overwhelming majorities in both chambers, leaving Ford, an unelected President with only a small base of support within his party, a figurative lame duck from day one.
Conflicts between Ford and his own party, including a very public one over the nomination of Nelson Rockefeller for Vice President, eventually lead to the rise of a 'dump Ford' movement on the right. With the 1976 Presidential election fast approaching, Ford declared his intention to seek the White House of his own volition...as did former actor turned Governor of California Ronald Reagan.
On the Democratic side, a crowded field of candidates soon gave way to only a few. The odds-on favorite for the nomination, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, came the closest to representing what the Democratic Party as a whole had represented for the past forty some-odd years. Despite initial uneasiness (Humphrey had just been declared free of cancer and good to go for another run in 1975(1)), Humphrey made a crucial decision to enter the primaries, announcing his candidacy in late 1975.
Though Humphrey was in many ways a combination of the last vestiges of the New Deal coalition, other candidates running for the Democratic Party's nomination in 1976 can be thought of as smaller, but no less vital expressions of powerful interests within the rapidly changing Democratic Party. Following Humphrey, the second strongest campaign of that cycle was that of former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, a technocratic administrator whose appeal to 'born-again' evangelical voters and working class whites with a combination of folksy populism and anti-Washington rhetoric made him a real force in the fight for the nomination. There was basketball player turned Congressman Morris 'Mo' Udall, a darling of college educated and environmentalist liberals; Senator Henry M. 'Scoop' Jackson of Washington, a key ally of Humphrey, appealed to the party's hawkish neoconservatives, as well as some sectors of organized labor who thought Humphrey too old or too racked with baggage to win; California Governor Jerry Brown represented the multicultural, yet fiscally conservative neoliberals; and George Wallace played to racial and economic resentment among white working class voters.
As the nominating contests played out on both sides, the frontrunners in each party felt the heat for the ongoing public disatisfaction with Washington, born out of the Civil Rights era, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter alike hurled rhetorical bombs at Ford and Humphrey, who were seen as 'Washington insiders', responsible for the 'malaise', as Carter put it, gripping the country. For their part, Ford and Humphrey did their best to blame the malaise on other individuals in Washington.
Nevertheless, Humphrey managed to rout Carter with an impressive victory in Iowa. Organized labor, though small in the 'right-to-work' state, managed to help get voters to the polls in ways that the poorly organized evangelical movement did not. On the Republican side too, the 'Washington insider', President Ford, managed a victory over his populist opponent, though only by a 2% margin of victory. While Humphrey's nigh overwhelmingly victory over Carter in Iowa lead to some single-issue candidates to drop out of the race, that race was far from over going into New Hampshire. Jimmy Carter, outpreforming all expectations, managed a razor-thin victory over Humphrey in the Granite state. On the Republican side, the President edged out Ronald Reagan by a single point.
Going into March, Humphrey and Gerald Ford won lopsided victories in Massachusetts, with Ford capitalizing on these victories to another solid victory in Vermont, which Carter managed to win over Humphrey in a virtual blowout. Ford and Carter were victorious in Florida, though Humphrey would come roaring back with a victory in Illinois (a state that, it should be noted, went to Ford as well, further taking steam out of the Reagan campaign). The turning point in the 'Battle of '76' it can be said, if there was one at all, lay in the crucial North Carolina primary.
All four campaigns investing a good deal in North Carolina in late March '76. Humphrey's campaign wanted a clear rout of Carter, wagering that if they could defeat Carter on his home turf, the inevitability of Humphrey as the Democratic nominee would carry him on to victory. On the Republican side, Ronald Reagan's faltering candidacy bet the house on winning North Carolina in order to pick up enough steam to up-end President Ford.
In the end, both candidates got what they were asking for.
Working class white voters in North Carolina split their vote between the technocratic Carter and the populist George Wallace, allowing a small contingent of North Carolina liberals and the substansial African-American voting block of the state to give Humphrey a razor-thin victory over Carter in the state. On the Republican side, conservative voters gave Ronald Reagan his first primary victory of the season, forcing Gerald Ford to stay in the race for the long-haul.
Humphrey's jubilation at the results was short-lived, however, with Jimmy Carter's come-from-behind victory in the Badger State of Wisconsin only a few weeks later, beating Humphrey 44-41. Doubling down, Humphrey won impressive victories in both Pennsylvania and Texas, though he would lose Carter's home state of Georgia and the state of Indiana. By May of 1976, the Democratic nominating process, which Humphrey had hoped to close with his victory in North Carolina, had become an all out slugfest between Carter and he. Mirroring this, the Republican side had tilted in favor of Governor Reagan, though President Ford was not down for the count just yet, as would be evidenced with a victory in West Virginia on May 11, 1976.
