What was Reagan's appeal to Democrats?

[Frozen Sky Ever Why]

In a way I can sort of understand former or even current Democrats voting for Trump, considering he's a fake populist who said he'd impose tariffs, ect. I cannot comprehend why Reagan "Democrats" went to Reagan. Reagan was much more fiscally conservative than your average Republican, was incredibly anti-union and pro free-trade. What the hell were the crossover Democrats voting for?

[RINO Tom]

Things were shltty, and Reagan gave a compelling case for why he would make them better in a much less partisan time.  For many Americans, by 1984, he had.

[Bismarck]

Things were shltty, and Reagan gave a compelling case for why he would make them better in a much less partisan time.  For many Americans, by 1984, he had.

Basically this. After stagflation, Vietnam, the unrest at the end of the 60s, Watergate, and the weak Carter administration, Reagan made America believe in itself again. Also in 1984 the economy was booming for the first time in many years.

[Hydera]

Following groups Reagan did pretty good with.

White Nationalistic and/or Socially conservative registered dems. Regardles of whether they were evangelicals, more religious or working class social conservatives who never bothered to go to Church they liked him. These guys probably fell out with the democrats and voted for Nixon or became Reagan supporters but never bothered to change their registration to Republican until then. In the following years this group finally changed their registration which is why the democrats who used to have a high voter registration advantage(not that it helped them as much as they hoped) the gap in registration became lower and lower.

White Suburban registered dems, many of which also had the same ideas as the first group. Many of these were young when they registered as democrats and once hey got degrees and good paying jobs they wanted to pay less taxes.



One thing to note is that democrats were super good at registering voters and they thought that made them stronger in elections if they registered voters when they were young. However many people who registered as a democrat when they were under-35. Ended up being convinced to vote GOP in the following years mainly because of religious, or social or nationalistic or etc issues/positions. Thats why states like Oklahoma and Louisiana and Kentucky for a long time had a large democratic voter registration advantage that ended up not being that useful for the dems because a large segment decided to vote republican.

Things were shltty, and Reagan gave a compelling case for why he would make them better in a much less partisan time.  For many Americans, by 1984, he had.

Basically this. After stagflation, Vietnam, the unrest at the end of the 60s, Watergate, and the weak Carter administration, Reagan made America believe in itself again. Also in 1984 the economy was booming for the first time in many years.

Job growth during Carter's 1st term was 10 million. Both of Reagan's terms resulted in 18 million. And this was despite the high inflation from the Iranian revolution.

[PoliticalShelter]

It's worth keeping in mind that Reagan actually didn't do as well with White Working class voters as commonly thought. He failed to win rural white southerners in 1980 (although quite easily winning them in 1984). He also lost large areas of coal country that republicans, particularly post-Bush republicans, tend to win with massive margins.

Many of these "Reagan democrats" weren't really working class, they were voters who had grown up in a working class background but under the post war economic expansion, had managed to claim a middle class lifestyle, and naturally began to grow a different set of priorities, that the Democratic Party often wasn't particular good at catering to. Combine this with the perception that liberal governance in the 1970s was failing, and the result is a large scale exodus.

However most of these "Reagan democrat" (at least the stereotypical Northern, Catholic one) largely swung back to Bill Clinton and many likely stuck with Gore, Kerry and Obama. Chances are the last president the Reagan democrats voted for, was a democrat, since they were almost all dead by the time Trump came along (in fact they were probably mostly dead by the time Obama came along).

The reason why these voters tended to be thought off as working class was because the media still tended to think,white ethnic Catholics as working class, even if this was horribly dated by the 1980s, let alone today.

[PoliticalShelter]

Job growth during Carter's 1st term was 10 million. Both of Reagan's terms resulted in 18 million. And this was despite the high inflation from the Iranian revolution.

This Slightly obscures the fact that when Carter was president he was seeing the mass entrance of the baby boomers into the workforce. By contrast Reagan oversaw the entrance of the smaller Generation X into the workforce.

Reagan also came into office when the unemployment rate was beginning to rise and had to preside over the early recession in the 80s, which had been the result of Volcker's sharp increase in the interest rate.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Overrated, for one thing.

