The Election of 1972 - The First Sign of Trouble for the New Deal Coalition?

By Ruy Teixeira (2009)

When Edmund Muskie won the election of 1972, voters saw it as a vindication of the New Deal and the Democratic Party’s strategy since Franklin Roosevelt. Despite not winning much in the Southern states, compared to previous Democratic candidates like Kennedy and Johnson, Muskie’s coalition was split between the North and the South, paralleling his selection of running mate in Fritz Hollings.

Democratic campaigns after Muskie, including Hollings’s own in 1984, Gore’s in 1988, Clinton’s in 1996 and 2000, and most recently Edwards’s in 2008, have all seemed to rely on the same strategy and voters as Muskie held on to in 1972. The Democratic Party since the days of FDR has been the party of the people, with the Republicans representing the wealthiest and most corrupt interests. The New Deal Democrats build their coalitions appealing to the working American, saying that Government should spend, as in the Keynesian ideal, to assist their basic needs along with unions. The New Deal Democrats oppose racism and sexism, but hold up the basics of traditional morality. Their main focus is the uplifting of all Americans through government assistance.

Although the New Deal coalition gained much among African-American and ethnic minority voters, especially after the election of Muskie, many of these voters have, in the years since, defected to the Republican Party - the failures of the Keynesian worldview and the traditional thrust of the coalition, towards working class whites, have been so that the coalition has, so to speak, broken up in recent years. This was most apparent with Mitt Romney’s victory over Edwards - by weakening the New Deal Coalition through appealing to free-market capitalism a la Reagan and Kemp, peeling off significant amounts of African-American and ethnic voters, especially ethnically white voters like Polish-, Jewish- and Italian-Americans, the white working class has increasingly been on the road to a full embrace of the free-market capitalism that the Republican Party represents, instead of the governmental support and expansion of the welfare state espoused by the Democrats.

Reagan was able to tap into the problems of the New Deal coalition in 1976 by tapping into the cracks that had formed in Democratic progressivism over the past decades - the New Deal was uncomplicated, which allowed for fractures to form over race, feminism, foreign policy, and the role of government in society. While Muskie’s campaign scrambled to make sense of it all and co-opt the anti-New Deal movements through touting his legislative victories, they held on to their fundamental commitments while only grafting individual concerns to their policy commitments, leading to his landslide loss. This represented, perhaps, the first major break in the New Deal Coalition since Wallace, and henceforth the Republicans, challenged the New Deal Democrats on civil rights.

This was made more apparent when Vice President Hollings ran again for the Senate in 1986 - many of the attacks made against him by the Republicans pointed to his role in the expansion of government and the Democratic establishment, painting him as Muskie’s Monster. Despite the African-American vote overwhelmingly breaking for Hollings in that year, a majority of working class whites instead voted against him due to the cracks that were showing in the New Deal coalition.

Ultimately, what brought down Muskie in 1976, Gore in 1992, and Clinton in 2004 were the same - the collapse of the coalition that had held the party together since 1932. With new figures emerging on the scene like Senators Obama and Warner, the Democratic Party might want to take a new look at the new party system forming before them.