The month of May held the most primaries thus far, and the results helped shape the rest of the race to come, of that we can be sure. Humphrey and Reagan carried Texas, while Carter would pick up victories in Georgia and Indiana, a feat repeated by Governor Reagan. Humphrey would win Washington, D.C. while Carter would take Connecticut; Carter and Reagan would hold steady with wins in Nebraska; Hubert Humphrey and Gerald Ford would both make convincing wins in West Virginia; Marlyand, Michigan, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee would break for Humphrey, while Carter would close the gap and win victories in Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon. With the race having come this far, powerful groups and lobbies within the Democratic Party did see, for the first time, an end in sight, and acted accordingly. The early endorsement of Humphrey by the AFL-CIO (something unprecedented in the organization's history) looked like a move that might backfire at first; though ultimately, it helped Humphrey's organization take solid victories in the labor-heavy states of Montana, Rhode Island, California, New Jersey, and Ohio, with an additional victory in his home state of South Dakota (helped in due part with his endorsement by 1972's Democratic nominee, Senator George McGovern). By June, the Democratic primary process was effectively over. Carter saw the writing on the walls and stepped aside, allowing for Humphrey to head to the Democratic National Convention as the presumptive nominee. Although a small caucus of neoliberal and 'progressive' Democrats vowed a 'stop-Humphrey' campaign, it proved largely ineffectual without the support of either Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, or Teddy Kennedy, all three of which pledged their support to Humphrey for the general election. At the Convention, Humphrey was greated as no other Democratic candidate had been since the coronation of John F. Kennedy as the party's standard-bearer in 1960. Humphrey pledged in his address a 'Fair Society', a program of labor law reform, full employment, and national health insurance; he chose as his running mate Jimmy Carter, in hopes of fully uniting the party going into the general election.
On the Republican side, Gerald Ford would be given no such treatment from his opponent. Entering the Republican convention in Kansas City, neither candidate was seen as the presumptive nominee, and the race could have, at that point, gone either way. In the end however, the party of conservatism went a conservative route, and renominated it's incumbent President on the first ballot. In hopes of gaining conservative support for the general election, Ford announced that his running mate would be Kansas Senator Bob Dole, a darling of the party's rising right-wing.
The general election initially showed a rather large lead for Hubert Humphrey, but this narrowed as the candidates engaged in the first televised presidential debates in sixteen years. Humphrey was said to have outpreformed Gerald Ford in the domestic policy arena, though pundits gave points to Gerald Ford on foreign policy, despite a gaffe (played up by the Humphrey campaign) in which Ford asserted that Eastern Europe was 'not under Soviet domination'. The Vice Presidential debate between Governor Carter and Senator Dole was likewise heated, with Dole blaming the Democratic Party for the deaths of scores of Americans in both World War I and World War II, as well as in Korea and Vietnam. Carter responded with an attack on Dole's record of supporting American military intervention abroad, leading to a very public spat between the two following the debate.
In any case, when the returns came in on election night, it was clear that Hubert Humphrey would be the next President of the United States, and that he would be given an even larger Democratic supermajority in both chambers of Congress. Winning a majority of the popular vote (51% to Gerald Ford's 46%), and a relatively comfortable margin in the electoral college (336-202), Humphrey's election in 1976 is considered by many historians to be the beginning of the Sixth Party System in the United States (1976-2012), and considered to be a realigning election that saw new political coalitions emerge. At any rate, the return of the South to the Democratic Party on election night has been chalked up to a number of varying factors, from Carter's candidacy to the appeal of the Humphrey-Carter campaign to working class whites and blacks in the South; even to the candidacy of Gerald Ford being the greater of two evils--nevertheless, the victory of Humphrey-Carter in the South paved the way for a reorientation of the Democratic Party in the South as a biracial, class-based mass party organization that would help sustain the Party in the region going into the next two decades.
Senator Hubert H. Humphrey / James E. "Jimmy" Carter (D): 51.0% (336 Electoral Votes)
President Gerald R. Ford / Senator Robert J. "Bob" Dole (R): 46.7% (202 Electoral Votes)
Eugene McCarthy (Independent): 0.96% (0 Electoral Votes)(2)
Representative Larry McDonald / Thomas J. Anderson (American): 0.90% (0 Electoral Votes)
Roger MacBride / David Bergland (Libertarian): 0.26% (0 Electoral Votes)
Lester Maddox / William Dyke (American Independent): 0.14% (0 Electoral Votes)
1. Herein lies our POD.
2. Gene McCarthy wasn't listed with an official running mate in most of the states he actually ran in.
More to come...
Without further adieu, I give you...
