Introduction

Far from being the tenuous and unmeaningful victory suggested by critical observers, the election of Richard M. Nixon as President of the United States in November, 1968, bespoke the end of the New Deal Democratic hegemony and the beginning of a new era in American politics. To begin with, Nixon was elected by a Republican Party much changed from that deposed in 1932; and such party metamorphosis has historically brought a fresh political cycle in its wake. Secondly, the vastness of the tide (57 per cent) which overwhelmed Democratic liberalism—George Wallace's support was clearly an even more vehement protest against the Democrats than was Nixon's vote—represented an epochal shifting of national gears from the 61 per cent of the country's ballots garnered in 1964 by Lyndon Johnson. This repudiation visited upon the Democratic Party for its ambitious social programming, and inability to handle the urban and Negro revolutions, was comparable in scope to that given conservative Republicanism in 1932 for its failure to cope with the economic crisis of the Depression. And ironically, the Democratic debacle of 1968 followed the Party's most smashing victory—that of 1964—just as the 1932 toppling of the Grand Old Party succeeded the great landslide of 1928. A comparison of the two reversals is apt:

The changed makeup and outlook of the GOP reflects its switchover, during the 1932–68 span of the New Deal era, from orientation towards the establishmentarian Northeast—especially the Yankee and industrial bailiwicks of New England, upstate New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania—to representation of the rising insurgency of the South, the West, the New York City Irish and middle-class suburbia. At the same time, while the New Deal institutionalized into a nationally-dominant liberal Establishment, the Democratic power base shifted to the Northeast, historically the seat of America's dominant economic, social, cultural and political elite. By 1964, the transition was reasonably obvious; whatever the strategic ineptitude of the Goldwater candidacy, it was not a geopolitical fluke. As Chart 2 shows, the Republican Party had been moving its reliance South and West since the beginning of the New Deal cycle in 1932. The 1968 election confirmed the general Southern and Western impetus of 1964—only the Deep South parochialism had been an aberration—and set a cyclical seal on the partisan re-alignment.

Maps 1–4 illustrate the regional tides at work and Chart 3 estimates the group voting currents of 1960–68. In 1968, only six states and the District of Columbia gave the Democratic presidential nominee a majority of the vote; seven other states produced Humphrey pluralities in the face of Nixon-Wallace majorities. In thirty-seven other states, Nixon-Wallace majorities divided in such a way as to award victory to either the Republican candidate, who carried thirty-two states, or Wallace, who carried five. Most of the Democratic states were Northeastern—Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland (as well as the District of Columbia)—or (West Virginia excluded) they were states—Michigan, Minnesota, Washington and Hawaii—which had been heavily settled or influenced by Yankees or Scandinavians. In light of its concentration in an area which had been the prime sociological core of post-Civil War Republicanism, 1968 Democratic strength was peculiarly ironic.

The forces shaping this parochialism are clear enough; they explain why, even as 1968 saw the nation turning against the Democrats, a handful of the New England and above-mentioned states swam against the current and gave the Democrats a higher vote share than in 1960. First of all, no other part of the United States shares the historical penchant of the Northeast for supporting the politics and ideology of a hitherto nationally dominant, but fading, group of interests. The Jeffersonian, Jacksonian and New Deal upheavals all captured the White House against ballot opposition centered in the Northeast. And on top of growing national Democratic Party identification with Northeastern interests, another major fulcrum of 1968 upheaval was the erosion of Civil War political traditions which had been the source of American sectional politics and partisanship for a century. Because of loyalties formed in the crucible of slavery and civil war, Yankees and Scandinavians in New England, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and the Pacific Northwest were the driving force and numerical bulwark of a Republican Party they had principally created. But as a result of the social upheaval of the Nineteen-Sixties, these were the groups and states among whom and which the Democrats gained (or suffered only minimal losses) in 1968. In many of the same areas where the Civil War had ingrained the most intense Republicanism, Democratic identification with the Negro social and economic revolution precipitated that party's best gains a century later.

On the other side of the coin, the conservative and Republican alliance of 1968 mobilized in areas with an insurgent record—the South, the West and the Irish sidewalks of New York (as well as the emerging tax-revolt centers of middle-class suburbia)—and a record of support for popular movements like those of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These voting streams were inclined to move away from, rather than towards, the emerging Negro-Establishment entente; and harkening back to the Civil War, the new conservatism was generally taking shape (there were exceptions, of course) in areas where Civil War feeling had been secessionist, divided or ambiguous, as in the South, Heartland, West, Border and German-Irish urban centers. Persistent ethnicultural cleavages were prompting a turnabout of partisanship.

But at this point it is necessary to lay down a few caveats. