Electability: how has “preventing another McGovern” worked out for the DNC? Not so well

How these genius judges of presidential electability have managed to lose 6 out of 10 since 1980 — and have a plan to make it 7 out of 11

The seminal event in the eyes of DNC types (by which, let’s say, we mean professional insiders and their avatar politicians) was George McGovern’s calamitous, 49-states-to-1 loss to incumbent Richard Nixon in 1972. Since then, they’ve seen it as their mission to prevent such (supposedly) unelectable left-wing Democrat from ever again attaining the nomination. With the possible exception of Walter Mondale (a traditional unionist liberal Democrat) in 1984, another 49-state loss which DNC probably consider the exception that proves the rule, they have succeeded in preventing anyone truly left of center from getting the nomination since 1972. That’s almost half a century. How’s that working out for them, and for us?

First let’s review how 1972 happened, starting with how the previous electoral experience shaped it. Candidates, activists and DNC types were all still traumatized by 1968, in which the party machinery engineered the nomination of Vice President Hubert Humphrey — who had run in no primaries — over the more popular (and anti-war) Eugene McCarthy, all in the shadow of the murder of frontrunner Robert Kennedy ten weeks earlier. Anti-war and counter-culture activists, outraged that the party was overriding popular will by nominating someone who was (still, at that point) on board with Lyndon Johnson’s war policy, pressed the convention and were assailed by Chicago riot police. The image of the convention could scarcely have been worse — the party crowning their nominee in a chaotic sea of blood. (Protestors descended on the Republican convention too, but by luck or design, that convention was on an island — Miami Beach — access to which could be easily controlled. So the protestors didn’t get close.). Though Humphrey suffered from the convention’s infamy and was an erratic campaigner, he steadily gnawed at Nixon’s lead in the polls, especially after publicly breaking with President Johnson’s Vietnam policy five weeks before the election. In the end, he lost to Nixon very narrowly. The experience embittered anti-war activists, who saw the nomination go to an insider candidate who at the time was no more committed to ending the violence in Vietnam than Nixon was, and who moreover lost to this sinister personality who just six years previously had been a political dead-man-walking, growling to the press in 1962 that they wouldn’t “have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.”

Fast forward to the 1972 Democratic nominating campaign: although none of the candidates embraced Nixon’s war policy or spoke in favor of staying in Vietnam for the long haul, McGovern stood out by saying unequivocally, enough is enough — this is wrong and it doesn’t matter to US security, so I would get us right now. He shouldn’t have been the only candidate to espouse such a common-sense and morally-right stance, but so it was. Despite the evident futility of fighting on in Vietnam, this message was too much for the party establishment (perhaps in part because there was still an important remnant of the hyper-conservative Southern wing of the party). So McGovern got no help from them and had to run a grassroots campaign in the primaries; but this was successful enough to send him to the convention with the plurality of delegates. Complicated maneuvering ensued, but the anti-McGovern factions and party establishment could not coalesce and McGovern won the nomination after arduous late-night processes. (He benefited from DNC rules changes in reaction to 1972, which among other things gave clearer advantages to the candidate who won the most primaries, i.e. reducing the leverage of party insiders at the convention.) This was an outsider capturing a major party’s nomination against the will of its establishment. What happened next? First the debacle with his running mate, Sen. Thomas Eagleton — but there is evidence to suggest that the leak of Eagleton’s history of mental illness and electroshock treatment was by Democratic insiders, not Nixon’s dirty-tricks retinue (though they would have had no qualms about doing so, had others not beaten them to it). Then the party machinery essentially went on strike and refused to turn out the vote for McGovern. The South swung to the Republicans, as Nixon had strategized with steady race-baiting. In the end, of course, McGovern was crushed.

The lesson the party establishment drew was, never ever let a radical outsider get anywhere close to the nomination again. But was that the right lesson? Was McGovern really that radical? Didn’t all Americans want to get out of Vietnam by 1972? Even Nixon, by promising peace talks and phasing over the fighting to the South Vietnamese army, was essentially promising the same thing. (More Americans died in Vietnam under Nixon than under Johnson; and by 1972 Nixon’s harping on Vietnamization and dangling possible peace talks should have become unconvincing, making McGovern potentially more credible on Vietnam. His WW2 service record as a decorated bomber pilot should have helped.) On domestic / social policy, McGovern was slandered as the candidate of “amnesty, acid and abortion,” but this slander seems to have been repeated by Democratic insiders as much as by Nixon supporters. The party machinery had managed to overcome the electoral hurdles of JFK’s inexperience and Catholicism, and nearly overcome Humphrey’s massive negatives. So the real lesson should have been that there is almost no candidate shortcoming that a supportive Democratic party machinery could not overcome; and conversely, there can be no defeat so bad or inevitable as that self-inflicted by an oppositional party establishment. Nonetheless, that establishment concluded that a populist candidate with anti-establishment positions, even if those positions be common-sense and popular, was the problem; and ever since then has acted accordingly.