Note that most working-class white Democrats (particularly unionized ones and those outside the South), the old-school left-liberals, poorer voters, liberal women/feminists, and especially black Americans (vast majority - of all backgrounds -  being Dems by then ofc)  utterly despised Reagan and were often quite scared by him and his politics. This was true even in his 49-state landslide in 1984 at the height of his popularity, basically.

Besides, most Americans did not like Reagan's policies, even if many liked him personally (or rather, liked his carefully manufactured affable public image). And he was quite unpopular at several points during his Presidency, particularly during the Volcker Recession in the middle of his first term and during the Iran-Contra era (which he and Bush Sr. should absolutely have been impeached and convicted for).

The "Reagan was beloved" myth started in the early 90s after the failed one-term Presidency of George Bush I, when Clinton was elected and the Contract On America types rose to power under Gingrich. Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, the Heritage Foundation, and others relentlessly pumped out misleading or even outright falsehoods in their propaganda regarding Reagan, as did the increasingly influential right-wing talk radio hosts and later in the decade, the Fox News Channel. It was basically all cynical bulls**t and whitewashing of one of America's worst Presidents. And not just the entire Republican Party (many of whom correctly saw Reagan as a vapid far-right nut before he was elected) but also an alarming number of Democrats (Clinton and the "New Democrats") bought into said bulls**t and whitewashing. Disgusting.

[Obama-Biden Democrat]

Take a look at SWPA and the Coal fields in KY and WV that voted for Mondale, despite him getting blown out by 18 points nationally. Mondale was the last gasp of the working class blue collar New Deal candidate. After he lost, the Democrats turned to technocracy and the DLC. Reagan ran best in areas such as the Philly suburbs, not struggling union areas.

[Sumner 1868]

The GI generation seems to have liked him a lot. In 1984, voters 65 and over supported him 64-36 and were the most Republican age group that year. Since they were the most Democratic age group in 1988 (Bush 51 - Dukakis 49) it's clear much of them supported him despite his party affiliation.

[catographer]

Things were shltty, and Reagan gave a compelling case for why he would make them better in a much less partisan time.  For many Americans, by 1984, he had.

Yup. Back then, if you were a good candidate and a good President, people who don't 100% agree with you may vote for you anyway. Nowadays, nope.

[adamevans]

Things were shltty, and Reagan gave a compelling case for why he would make them better in a much less partisan time.  For many Americans, by 1984, he had.

and the 1984 dem primary was very much contested and dirty leaving democrats who felt they didn't have a candidate to vote for.

[SingingAnalyst]

Since no one has mentioned this yet, I suspect Mondale had no chance in 1984 among working-class white voters in Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, once this news broke:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Popie%C5%82uszko#Assassination

I was a freshman at MIT at the time, and in Cambridge I never heard a thing about this; however, I'm sure people back home in largely Polish-American Sterling Heights, Michigan, heard about it. A few days later, Reagan won 70% in Sterling Heights, 64% in Warren, 48.5% in Detroit's District 6 (which was starting to have a significant Black voter population), and even 41% in Hamtramck (slogan: A Bit of Europe in America). More evidence that politically motivated actions can have far-reaching consequences.

[SingingAnalyst]

The GI generation seems to have liked him a lot. In 1984, voters 65 and over supported him 64-36 and were the most Republican age group that year. Since they were the most Democratic age group in 1988 (Bush 51 - Dukakis 49) it's clear much of them supported him despite his party affiliation.

^^^This. Older voters seemed to like Reagan. In 1976 voters over 65 split evenly between Carter and Ford. In 1980, they voted 55/39 for Reagan over Carter.

[SingingAnalyst]

Things were shltty, and Reagan gave a compelling case for why he would make them better in a much less partisan time.  For many Americans, by 1984, he had.

Yup. Back then, if you were a good candidate and a good President, people who don't 100% agree with you may vote for you anyway. Nowadays, nope.

^^^This. After two consecutive oustings of an incumbent President (Ford in '76 and Carter in '80), many Americans I think were ready to re-elect Reagan if they felt he did even a halfway decent job.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

His socially conservative positions and populist rhetoric.

[Sir Mohamed]

Mainly his charisma and the promise to start all over again after very rocky years. Remember what the US in 1980 was: There was the killing of JFK, MLK and RFK, 'Nam, Watergate and stagflation as well as Carter's foreign policy weakness. He was the "strong man" with charisma who talked optimistic about the future.