The Sixth Party System in American Politics (1976-2012)
1976: HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN
For most of Gerald Ford's short-lived administration, he was faced to deal with a Democratic supermajority in not only the House of Representatives, but in the Senate, as well. Only two months after taking office in August of 1974, the Democrats would win overwhelming majorities in both chambers, leaving Ford, an unelected President with only a small base of support within his party, a figurative lame duck from day one.
Conflicts between Ford and his own party, including a very public one over the nomination of Nelson Rockefeller for Vice President, eventually lead to the rise of a 'dump Ford' movement on the right. With the 1976 Presidential election fast approaching, Ford declared his intention to seek the White House of his own volition...as did former actor turned Governor of California Ronald Reagan.
On the Democratic side, a crowded field of candidates soon gave way to only a few. The odds-on favorite for the nomination, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, came the closest to representing what the Democratic Party as a whole had represented for the past forty some-odd years. Despite initial uneasiness (Humphrey had just been declared free of cancer and good to go for another run in 1975(1)), Humphrey made a crucial decision to enter the primaries, announcing his candidacy in late 1975.
Though Humphrey was in many ways a combination of the last vestiges of the New Deal coalition, other candidates running for the Democratic Party's nomination in 1976 can be thought of as smaller, but no less vital expressions of powerful interests within the rapidly changing Democratic Party. Following Humphrey, the second strongest campaign of that cycle was that of former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, a technocratic administrator whose appeal to 'born-again' evangelical voters and working class whites with a combination of folksy populism and anti-Washington rhetoric made him a real force in the fight for the nomination. There was basketball player turned Congressman Morris 'Mo' Udall, a darling of college educated and environmentalist liberals; Senator Henry M. 'Scoop' Jackson of Washington, a key ally of Humphrey, appealed to the party's hawkish neoconservatives, as well as some sectors of organized labor who thought Humphrey too old or too racked with baggage to win; California Governor Jerry Brown represented the multicultural, yet fiscally conservative neoliberals; and George Wallace played to racial and economic resentment among white working class voters.
As the nominating contests played out on both sides, the frontrunners in each party felt the heat for the ongoing public disatisfaction with Washington, born out of the Civil Rights era, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter alike hurled rhetorical bombs at Ford and Humphrey, who were seen as 'Washington insiders', responsible for the 'malaise', as Carter put it, gripping the country. For their part, Ford and Humphrey did their best to blame the malaise on other individuals in Washington.
Nevertheless, Humphrey managed to rout Carter with an impressive victory in Iowa. Organized labor, though small in the 'right-to-work' state, managed to help get voters to the polls in ways that the poorly organized evangelical movement did not. On the Republican side too, the 'Washington insider', President Ford, managed a victory over his populist opponent, though only by a 2% margin of victory. While Humphrey's nigh overwhelmingly victory over Carter in Iowa lead to some single-issue candidates to drop out of the race, that race was far from over going into New Hampshire. Jimmy Carter, outpreforming all expectations, managed a razor-thin victory over Humphrey in the Granite state. On the Republican side, the President edged out Ronald Reagan by a single point.
Going into March, Humphrey and Gerald Ford won lopsided victories in Massachusetts, with Ford capitalizing on these victories to another solid victory in Vermont, which Carter managed to win over Humphrey in a virtual blowout. Ford and Carter were victorious in Florida, though Humphrey would come roaring back with a victory in Illinois (a state that, it should be noted, went to Ford as well, further taking steam out of the Reagan campaign). The turning point in the 'Battle of '76' it can be said, if there was one at all, lay in the crucial North Carolina primary.
All four campaigns investing a good deal in North Carolina in late March '76. Humphrey's campaign wanted a clear rout of Carter, wagering that if they could defeat Carter on his home turf, the inevitability of Humphrey as the Democratic nominee would carry him on to victory. On the Republican side, Ronald Reagan's faltering candidacy bet the house on winning North Carolina in order to pick up enough steam to up-end President Ford.
In the end, both candidates got what they were asking for.
Working class white voters in North Carolina split their vote between the technocratic Carter and the populist George Wallace, allowing a small contingent of North Carolina liberals and the substansial African-American voting block of the state to give Humphrey a razor-thin victory over Carter in the state. On the Republican side, conservative voters gave Ronald Reagan his first primary victory of the season, forcing Gerald Ford to stay in the race for the long-haul.
Humphrey's jubilation at the results was short-lived, however, with Jimmy Carter's come-from-behind victory in the Badger State of Wisconsin only a few weeks later, beating Humphrey 44-41. Doubling down, Humphrey won impressive victories in both Pennsylvania and Texas, though he would lose Carter's home state of Georgia and the state of Indiana. By May of 1976, the Democratic nominating process, which Humphrey had hoped to close with his victory in North Carolina, had become an all out slugfest between Carter and he. Mirroring this, the Republican side had tilted in favor of Governor Reagan, though President Ford was not down for the count just yet, as would be evidenced with a victory in West Virginia on May 11, 1976.
