Were 1920 and 1924 abortive realignment elections?

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

I've been reading about the 1920 election and am struck by how hard the cities swung against Democrats and the degree to which the Harding campaign successfully managed to court recent immigrant groups. It seems that even the Irish who were the most reliable Democratic voting bloc in the north may have voted for Harding by a plurality. Sometimes I wonder if the Democrats were on track to be reduced to a southern regional party with the GOP becoming dominant in big cities were it not for the Al Smith campaign and the New Deal more then reversing those trends.

[OSR stands with Israel]

Not really, they were just the 4th party system party at its peak as a similar thing happened from 1896-1908 just not to the extent it happened in 1920 and 1924

[RINO Tom]

I've been reading about the 1920 election and am struck by how hard the cities swung against Democrats and the degree to which the Harding campaign successfully managed to court recent immigrant groups. It seems that even the Irish who were the most reliable Democratic voting bloc in the north may have voted for Harding by a plurality. Sometimes I wonder if the Democrats were on track to be reduced to a southern regional party with the GOP becoming dominant in big cities were it not for the Al Smith campaign and the New Deal more then reversing those trends.

That's very possible, but I think the Al Smith campaign had at least as much to do with it as the New Deal, when adjusting for the total, sizable impact of both things.  In other words, Democrats were already "the party of immigrants" (and, in general, always the party of "the marginalized," at least as they chose to define it at given periods) well before Al Smith, and Smith's campaign seemed like a very intentional effort to get back to the party's roots in that regard.  The New Deal provided them with a very logical next step on that path, IMO.

[Orser67]

I would argue that the 1920s were more of a reversion to form after a relatively short Democratic resurgence in the 1910s as opposed to an abortive realignment. 1912/1916 was the only time between 1852/56 and 1932/1936 that Democrats won consecutive presidential elections, and they did so then only because Republicans were split in 1912, and because an incumbent barely managed to hang on in 1916.

In particular, 1920, by some measures the most decisive defeat in U.S. presidential election history, was the combination of a Republican resurgence, a massive repudiation of the Wilson administration, and perhaps a broader rejection of the progressive era as a whole.