[Podgy the Bear]

The fact that he was willing to give up 20-30 percent of what he was looking for (while retaining 70-80 percent) brought a lot of Democrats into the fold.  My first two national votes (in 1984 and 1988) were for Reagan and Bush--haven't voted Republican since. 

Clinton did much of the same in the 1990s.  It's not there today.

[uti2]

The election was a referendum on Carter's high interest rates and Carter's handling of the iranian hostage crisis, any Republican could've won that election. It should be pointed out that most Democrats disagreed with Carter on how he handled those issues, they wanted Carter to be more aggressive against Iran and he also had appointed the hawk Volcker with stern democratic opposition.

[OSR stands with Israel]

Also one advantage Reagan had was he was a former two term governor of the largest state in the Union, California which also was a swing state (at the state level). So he couldnt be painted as being an extremist like Goldwater could , because Reagan, unlike Goldwater, had a record as governor he could point too whenever the Democrats would try to use that argument. Also what people forget is by 1979 , 1980 most people identified Reagan as a politician and a former governor of California and not an actor so they couldnt use the unqualified card.

[uti2]

Also one advantage Reagan had was he was a former two term governor of the largest state in the Union, California which also was a swing state (at the state level). So he couldnt be painted as being an extremist like Goldwater could , because Reagan, unlike Goldwater, had a record as governor he could point too whenever the Democrats would try to use that argument. Also what people forget is by 1979 , 1980 most people identified Reagan as a politician and a former governor of California and not an actor so they couldnt use the unqualified card.

This helps explain Reagan's comfortable margin. Reagan was seen as experienced and being of the mainstream. He was known for cooperating with democrats and having a moderate streak (implementing gun control & being one of the first governors to legalize abortion) despite being a conservative.

It was a pretty close race with Carter to the end if you look at the polling, but Reagan's track record provided reassurance to weary voters.

[OSR stands with Israel]

Also one advantage Reagan had was he was a former two term governor of the largest state in the Union, California which also was a swing state (at the state level). So he couldnt be painted as being an extremist like Goldwater could , because Reagan, unlike Goldwater, had a record as governor he could point too whenever the Democrats would try to use that argument. Also what people forget is by 1979 , 1980 most people identified Reagan as a politician and a former governor of California and not an actor so they couldnt use the unqualified card.

This helps explain Reagan's comfortable margin. Reagan was seen as experienced and being of the mainstream. He was known for cooperating with democrats and having a moderate streak (implementing gun control & being one of the first governors to legalize abortion) despite being a conservative.

It was a pretty close race with Carter to the end if you look at the polling, but Reagan's track record provided reassurance to weary voters.

Exactly and that's why the Democrats campaign against Reagan was extremely dumb because they tried to portray Reagan as an extremist right winger (like they did to Goldwater) who is not at qualified to be president because hes just an actor.



The fact is with Reagan being a two term governor meant he had an actual record he could point to unlike Goldwater which meant the extremist attack would not work.


And the hes just an actor was an extremely dumb argument because no he wasn't , he was a two-term governor of the largest state in the Union(California). That meant he actually was more qualified for the job than anybody running in the Republican Primary that year, Ted Kennedy, and was definitely more qualified than Carter was in 1976.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes all appealed towards Latinos, because they endorsed amnesty, and so did Eisenhower. But, after the death of RFK, the Goldwater GOP used a Southern strategy to get the white male vote out.  However, since the 2010 tea party days, Latinos have moved towards the Dems on amnesty.

[MarkD]

His socially conservative positions and populist rhetoric.

^^^
One thing I have always thought was fascinating about Reagan was that he spent as much of his time criticizing policies created by the Supreme Court as he did criticizing policies created by Democrats in Congress. He supported public school prayer, which meant he was critical of Engel v. Vitale. He opposed bussing, which meant he was critical of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Bd of Educ. He opposed abortion, which meant he was critical of Roe v. Wade. These were the kinds of issues that appealed to many Democrats.

[uti2]

Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes all appealed towards Latinos, because they endorsed amnesty, and so did Eisenhower. But, after the death of RFK, the Goldwater GOP used a Southern strategy to get the white male vote out.  However, since the 2010 tea party days, Latinos have moved towards the Dems on amnesty.

