When was the last election where D nominee was more right than the R?

[RINO Tom]

economically 2016, on social issues idk 1956 probably

Both of these answers are hilariously wrong, LOL.

[RINO Tom]

1912

I assume you must be including civil rights as a left-right issue where being against civil rights initiatives is presumably the "conservative" position?  Even then, I am not sure that - during the 1912 campaign - Taft was noticeably more pro-civil rights than Wilson.  A little, sure, but he wasn't too bold, to my knowledge.  Wilson really didn't gain an "anti-civil rights" reputation until well after he was elected, no?  I remember seeing that he actually got a lot of Black newspaper endorsements in 1912.

I also see little evidence that Wilson was running to Taft's right on economic issues?  Could be wrong.

[RINO Tom]

Good Ol' Grover (1892).  Though, I could make an argument for never, which would really fly against conventional wisdom.

How is 1904 not an answer, Alton B Parker was basically a Grover Cleveland style Dem

Parker ran a fairly populist/progressive campaign for David B. Hill in New York.  A short read of his stint as judge shows a pretty liberal streak, IMO.  I'm not sure why this one is such a "no-brainer," most likely due to people believing Teddy Roosevelt was a tad to the left of where he actually was?

[RINO Tom]

Never. On the other hand, "when was the last election where the Republican nominee was more progressive than their opponent" is a much more interesting question.

Good answer.

[RINO Tom]

I always felt like Carter was more conservative than Ford.

I don’t know what to say other than he wasn’t...

[RINO Tom]

I always felt like Carter was more conservative than Ford.

I don’t know what to say other than he wasn’t...

The fact that he carried the former Confederacy? Shows he at least had conservative appeal.

Not necessarily.  That 1) assumes states’ politics are static over decades and 2) assumes Carter won the most conservative Southern voters.  Was Clinton more conservative than Dole just because he won WV, Trump’s best state?

[RINO Tom]

You can’t make ARGUMENTS for certain years, but the answer is MUCH closer to “never” than it is a magical “turning point” ... including 1896.

[RINO Tom]

Cleveland was a hardcore free trader, while Harrison was a protectionist.

If you need something a bit more "social," Harrison stuck his neck out in support of an anti-lynching law, which Cleveland never supported.

Assuming one's left/right classification on trade is largely based on how egalitarian the effects are (e.g., opposing TPP on "corporate welfare" grounds), I think you could make a pretty coherent argument that being in favor of free trade wasn't necessarily more conservative in a time when the business community was pushing HARD for a protective tariff given our economic position on the global stage - an exact opposite situation as today.

I always felt like Carter was more conservative than Ford.

I don’t know what to say other than he wasn’t...

The fact that he carried the former Confederacy? Shows he at least had conservative appeal.

Yes, he had some appeal to Southern conservatives, being Southern and a "born-again" Christian. 
And yet, while Carter did well compared to other Democrats of the past 50 years, among white voters he only beat Ford in GA, AR, and probably TN.

Ford managed to still win in the white South because he performed well in Southern urban and suburban areas. His strongest performances in the south include Jefferson and Shelby counties (Birmingham metro,AL), Montgomery county (Montgomery, AL) and Mobile and Baldwin counties (Mobile metro, AL), Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery counties (Houston metro, TX), Dallas, Tarrant, Denton, Collin and Rockwall counties (Dallas Metro, TX), Lubbock county (Lubbock, TX)), Wake county (Raleigh, NC), NOVA, Virginia beach county (Virginia Beach, VA), Hinds County and Rankin county (Jackson metro, MS), Oklahoma and Cleveland counties (Oklahoma City metro, OK), Tulsa county (Tulsa,OK), Greenville county (Greenville, SC), Lexington county (Lexington, SC), East Baton rouge parish (Baton rouge, LA), Southern and Central Florida (Orlando, Palm beach, etc.), Hamilton count (Chattanooga, TN), Knox county (Knoxville, TN), Jefferson County (Louisville, KY), etc.


Carter definitely won rural Southern whites in 76.

Yes, and the suburban areas of the South in this era were pretty undeniably the most conservative white areas of the region; it's not like Ford was winning the Black vote in those areas ... rural does not eternally mean conservative.  Carter won a bunch of Fuzzy Bears, and Ford won a bunch of Extreme Conservatives.  The fact that rural Southerners now a days are a lot closer to Paulite Hick ideologically is not overly relevant to ... 1976.

[RINO Tom]

You can’t make ARGUMENTS for certain years, but the answer is MUCH closer to “never” than it is a magical “turning point” ... including 1896.

1896 though was a massive massive shift : Going from Grover Cleveland to William Jennings Bryan is a massive shift in every way possible as there was probably a bigger difference between both of them politically than there was between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater in 1964.

