Which elections did Jim Crow laws "steal" for the Democratic nominee?

[All Along The Watchtower]

Literally every Democratic presidential victory until FDR depended on disenfranchising black Americans.

Democrats were founded as the party of violent white supremacy, and this remained their dominant tendency until the New Deal. Williams Jennings Bryan aside, it was their sine qua non.

...and yes, that includes the three-way contest in 1912. Taft only won renomination because of the solid support of Republican delegates from Southern states who, in effect, were representing rotten boroughs.

After Roosevelt, neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won without electoral votes obtained through black voter suppression. Obviously, this was not true for Johnson, and in 1968 Nixon became the first, but not the last, Republican president whose victory carried the taint.

Right, assuming this is strictly an answer to the OP ... however, it's still not a satisfying "history" of Black realignment by any means.  Too often, anything one tries to research on this boils down to, "Blacks voted for the Party of Lincoln until not-as-racist FDR came along with his awesome economic reforms and they became solid Democrats overnight and even more solid when the GOP became racist in 1964!"  It's a depressingly undercovered transformation process, specifically pre-1932.  The GOP's relationship with the Black community had been eroding for decades by that point.

FDR is an exception here because he won by a large margin. Whether he was more or less racist than previous Democratic nominees was not nearly so important as the Southern vote being less dominant in his coalition.

As far as the transformation of the black vote, after Republicans abandoned Radical Reconstruction their party really had no positive claim to forwarding the interests of black Americans. They happened not to be the coalition that relied on violent Southern segregationists, but contesting the single-party rule in the South ceased to be a priority, and border state Republicans looked for their votes elsewhere.

Every so often we hear accounts of how Nixon was the last Republican to win black voters, but that's trivial. Considering how many black voters were excluded from voting up through the 1970s, those who actually could vote shouldn't be treated as a representative cross-section of black political opinion. The history that you are looking for is dominated by organizing outside of electoral politics and the two major parties.

Great post. Well said.

[All Along The Watchtower]

After Roosevelt, neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won without electoral votes obtained through black voter suppression. Obviously, this was not true for Johnson, and in 1968 Nixon became the first, but not the last, Republican president whose victory carried the taint.

I'm pretty sure neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won the Electoral College without the black voters in the North.  Stranger in a strange land explained Truman.  JFK is estimated to have carried the black vote 68-32.  Look at the narrow Kennedy victories in Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

...and yet both relied on Jim Crow states for majorities in the electoral vote. There's limited value in pointing out partisan lean among voters when you're talking about voter suppression.

Related: One underrated aspect of the 1964 presidential election is that LBJ lost five Deep South/Dixiecrat states by landslide margins in an election in which he won every other state (minus Goldwater's Arizona - which FWIW, Goldwater won by a margin of one point, in contrast to those five Southern states) - for 486 EVs - and a 61-38 nationwide popular vote margin. "Landslide Lyndon" was actually a justified moniker this time, except for most of the Deep South, where the exact opposite happened.

The fact that a Democratic presidential nominee, running on an openly pro-civil rights platform and and having already signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and on his way to signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, could win a nationwide landslide in both the Electoral College and the national popular vote without the help of the Deep South (regardless of LBJ's past history as a segregationist - white Texas Democrat, after all - or at least, friend and ally of segregationists) is a historical watershed, especially when you consider that the Republican presidential nominee in that same election was "Mr. Conservative", being propped up by the modern "movement conservatives" who were rapidly taking over the Republican Party.

[All Along The Watchtower]

After Roosevelt, neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won without electoral votes obtained through black voter suppression. Obviously, this was not true for Johnson, and in 1968 Nixon became the first, but not the last, Republican president whose victory carried the taint.

I'm pretty sure neither Truman nor Kennedy could have won the Electoral College without the black voters in the North.  Stranger in a strange land explained Truman.  JFK is estimated to have carried the black vote 68-32.  Look at the narrow Kennedy victories in Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

Also, to tie your post into Averroes's response: Truman and JFK both proved that Democrats could narrowly win the Presidency without all of the Jim Crow states, and rely more on black voters in non-Jim Crow states than FDR, whose electoral landslides including the South. This demonstrated to the Dixiecrats that their stranglehold on the national party was slipping, but at the presidential level, it was still a slow process until 1964.