The month of May held the most primaries thus far, and the results helped shape the rest of the race to come, of that we can be sure. Humphrey and Reagan carried Texas, while Carter would pick up victories in Georgia and Indiana, a feat repeated by Governor Reagan. Humphrey would win Washington, D.C. while Carter would take Connecticut; Carter and Reagan would hold steady with wins in Nebraska; Hubert Humphrey and Gerald Ford would both make convincing wins in West Virginia; Marlyand, Michigan, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee would break for Humphrey, while Carter would close the gap and win victories in Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon. With the race having come this far, powerful groups and lobbies within the Democratic Party did see, for the first time, an end in sight, and acted accordingly. The early endorsement of Humphrey by the AFL-CIO (something unprecedented in the organization's history) looked like a move that might backfire at first; though ultimately, it helped Humphrey's organization take solid victories in the labor-heavy states of Montana, Rhode Island, California, New Jersey, and Ohio, with an additional victory in his home state of South Dakota (helped in due part with his endorsement by 1972's Democratic nominee, Senator George McGovern). By June, the Democratic primary process was effectively over. Carter saw the writing on the walls and stepped aside, allowing for Humphrey to head to the Democratic National Convention as the presumptive nominee. Although a small caucus of neoliberal and 'progressive' Democrats vowed a 'stop-Humphrey' campaign, it proved largely ineffectual without the support of either Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, or Teddy Kennedy, all three of which pledged their support to Humphrey for the general election. At the Convention, Humphrey was greated as no other Democratic candidate had been since the coronation of John F. Kennedy as the party's standard-bearer in 1960. Humphrey pledged in his address a 'Fair Society', a program of labor law reform, full employment, and national health insurance; he chose as his running mate Jimmy Carter, in hopes of fully uniting the party going into the general election.
On the Republican side, Gerald Ford would be given no such treatment from his opponent. Entering the Republican convention in Kansas City, neither candidate was seen as the presumptive nominee, and the race could have, at that point, gone either way. In the end however, the party of conservatism went a conservative route, and renominated it's incumbent President on the first ballot. In hopes of gaining conservative support for the general election, Ford announced that his running mate would be Kansas Senator Bob Dole, a darling of the party's rising right-wing.
The general election initially showed a rather large lead for Hubert Humphrey, but this narrowed as the candidates engaged in the first televised presidential debates in sixteen years. Humphrey was said to have outpreformed Gerald Ford in the domestic policy arena, though pundits gave points to Gerald Ford on foreign policy, despite a gaffe (played up by the Humphrey campaign) in which Ford asserted that Eastern Europe was 'not under Soviet domination'. The Vice Presidential debate between Governor Carter and Senator Dole was likewise heated, with Dole blaming the Democratic Party for the deaths of scores of Americans in both World War I and World War II, as well as in Korea and Vietnam. Carter responded with an attack on Dole's record of supporting American military intervention abroad, leading to a very public spat between the two following the debate.
In any case, when the returns came in on election night, it was clear that Hubert Humphrey would be the next President of the United States, and that he would be given an even larger Democratic supermajority in both chambers of Congress. Winning a majority of the popular vote (51% to Gerald Ford's 46%), and a relatively comfortable margin in the electoral college (336-202), Humphrey's election in 1976 is considered by many historians to be the beginning of the Sixth Party System in the United States (1976-2012), and considered to be a realigning election that saw new political coalitions emerge. At any rate, the return of the South to the Democratic Party on election night has been chalked up to a number of varying factors, from Carter's candidacy to the appeal of the Humphrey-Carter campaign to working class whites and blacks in the South; even to the candidacy of Gerald Ford being the greater of two evils--nevertheless, the victory of Humphrey-Carter in the South paved the way for a reorientation of the Democratic Party in the South as a biracial, class-based mass party organization that would help sustain the Party in the region going into the next two decades.
Senator Hubert H. Humphrey / James E. "Jimmy" Carter (D): 51.0% (336 Electoral Votes)
President Gerald R. Ford / Senator Robert J. "Bob" Dole (R): 46.7% (202 Electoral Votes)
Eugene McCarthy (Independent): 0.96% (0 Electoral Votes)(2)
Representative Larry McDonald / Thomas J. Anderson (American): 0.90% (0 Electoral Votes)
Roger MacBride / David Bergland (Libertarian): 0.26% (0 Electoral Votes)
Lester Maddox / William Dyke (American Independent): 0.14% (0 Electoral Votes)
1. Herein lies our POD.
2. Gene McCarthy wasn't listed with an official running mate in most of the states he actually ran in.
More to come...