There really is no way Grover Cleveland stays a Democrat (assuming he is active in politics) through the Wilson years let alone the FDR ones. The Presidency since then which most resembles his is Coolidge(Who is also the only President I would argue was more right-wing than Cleveland since 1860)

The bolded is why you need a private class that meets twice a week with Harry S Truman (the President or the poster), haha.  You pinpoint these little policy positions or campaign slogans as if they are the pieces that create the final product of "Politician X" and completely ignore the philosophical reasons behind choosing a party in the first place - you completely disregard broader stuff like that.  Grover Cleveland would want nothing to do with Barry Goldwater, even if you both se them as "small government" or whatever, because they have fundamentally different philosophies.  Cleveland represented the MORE pro-business side of the more egalitarian (for Whites, of course) party; that doesn't mean he then fits in with the less egalitarian, more pro-business party, though.  Joe Manchin is not a Republican for a reason, Charlie Baker is not a Democrat for a reason, etc.  You don't step into a real-life PM matrix and give short policy descriptions to a computer and have it spit you back out as a "Democrat" or a "Republican," dude!  Politicians often choose parties based on their general worldview, not an ideological score.  Grover Cleveland used the same campaign gimmicks against the GOP that liberal Democrats of his era did; he just simply had more conservative ideas about how to achieve his goals than they did.

Your "big switch" date also assumes that the GOP before McKinley didn't embody his politics; I flatly reject that, regardless of whatever shift you perceived the Democrats making.

[RINO Tom]

Even in 1980 Carter did very well in the rural south

I'm not sure what you're suggesting ... if you are agreeing with people who have said the rural South actually had a more liberal streak in the '60s, '70s and '80s than Southern suburbs, then ... agreed.

[RINO Tom]

Michele Bachmann voted for Carter in 1976, but I suppose she could be a "religion first" voter.

When coupled with the fact that Elizabeth Warren used to be a Republican ... big if true.

[RINO Tom]

There are so many bad posts in this thread.

Free Trade is a liberal position in the nineteenth century! Arguably it is the defining issue of the period, the constant that allows us to trace the evolution of American liberalism from Jefferson to Jackson to Bryan and on through the years to Wilson and FDR. The Jeffersonian Republican party was formed in direct response to the economic policy of Alexander Hamilton, which in their eyes represented the hijacking of the central government by the monied interests. Jefferson feared above all other threats to the permanence of the Union the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the financial elites—bankers, speculators, merchants, and creditors—who would gain power and influence were Hamilton's program enacted. The two pillars of this policy were the central bank (which would establish national credit, strengthening the prospects of American merchants, and also ensure creditors could follow their debtors across state lines) and the tariff (which would strengthen American industry by blocking out foreign goods, thus increasing demand for domestic manufactures).

That's great if you're an aspiring industrialist or the owner of a fleet of merchant ships; not so much if you're an independent farmer. From the latter's perspective, tariffs robbed the poor to feed the rich by raising the price of manufactured goods in order to protect the interests of the upper classes. That, of course, is exactly what they were designed to do: Hamilton and Henry Clay argued for protectionism because they saw American dependence on foreign imports as a key strategic weakness undermining the independence of the republic. They saw industry as the driver of progress, with the idea being that if the upper classes did well, prosperity would 'trickle down' to the masses. It was also an inherently elitist position: from a liberal perspective, prioritizing the interests of the few above the needs of the many. It wasn't about 'protecting American workers,' though it was sold as that in the years after the Civil War to those workers, who were warned their jobs would surely disappear forever if the Democrats ever got power.

Ironically, the very object of protectionism—the nurturing of a strong consumer class—created the circumstances for its fall from political grace. By the early twentieth century, middle class progressive reformers had joined those clamoring for free(er) trade, motivated by the very thing that had driven the Jeffersonians to battle against the tariff all those years ago: high prices and distaste for taxing the common people to line to pockets of wealth manufacturers. William Howard Taft's failure to deliver on promises to gut the tariff were a major factor in his fall from grace among progressives, who flocked to Woodrow Wilson's anti-protectionist ticket in 1912. When Wilson enumerated a list of Fourteen Points that were to be the foundation of a new era of world democracy, Free Trade was second on the list; and while his legacy is scorned by modern leftists for his odious racism and incompetent performance at Versailles, Wilsonian 'New Freedom' was the genesis of the modern Democratic Party, as Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman both acknowledged.

The common misconception that protectionism is left-wing and Free Trade right-wing is owed to (a) a short-sighted means-before-ends view of politics and political ideology, and (b) a mistaken belief that because 'conservatives today support Free Trade,' it therefore must be a conservative position. Perhaps more generously, it assumes (c) that the left is on the side of the workers, and since wage laborers in the nineteenth century supported protectionism, it must be a left-wing position (you would think liberals would jump at another example of working class whites voting against their economic interests, but oh well ).

I one day hope to have your knowledge on this subject, a journey I have been on for a few years.  Genuine thank you for cleaning up this mess.