Liberal lions in deep red states

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

How/why did progressive liberals win Senate elections in states like Alaska, South Dakota, Idaho, and Indiana? All those liberal Democrats were, sadly, defeated by Republicans (McGovern, Church, Hartke, and Birch Bayh, with the exception of Gravel who lost renomination) but it's pretty remarkable these guys won elections in not just Republican-leaning states, but states that were all pretty firmly in the Republican column and very conservative at that. And most of these guys were in the Senate for a pretty long time. Hartke lost to Lugar in '76, and all the others fell in Reagan's landslide.

Even with polarization being as low as it was at the time, it just feels like there's no way these guys should've enjoyed long tenures representing those states. These were not moderates, they were proud liberals in hostile terrain, which makes their electoral successes that more significant.

[Vice President Christian Man]

Indiana had enough of a Southern influence to allow more moderate Dems like Bayh to win but in the other cases those states with the possible exception of Alaska since it was too new had an "old school" populist flare which these politicians were able to win off of. Although by the time the Reagan era arrived, much of that appeal in the region was gone as the prairie populists began to be replaced by Trump types.

[TDAS04]

Western Democrats can actually be quite progressive, especially on such issues as the environment, and are often anti-establishment. A McGovern, a Church, or a Hart often appealed to enough people to win, but not so much in more pro-establishment red states back East and down South. Also a reason why Bernie Sanders fared so well out west against Hillary Clinton.

[Republican Party Stalwart]

Much of this has to do with the candidates' charisma, personality, public perception, and personal moral values and lifestyle. I imagine that South Dakotans liked McGovern because he was an earnest man, with a decently moral personal character, who was from a politically Republican family background and personal upbringing, and who genuinely exuded compassion, humility, love, and altruism.

[MABA 2020]

It always amazed me that McGovern was from South Dakota

[Republican Party Stalwart]

It's not that surprising when you consider all of the other Democratic Senators, congressmen, and state legislators that South Dakota produced in the latter half of the twentieth century, as well as the numerous instances where the state has voted unusually D (1896, 1892, 1924, 2008, and a couple more).

The state has definitely always leaned straight-ticket R for the virtual totality of its existence, but it has nonetheless never been quite monolithic; it has always been quirky relative to other places that have been comparatively even more constantly R-leaning, such as South-central/Southeastern Kentucky and East Tennessee - probably because of South Dakota's rural economy (not just the fact unto itself that it is rural but also types of agriculture, mortgaged/"factory" vs unmortgaged/family-owned/household farms, particularities of culture around agriculture, etc.) (see SD, IA, MT, WI, MN in 1988 or 1924 to know what I mean), along with South Dakota's German Lutheran, German Catholic, and Scandinavian DNA (relative to more WASP-y East Tennessee or Northern Illinois).

[Fuzzy Bear]

Much of this has to do with the candidates' charisma, personality, public perception, and personal moral values and lifestyle. I imagine that South Dakotans liked McGovern because he was an earnest man, with a decently moral personal character, who was from a politically Republican family background and personal upbringing, and who genuinely exuded compassion, humility, love, and altruism.

George McGovern BUILT the Democratic Party in South Dakota over many years with intensive door-to-door retail politics.  He lost his first Senate race to Karl Mundt in 1960, but he kept digging and won in 1962.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Much of this has to do with the candidates' charisma, personality, public perception, and personal moral values and lifestyle. I imagine that South Dakotans liked McGovern because he was an earnest man, with a decently moral personal character, who was from a politically Republican family background and personal upbringing, and who genuinely exuded compassion, humility, love, and altruism.

George McGovern BUILT the Democratic Party in South Dakota over many years with intensive door-to-door retail politics.  He lost his first Senate race to Karl Mundt in 1960, but he kept digging and won in 1962.

I guess in a sense he was a sort of Stacey Abrams in terms of remaking a state party (before she was ever born, of course).

[Mr. Smith]

Forgot about Gale McGee (WYOMING!) and Ted Moss. (UTAH!)

Anyway, you had Edward Brooke, James Buckley, and Hiram Fong running these deep blue states  at the same time.

[Fuzzy Bear]

Forgot about Gale McGee and Ted Moss.

Anyway, you had Edward Brooke, James Buckley, and Hiram Fong running these deep blue states  at the same time.

Both MA and NY were far more Republican during the times of Brooke and Buckley. 

When Buckley was elected, NY had mostly Republican Governors since the 1930s, and Nelson Rockefeller had just won a 4th term.  The Republicans controlled both Senate seats, both Houses of the Legislature, and the city Governments of Rochester, Syracuse, Schenectady and all of the major suburbs of NYC. 

Buckley was notable because he was the only Republican elected from NY statewide that could honestly be described as a Movement Conservative.  He wasn't even really a Republican; he was the nominee of NY's Conservative Party and had the support of the Nixon Administration.  He won 39% of the vote to 37% for Rep. Richard Ottinger, and 23% for the anti-war moderate Republican appointed Sen. Charles Gooddell (father of the NFL Commissioner). 

Brooke was a liberal Republican who was elected in a time where Massachusetts was in an Era of Good Feeling.  Liberal Republican Francis Sargent was Governor, Liberal Republicans Silvio Conte and Margaret Heckler held key seats, and the Republicans held the MA Governorship more often than not.  The most CONSERVATIVE politician elected in Massachusetts in my lifetime was likely Gov. Edward King, a conservative Catholic Democrat who defeated Dukakis in the 1978 primary, but lost the 1982 primary to Dukakis because of his social conservatism.  King later became a Republican in 1984 during the Reagan years.

[darklordoftech]

Maybe those states had/have old right isolationist tendencies that made anti-war/anti-draft/civil libertarian candidates appeal to them?

[Fuzzy Bear]

Maybe those states had/have old right isolationist tendencies that made anti-war/anti-draft/civil libertarian candidates appeal to them?

Frank Church's Idaho was the home of Sen. William Borah (R-ID) who was one of the bitter end Republicans who opposed ratification of the Treaty of Versailles at all costs.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Forgot about Gale McGee (WYOMING!) and Ted Moss. (UTAH!)

Before Moss, Utah had Elbert D. Thomas, a devoutly Mormon antiracist and internationalist New Dealer who served three terms in the Senate, lost to Bob Bennett's dad in 1950, and died in office as High Commissioner of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands two years later. He was a long-lister for FDR's running mate in 1944 and chaired the predecessor of today's HELP Committee for most of World War II, in addition to being a reliable vote for FDR's war policies on the Foreign Relations Committee.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Forgot about Gale McGee (WYOMING!) and Ted Moss. (UTAH!)

Before Moss, Utah had Elbert D. Thomas, a devoutly Mormon antiracist and internationalist New Dealer who served three terms in the Senate, lost to Bob Bennett's dad in 1950, and died in office as High Commissioner of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands two years later. He was a long-lister for FDR's running mate in 1944 and chaired the predecessor of today's HELP Committee for most of World War II, in addition to being a reliable vote for FDR's war policies on the Foreign Relations Committee.

Wyoming was once a blue state. It voted to the left of the country in 1948 even.

[Republican Party Stalwart]

Maybe those states had/have old right isolationist tendencies that made anti-war/anti-draft/civil libertarian candidates appeal to them?

Frank Church's Idaho was the home of Sen. William Borah (R-ID) who was one of the bitter end Republicans who opposed ratification of the Treaty of Versailles at all costs.

William Borah was one of the greatest Senators in American history.

[Alben Barkley]

Maybe those states had/have old right isolationist tendencies that made anti-war/anti-draft/civil libertarian candidates appeal to them?

Frank Church's Idaho was the home of Sen. William Borah (R-ID) who was one of the bitter end Republicans who opposed ratification of the Treaty of Versailles at all costs.

William Borah was one of the greatest Senators in American history.

The man was a Nazi sympathizer who was delusional enough to believe he could talk Hitler out of war. His and his fellow “Irreconilable” Republicans’ refusal to ratify the Versailles treaty also arguably helped lead to WW2, as the US being in the League of Nations might have actually made a difference. Even if it still happened, the US being involved earlier could have saved millions of lives.

[ClassicElectionEnthusiast]

As far as Birch Bayh and George McGovern, in both of their cases their respective states were strongly enough Republican (IN, SD) that save for McGovern winning his 2nd term in 1968 by a 13-point margin over former Governor Archie Gubbrud, both of them had to struggle to win their Senate races.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

The media environment was much more localised in those days so there was less domination of national ideological issues. Many conservative voters in these small states would have been reading in the local paper how their Senator may be on the liberal side but was a Nice Guy FF who was respected in the Senate, had seniority and these committee chairs, which he had used to bring this industry to the state, and he'd stood up to the President of his party on this issue etc.. This is an interesting paragraph I just stumbled across:

[Church] was also careful to cater to his conservative constituency on issues like gun control, and voters respected his integrity and his independent stance against the Johnson administration, which was very unpopular by 1968. After a meeting in New Meadows, for example, a cattleman assured Bethine Church that she “needn’t worry. I’ll be for your man—but I’ll be damned if I’ll be for L.B.J.” That election year, the conservative Idaho Statesman broke precedent and backed Church, arguing that “no Senator from Idaho since [William] Borah has commanded so much respect in the Senate or the nation.” Even in conservative, Republican Payette, Idaho, one publisher confessed that there was “a lot of sentiment that he’s the best senator we’ve had in years.”

