This is the first part of three posts analyzing the Democratic Party’s struggles during the 1920s, when it lost three consecutive presidential elections by landslide margins.
The second part can be found here.
A Regional Party Limited to the South
The biggest presidential landslides are two elections you’ve probably never heard of: the 1920 presidential election, and the 1924 presidential election.
More below.
In the 1920 presidential election, Democratic candidate James M. Cox lost by 26.2% to Republican candidate Warren G. Harding. Four years later, Democratic candidate John Davis would get barely more than one-fourth the vote in another landslide defeat. These two elections constitute the biggest victories in the popular vote in the history of American presidential elections.
In the aftermath of President Barack Obama’s victory, Democratic strategists liked to boast that the Republican Party was becoming a regional party restricted to the South. This meme has become less popular in light of Republican gains during the 2010 mid-terms, in which Republicans did quite outside the South (especially in the Midwest).
Yet during the 1920s, the Democratic Party really was a regional, Southern-based party that had great difficulty competing outside the South. It was a party that was completely unrecognizable today: a proudly racist, white supremacist organization in which its two main constituencies refused to back the same candidate not for one, not for two, but for three consecutive elections.
The story begins with World War I and President Woodrow Wilson.
— Inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/
But I really needed to click the link to get the context. I hope you don’t mind my posting the anti-immigrant comments that Woodrow Wilson made, which constituted the kiss of death for the 1920 Democratic candidate:
So Wilson was not only a rabid racist, but such an idiotic anti-immigrant bigot that he cost his party any chance at victory in 1920. But was he already quite ill at the time?
One editorial comment relating to your blog: You use “ethic” in place of “ethnic” several times, so you might want to edit that.
I look forward to the next installment.
the northeast and west coast (including HI but not AK) are rather strongly D-leaning, while the South is rather strongly R-leaning. Then you have the Midwest and Southwest which are basically the battlegrounds.
Even with the 2010 midterm results, I’d say that the Republican Party of today is somewhat regionalized. They had generally little electoral success in the D-leaning parts of the country I mentioned above (the exception being New Hampshire), and they even lost state legislature seats in a few states–such as Hawaii and Massachusetts.
These are the districts that the Democrats have claimed since 2006, and held in 2010
AZ8
CA11
CO7
CT2
CT4
CT5
DEAL
IA1
IA2
IN2
KY3
MI9
MN1
NC8
NC11
NM1
NY25
PA4
VA11
There’s 19 districts here including NY25, which might disappear soon pending 2010 results. Some of these are realigning and probably gone for good for the GOP (the CT ones, DEAL, CA11).
A couple of them are redistricting targets and will probably be taken back (ID2, I don’t know how Donnelly holds this). And a couple of them have rather conservative Democrats (PA4 and Altmire).
And these are the longer (pre 2006) term seats that the Dems held and lost in 2010.
AR1
AR2
CO3
FL2
GA8
IL17
KS3
LA3
MI1
MN8
MS1
NC2
OH6
PA11
SC5
SD1
TN4
TN6
TN8
TX17
VA9
WA3
WI7
WV1
There seem to be a lot more of the realigning types on this list. Most of them are in the South.
A couple easy Dem targets here (WA3 comes to mind), but not that many.
And these are the current battlegrounds that flipped, then flopped.
AL2
AZ1
AZ5
CO4
FL22
FL24
FL8
ID1
IL11
IN8
IN9
MD1
MI7
NH1
NH2
NJ3
NM2
NV3
NY13
NY19
NY20
NY24
NY29
OH1
OH15
OH16
OH18
PA10
PA3
PA7
PA8
TX23
VA2
VA5
WI8
I might be a couple off but its mostly correct. It doesn’t look like Pelosi has an easy ~25 targets on the bottom 2 lists.