Yesterday, Democratic pollster Doug Schoen made the case for the Democratic Party being taken over by special interests that are hobbling the party’s ability to appeal to moderate and independent voters in the center of American politics.
But 2011 is not the first time the Democratic Party has faced the prospect of being in a more or less permanent minority status in which it can only elect a president or a congressional majority following Republican miscues.
During the Reconstruction years following the Civil War, the Solid South was born. Voters in the states of the old Confederacy were so attached to the Democratic Party that they became known as “Yellow-Dog Democrats” — that is, they would vote Democratic even if a yellow dog was the party’s candidate.
Following the disputed presidential election of 1876 and the lifting of Reconstruction, the Solid South was the base of the Democratic Party. The only Democrats who won the White House between 1880 and 1932 — Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson — did so mainly because of Republican disarray.
The Democrats’ nadir came in the 1924 election when the party’s presidential nominee, James M. Cox, lost every state outside the Solid South en route to losing to Republican Calvin Coolidge by 26 percent. Cox got only a fourth of the vote in New York City and barely more or less in Chicago, Detroit and other big cities.
The Democrats were trapped and could only escape by defying Southern voters on issues like civil rights, labor unions and the role of the federal government in the economy. Old voting habits die hard, but by 1968, it was clear the South was no longer solid for the Democrats. There have been 11 presidential elections since then and Republicans won seven of them.
What is disturbing about the Democrats’ present condition is that America needs two healthy, vibrant major parties capable of attracting moderate and independent voters. But there is nothing moderate or independent about the agendas of the Four Horsemen of Big Labor, Big Green, Big Lawyers and Big Insiders.
When one or the other party stumbles toward minority status, the other, majority party doesn’t have to work as hard for voter allegiance, and that’s no good for anybody.
Today’s Examiner Special Report offerings start with Ron Arnold’s spotter’s guide to the eight kinds of progressives and how they relate to the four major special interests that now control the party.
Arnold also identifies 15 of the most influential power brokers — most of whom are hardly known to the public — and an additional 25 who are even less visible but essential to understanding where the Democratic Party is going and why. And the Heritage Foundation’s Conn Carroll examines the back story on one of the newest of those key Democratic power brokers.
Be sure to click on the links in the sidebar of this piece to easily navigate all of the stories in this series as they are published. More tomorrow!
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner.
