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

[E-Dawg]

For purposes of this thread, let's take 3rd parties out of the equation. Even if you would have voted for a left-leaning 3rd party in some of these elections, I am more so curious who you would have preferred (or at least considered the lesser evil) between the GOP and Dem nominees. Also, this thread is specifically about the post-Civil War elections (I ran out of room in the title to specify that).

I would imagine that the vast majority of modern liberals and leftists would have voted Republican from 1856 to 1876 for obvious reasons. The Republicans in this period were still generally right wing across the board (economically nationalist, protectionist, bro-business, more anti-immigrant, more religious and puritanical), with the exception of some of the radical Republicans who were genuine left-wingers purely in it for ending slavery and protecting African American civil rights. I think its accurate to say that the GOP in in the period from 1854 to 1876 was a generally right-wing party, but one that had a big tent due to their slavery and civil rights stances appealing to many left-wingers as well. The Democrats, even in this period, were in many ways still the more left-wing party. It was unfortunately also the party that was more sympathetic to the South, opposed abolishing slavery, and opposed civil rights protections for African Americans during reconstruction. All of these are massive deal-breakers to modern leftists and liberals, and you'd be hard pressed to find one that would say that would have voted Democratic during this period.

However, the Republican party stopped meaningfully protecting African American rights post-Reconstruction and the Compromise of 1877. The two national parties became equally useless on civil Rights, and the national Democrats were clearly both more egalitarian and more left-wing on economics (With the obvious exception of the Southern planter class who were aligned with the Democrats post-Civil War due to trade and other Northern business interests conflicting with theirs, on top of Civil War legacy).

So I would imagine that a lot of modern liberals/leftists would say that they would start voting Democratic in 1880 once Reconstruction had ended and the Gilded Age political alignments firmly were in place. I could also reasonably see a lot holding out longer out of a mistrust with the Democratic party, hope that Republicans would do something on civil rights, Northern sectionalism, seeing the Democrats as also being too pro-business, and for some Republicans such as Harrison being proto-progressive in some ways. I imagine these liberals/leftists would vote either Republican or 3rd party during the 1880-1892 elections, before finally switching to Bryan in 1896 due to him being clearly way to the left compared to the firmly pro-business and nationalist McKinley. I have a very hard time seeing modern liberal/leftists with coherent ideologies staying with the clearly right-wing GOP for any longer than this, beyond maybe a few isolated later elections (maybe 1904 due to TR's progressive record and Parker's mediocrity, or 1916 due to Wilson's blatantly pro-segregation policies).

I am curious to see if my analysis here is generally correct or not, I'd be interested in hearing different perspectives on this.

[E-Dawg]

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)?

[E-Dawg]

Also, I'm just gonna link to this below thread for some lengthy and really interesting analysis of the views of the two parties over time and how they evolved.

https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=371825.0

Something I've thought about recently is that contrary to a common misconception that the Democrats and Republicans have "switched sides" there's always been some continuity within each. Republicans have always tended to be the more nationalistic party and accused Democrats of being traitors/soft on the rebs/reds/terrorists, and included in their coalition Protestant zealots (in the north) and small business owners. To some extent current trends are causing the parties to revert to coalitions resembling those in the third party system as well with Democrats as the party of more recent immigrants, finance capital and free trade (DLC type Democrats are actually sort of similar ideologically to the Bourbon Democrats) and Republicans as the party of the native born working class and protectionism. The difference is that now it's as if their had been a nineteenth century coalition that had included the northern conservative Republicans and southern ex-slaveholders.

[E-Dawg]

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.