Hispanics have voted pretty consistently for Republicans at a rate of ~30-35% (w/ 2/3rds preferring Carter/Mondale/Dukakis/Clinton, etc.) all the way to GWB 2000 and since then with maybe two exceptions.  GWB '04 was the only outlier where the GOP won by 38-39%. Romney was the low-point at 27%, he did worse with Latinos than Mccain did.

[mianfei]

It's worth keeping in mind that Reagan actually didn't do as well with White Working class voters as commonly thought. He failed to win rural white southerners in 1980 (although quite easily winning them in 1984). He also lost large areas of coal country that Republicans, particularly post-Bush [junior] Republicans, tend to win with massive margins.

Many of these "Reagan Democrats" weren't really working class, they were voters who had grown up in a working class background but under the post war economic expansion, had managed to claim a middle class lifestyle, and naturally began to grow a different set of priorities, that the Democratic Party often wasn't particular good at catering to. Combine this with the perception that liberal governance in the 1970s was failing, and the result is a large scale exodus.

However most of these "Reagan Democrat" (at least the stereotypical Northern, Catholic one) largely swung back to Bill Clinton and many likely stuck with Gore, Kerry and Obama. Chances are the last president the Reagan democrats voted for, was a democrat, since they were almost all dead by the time Trump came along (in fact they were probably mostly dead by the time Obama came along).

The reason why these voters tended to be thought off as working class was because the media still tended to think,white ethnic Catholics as working class, even if this was horribly dated by the 1980s, let alone today.

Excellent points.

Looking through the 1972 and 1984 elections, and comparing them with 2000 and 2016, makes it clear that the issues driving long-term Democratic voters to the Republican Party were not the same in the two cases at all. There exist three major issues that account for the rapid shift of many banner McGovern and Mondale counties in rural coal (and metal-mining and timber) country to Republicans from Bush junior onwards:

• Environmental restrictions by the Democratic Party being viewed as deadly to local job prospects
• The Democratic Party’s support for continued high immigration, which they definitively view as making their wages unable to sustain an adequate livelihood
• The Democratic Party’s support for gun control is intolerable in these areas because guns are embedded in their traditions

In the days of McGovern and Mondale, immigration and gun control were nowhere near the litmus test issues that they are today. It was only in the 1990s that they became important. In fact, the suburban “Reagan Democrats” may not have been opposed to gun control à la Europe of Australia at all, when the most loyal white-majority McGovern and Mondale counties were fiercely opposed thereto.

As for immigration, Reagan had little or no desire for a restrictive policy, although it is fair to say that played and plays into the hands of big businesses seeking low-wage labor to import from outside the United States. It is highly plausible that coal country (and some politically not dissimilar mining and logging counties elsewhere, especially the Upper Midwest) in the 1970s and 1980s desired much more restrictive immigration laws than either major party would even consider.

Turning to the environment, it must be remembered that Nixon’s term preceding the 1972 election had seen the most significant legislation in this field of any presidential term ever. If in 1972 coal, logging and mining counties saw any fear of legislation affecting their populaces’ livelihoods, they had no incentive to back Nixon.

What was much more important to the “Reagan Democrats” is the perception that the Democratic Party had failed them economically and that it was catering to “fringe” groups like nonwhites, the welfare class and others amongst the very poor, and student radicals.

This perception has constituted a critical component of every Republican election victory since the Voting Rights Act. What has changed since 1984 is that the middle and upper classes no longer perceive the Democratic Party as an economic failure to anything like the same extent. Hence, the Democratic Party now gains twice the proportion of votes from the richest quintile that Mondale did. Contrariwise, poor whites, who have most to lose from the Democratic Party’s powerful identification with the nonwhite welfare class, whose resources they believe must go to white workers instead, have become the most hostile group in the United States to the Democratic Party. Often, this hostility is not expressed via Republican voting, but via not voting at all, because these poor and underclass whites cannot trust the GOP (especially to rigidly restrict immigration) no matter how much they hate the Democrats. There can be little doubt that Hilary Clinton in 2016 won a substantially smaller proportion of the poorest quintile of white Americans – especially if we count the increasing proportion of nonvoters – that George McGovern did in 1972.