Voters were local-minded and cared relatively more about Idaho having a respected local champion than certain votes on national legislation, and didn't tend to associate local politicians with the national parties or incumbent president so much. Again because most of their information about their Senator came from local media, which increased the power of retail politics and helped incumbents.


In 1964, Joe Manchin could probably say "yeah I voted for Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, but as chair of the Senate Energy Committee I stood up to the President and brought the Mountain Valley Pipeline to West Virginia which produced x thousand jobs", and people would read about his vote in the Charleston Gazette with a glowing writeup from a Moderate Hero local journalist who knew his staff personally and liked the guy. In 2024 Manchin just gets bashed over the head by Fox News and Republican attack ads telling West Virginians how Manchin voted with Biden 90% of the time or whatever.

[Alcibiades]

I’ll focus on McGovern, because I think there’s the most to say about him. Many years after his infamous presidential loss, in 2006, he said:

How the hell do you get elected in South Dakota for twenty years if you're a wild-eyed radical?

I think there’s actually a lot of truth to that. Despite his 1972 campaign having become a byword for out-of-touch left-liberalism, McGovern was no radical. In fact, he was deeply rooted in the political traditions of his home state. He grew up in a Republican family, and only became a Democrat in the 50s, having been inspired by Adlai Stevenson. He was a modest man with a restrained rhetorical style who kept his distance from the Washington establishment. In Congress, his main policy preoccupation was with agricultural issues. His famed anti-war stance was arguably in line with the isolationist tradition of the Prairies. And he took anti-union votes as a senator, which makes sense considering that South Dakota has never had much industry (McGovern was of course hated by the unions during his presidential campaign — the AFL-CIO stunningly refused to endorse him — but this gave him common cause with his reformist liberal supporters, many of whom regarded the unions as an antiquated, corrupt, socially conservative, and militaristic influence on the Democratic Party).

What seems to have happened is that McGovern was somewhat thrust into the national limelight as a liberal hero on account of being one of the strongest anti-Vietnam War voices in Congress. As a result, liberal activists rallied around him as their candidate in 1972, and, although he was certainly a social liberal himself, he became inadvertently tarnished by association with some of their more electorally unpalatable views which he himself would certainly have never openly expressed, hence why the Nixon campaign successfully painted him as the candidate of ‘amnesty, acid and abortion’.

It seems undoubtedly true that this national campaign against him had a detrimental effect on his popularity back in South Dakota. In 1974, he won re-election by a fairly narrow margin, reduced from 1968, despite this being a big Democratic wave year on account of Watergate. Then in 1980, having won the Democratic primary by a mere 62-38 margin against a man Wikipedia describes only as a ‘pro-life activist’, he lost the general election in a nearly 20-point blowout (what we might today call a ‘Blanching’), whereas Bayh and Church (who themselves were perhaps hurt by their 1976 presidential campaigns giving them an increased national liberal profile) only narrowly went down. This is all to say that Thersites’ point above about politics being less nationalised is a very good one; once McGovern had been painted as a liberal extremist on the national stage, he never really recovered his previous reputation as a popular moderate in South Dakota.

[Electric Circus]

Thersites makes the point that I intended to share here.

Politicians have less agency when it comes to how information about them flows to different audiences If George McGovern were running for Senate in today's media environment, someone would have put his thesis on the Colorado Coalfield War online, and Twitter posters would be riffing on choice quotes.

Mass media has also tended to homogenize and deracinate voters themselves. Plenty of people have experienced this Invasion of the Body Snatchers effect second-hand, in which someone you know becomes a fervent mouthpiece for the party line of some media outlet or online community to which their initial attraction was far more nuanced.

That's not to say that material economic changes were less important. As recently as 1988, a farm crisis had a pronounced effect on the electoral map. Fluctuating milk prices have swung blocks of dairy counties toward Democrats in a presidential election as recently as 2008. Few of the examples named here represent any kind of inconsistency with their states' prior political histories. They only appear incongruent when we look backward from the present and project extremely recent patterns of stereotyped political behavior onto the past.

[TDAS04]

McGovern, Bayh, and Church all lost in 1980. Ironically, Church’s 1-point loss in Idaho was as narrow as that year’s reelection victory for a “conservative lion” in the conservative state of Arizona.

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

I appreciate all these great responses. Apologies for just seeing them now.