A Regional Party Limited to the South: The Democrats in the 1920s, Part 1

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/

19 thoughts on “A Regional Party Limited to the South: The Democrats in the 1920s, Part 1”

  1. 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:

    …there is an organized propaganda against the League of Nations and against the treaty proceeding from exactly the same sources that the organized propaganda proceeded from which threatened this country here and there with disloyalty, and I want to say – I cannot say too often – any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.

       If I can catch any man with a hyphen in this great contest I will know that I have got an enemy of the Republic.

    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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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