Liberals/Leftists: What presidential elections would you have started voting Democratic?

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

I’m the rarity in that I see myself as having possibly been a Jacksonian Democrat in the 1830s (though sort of a reluctant one) that was also an abolitionist and saw opposition to the slave power as an extension of populist principles. By the civil war I definitely would have seen no home for me in the party any more and voted for Lincoln and yes would have stopped supporting the GOP after 1876. I can’t say I would have supported Hancock though and honestly probably would have been mostly politically homeless and supported third parties (except for Bryan) and then been a Democrat from 1928 on.

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

I’m the rarity in that I see myself as having possibly been a Jacksonian Democrat in the 1830s (though sort of a reluctant one) that was also an abolitionist and saw abolition as an extension and opposition to the slave power as an extension of populist principles. By the civil war I definitely would have seen no home for me in the party any more and voted for Lincoln and yes would have stopped supporting them after 1876. I can’t say I would have supported Hancock though and honestly probably would have been mostly politically homeless and supported third parties (except for Bryan) and then been a Democrat from 1928 on.

Are there any elections from 1880 through 1924 where you prefer the Republican nominee over the Democratic nominee (even if just as a lesser of two evils)?

Yes, I should have added 1904 and 1916 as two probable examples.

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

I should add that to your original post given how obviously pro-business the Republicans were from the 1890s on (with the sole exceptions of TR and Taft) it’s kind of amazing that liberal Republicans managed to limp on into the 60s. I wonder if they maintained some kind of vague lingering hope that they could retake the party and possibly force a realignment where the Democrats would nominate a Dixiecrat in response until 1964 when it must have become obvious they had no future in the party.

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

I should add that to your original post given how obviously pro-business the Republicans were from the 1890s on (with the sole exceptions of TR and Taft) it’s kind of amazing that liberal Republicans managed to limp on into the 60s. I wonder if they maintained some kind of vague lingering hope that they could retake the party and possibly force a realignment where the Democrats would nominate a Dixiecrat in response until 1964 when it must have become obvious they had no future in the party.

I mean, we have posters claim that people are RINOs and DINOs today, so that still is not entirely gone.  With that said, actual "liberal" Republicans - which I am defining as being at least as "left wing" as your average liberal Democrat - were never that large in number in the Twentieth Century.  A majority of them were more accurately described as being "liberal" for a Republican.  You can say Willkie is a liberal, but you cannot say he didn't run to FDR's right, for example.

True, I guess Republicans like LaGuardia and John Lindsay that genuinely were to the left of many Democrats were rare exceptions.

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=440578.0

This thread also has some great discussion on the ideologies of the Republicans and Democrats during the Civil War and the period after.

[N.B.—So I did not intend to write this much but it just sort-of grew of its own accord. Not good!]

The Southern planter class represented a fundamentally reactionary and dare I say conservative (in the Tory sense of wanting to preserve what was left of the old feudal order) element in nineteenth century American society. They were not exactly aristocrats, but close enough in the important respects that I will not dispute the term. I have said this many times, and it is why I call the Republicans of the 1850s a "progressive or proto-progressive party" depending on how technical you want to get.

If you are talking specifically about the period from 1854-1874, when the only fight that mattered in was between liberal capitalism in the North and quasi-feudal slave society in the South, then I would agree that the Republicans carried the liberal banner in that fight. I do not think that is contradictory of anything I have said in this thread, but I am clarifying here and now.

The problem with applying this to the whole of the nineteenth century (and from here on out I am responding only to Lechasseur's post) is that outside of that twenty-year period, American politics wasn't a straight fight between the planter class and the bourgeoise. For one thing, prior to 1854 the two were often allies: the Whig party was essentially an attempt to marry capitalists in New York and Massachusetts to planters in Mississippi and the Carolinas. Seward in 1860 includes bankers and speculators with slaveholders in his denunciations of "capital" and describes all three as being pitted against the interests of labor embodied by the Republican party. This is why abolitionists absolutely hated the Whig party and wrote disparagingly of the alliance between the "lords of the loom" and the "lords of the lash."

If slavery is incompatible with liberalism, then the Northern bourgeoise were not liberals before 1854, plain and simple.

After 1874 the situation is very different, as most of the liberal and socialist elements flee the Republican party, either returning to the Democrats (Chase) or migrating to the kaleidoscope of leftist third parties that sprung up between 1874 and 1896 (Weaver, Butler, Parsons). It is easy to look at the electoral college maps from this era and draw lazy conclusions about the orientations of the parties, but I would submit that what is really important to understand is what is happening in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic at the state and local level. This is where the new post-war America was being created, in factory towns and cities and on farms and railroads, and crucially it is where most of the voters are. And what we see is that despite the apparent Republican stranglehold on the electoral college, these states were closely contested in every election from 1876 to 1896, with significant showings for the Greenbacks, Union Labor, and Populists in turn. In the majority of cases, the major party that these leftist elements preferred to cooperate with in these states was the Democratic party.

In between you had the Democrats as essentially the party, first of the planter class during the 1850s, and then in the 1860s the party of various interests who wanted no part in a war for black freedom as they saw it. In the North, their support came mainly from those who had ancestral or business ties to the South, or who for a variety of reasons felt alienated from the dominant White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture.

There never was a planter aristocracy in the North, and to argue that Northern Democrats were dupes of the Southern landed gentry for the entire period from 1828 to some point in the early twentieth century is ludicrous, and more importantly ignores the very real political issues that did motivate Northerners to vote the Democratic ticket. They had interests besides just doing whatever the planter class wanted, and except those twenty years from 1854 to 1874, what the planter class wanted was not primarily what decided Democratic orthodoxy.

It is important to understand both who made up the political coalitions and why they chose to support them, and that varied from region to region and decade to decade. Unlike for instance the rank-and-file Confederate soldier, who did fight specifically to preserve a slavery and therefore the political and social dominance of the planter class, Irish immigrants in New York City or agrarian populists in the Midwest were not voting Democrat in the 1870s and 80s because they wanted to help out the Southern landed aristocracy, nor was that the primary effect of their votes. The most important conflict going on in these states was between the bourgeoise elements (those who had benefitted from the advent of industrial capitalism) and the several laboring classes (farmers, urban laborers, and immigrants generally). As bruhgmger pointed out a few posts ago, this is the Democratic party that elected Eugene V. Debs to the Indiana legislature and courted Greenback votes to elect their candidates all throughout the Midwest and even in New England, while the Republicans could not expect similar support.

The Democrats of this period were clearly not a labor party nor were they the preferred vehicle of the left. But it is not an accident that Bryan was nominated by the DNC and not the RNC.

Does anybody know which Chase unconditional surrender Truman is citing here? Salmon Chase died in 1873 and never switched parties. Brilliant analysis I think.

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

I very much doubt that most red avatars on this site would be voting Democratic in 1896: Bryan campaigned in opposition to urban areas in a way that no presidential candidate after him has. Of the fifty largest cities in the country, only seven were in a county that voted for Bryan: New Orleans, Kansas City, Denver, Richmond, Nashville, Atlanta, and Memphis. Of this group, Kansas City is the only one not to have been either Southern or a center for the silver industry. Bryan was simply not interested in the votes of city-dwellers.

I live in a mid-sized city (Providence) but still would have voted for him simply on the basis of ideology. That’s why I can confidently say I’d have voted for both Bryan in 1896 and Biden in 2020, because I’ve never been a culture war voter and don’t think I ever would have been when the other choice is William McKinley or Donald Trump.