Now to their ensuing record of success in holding the White House. 1976 is a good place to start, because it might be where we first see this establishment determination in action. Although Jimmy Carter started as a long-shot outsider candidate for the nomination, and is remembered as a pro-human-rights liberal, in fact in 1976 he was about the most right-wing Democratic candidate (excluding lingering Southern segregationist George Wallace and arch-Cold-Warrior Henry Jackson, the ‘Senator from Boeing’). Here we might detect the hand of Bob Strauss, the Texas lawyer who was DNC chair 1972–1977; he had always been a John Connally man (and Connally had changed from Democrat to Republican in 1973). But, just at the post-Nixon moment when the Democrats had vast momentum, huge Congressional majorities, and could have benefited from the major discrediting of the national security state by the Church Committee revelations, the fall of South Vietnam, and détente with the Soviets — an opening for liberalism that you could drive a cruise ship through — the nomination goes to a right-winger, whose presidency ended up foreshadowing much of the Reagan Revolution (de-regulation, military buildup). So his vaulting to the front of the primary field and winning the nomination smoothly was consistent with a DNC determined to prevent left-wing success. (I have not examined the primary campaign in detail to detect whether the DNC put its thumb on the scales for Carter; it may not have been necessary, given Carter’s fresh-faced, “I’ll never lie to you” appeal and Southern affinities.)

With your indulgence, however, I’ll set aside Carter’s win against Ford in 1976 from our assessment of DNC success in presidential elections, for at least two reasons. First, the Democrats in 1976 could have run a ticket of Charlie Manson and the Unabomber and scarcely lost, with Nixon’s crimes in full view, Ford’s pardon of Nixon making his post-facto complicity obvious, Reagan’s bruising of Ford in the Republican primaries, and Ford himself wooden and unpresidential (and very CIA-connected, if anyone cared to mention it, plus complicit in the JFK cover-up as a Warren Commission member). Second, Carter almost did lose, at a moment when almost no Democrat could. People forget how close that election was: 50% to 48% in popular vote; Ford actually won more states (27); Carter the Georgian won by holding the South and just enough big states. But he almost screwed up a sure thing.

So that leaves the elections of 1980 through 2016, which amount to 10 elections. I can be brief in our assessment. The DNC’s groomed, non-left-wing candidates managed to lose 6 of those ten (1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, 2004, 2016 — and I’m counting 2000 as a loss because the DNC’s candidate was too stiff to fight back successfully against an obvious steal in Florida). Moreover they lost those six to the following array of thickies, sinister clowns, and villains: ex-movie actor Reagan; ex-CIA Director (and longtime covert spook) Bush senior; ex-alcoholic, feckless and mean Bush junior; and (no adjectives needed) Trump. Against these, the DNC put up the all-time dream team of Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and Hillary. Gag me.

So the DNC’s record since 1976, against mentally and ethically impaired competition, is south of .500, about what the Red Sox do in their worst years. Plus, they are conspicuously failing to learn from experience: whereas the lessons of Mondale’s or Gore’s losses may be ambiguous, those of Hillary’s loss are not — in 2020 as in 2016, people know they’re getting screwed and the system is rigged, and they won’t turn out to vote for anyone who pretends that’s not so.

There’s a school of thought, to which I increasingly subscribe, that the DNC and the party it pilots are, in the eyes of the wealthy, mainly there to deflect, defuse and co-opt populist economic liberalism. In this view, the DNC is prepared to lose if necessary, and may go to extremes to play its role — self-destruction may be the last line of defense (see previous article). But I’m writing this article today, I guess, to address the persistent doubts about Sanders’ electability. Most Democratic and independent voters who harbor those doubts are sincere and concerned (though many DNC and media types who reinforce them do so out of disingenuous self-interest). So I’d like to make the point to the sincere ones, don’t let these geniuses tell you who’s electable. They’ve gotten it wrong more times than a coin flip. My gut told me in 2016 that there was going to be a populist wave, either Sanders or Trump. It’s saying the same thing now. When in doubt, go with your gut.