The last election in which the Democratic candidate was more conservative?

[minionofmidas]

Not 1976. Jimmy Carter may have been a religious, but a conservative he was never. Ford was the kind of Republican they're actively unmaking nowadays, of course, but still clearly an establishment conservative.

Not 1960. LBJ's position on the left of the old Southern Democrats is even more clearcut than Carter's. Kennedy sure had some Conservative baggage, but it's not as if Nixon was ever a Liberal Republican either. If Kennedy had ever run against Eisenhower, you might conceivably have a case. Yeah sure, the Reps had a civil rights plank in their platform in 1960 - the prize for an unanimous nomination when everybody knew Nixon would win a vote against Rockefeller but by an unimpressive and possibly by an embarassingly small margin. So?

The latest you could conceivably make a case for - the last time that it wasn't all that clearcut -  is Eisenhower vs Stevenson

Although I would go with 1904. Certainly that was the last time this was *clearly* the case. 1928 is the most obvious alternative, though really only from an expost point of view.

[minionofmidas]

Lyndon Johnson disliked Northern Ivy League Liberals because he felt looked down on by them (rightly in a lot cases, wrongly in others). If that makes a man "conservative", the moon is made of purplish cheese. He's the kind of man who freely used the word "n" in private conversation but was fundamentally convinced of the equality of the races (in value, not in every respect) and of the vileness of Jim Crow.

Nixon, OTOH, fundamentally believed that a "democracy" where they let negroes, spics and white southern hayseeds vote couldn't be anything but a sham.