Lowest Point for the Democratic Party since WW2

[Skill and Chance]

Write-in: 1988.

Their 5th loss out of the past 6 elections, and one that they went into with an advantage and should have won.

Not really , given the Dems gained house and senate seats and I disagree they had the advantage. The economy was considered to be doing really well by most voters, things had gotten much better globally and this was a time when voters cared about foreign policy and the Republicans nominated an incumbent Vice President who didnt run away from a popular President like Gore did.

1988 was definitely an election in which the GOP had the advantage in terms of fundamentals and while that didnt produce wins for the GOP in 1960 or Dems in 2000, all 3 of those elections should have been wins for the incumbent party imo.

IDK, I think Dems should have been able to capitalize on the Farm Crisis more.  It's somewhat surprising Dukakis got blown out. 

[Senator Incitatus]

The '80s were demoralizing, but it was the ascension of the Third Way in the '90s especially that showed how much the Republicans and their fiscal conservative ideas had triumphed. 1994 was probably the most crushing defeat, and then "the era of big government is over" and getting Clinton reelected without either chamber of congress were pretty jarring too. ...

I'm going with 1994 because it definitively killed the Democratic Party as it existed to that point; 2016 was just the postmortem of that.

[TheElectoralBoobyPrize]

What about after 2002? They lost House seats and their Senate majority all under a Republican President who had lost the popular vote and was presiding over a weak recovery from a recession. They would be out of power for four years...the only time in the post-WW2 era they would be out of power for more than one cycle.

[Fuzzy Bear]

What about after 2002? They lost House seats and their Senate majority all under a Republican President who had lost the popular vote and was presiding over a weak recovery from a recession. They would be out of power for four years...the only time in the post-WW2 era they would be out of power for more than one cycle.

1984 was a time where the Democratic Party came to recognize that they had nowhere near enough Grass Roots support to win the Presidency.  They had no "base" of states they could count on, having lost 49 states twice in 12 years.

They didn't even win the Senate back.  They controlled the House only because of the remnants of the Conservative Southerners, and (unlike 1972) some of those seats were lost in 1984.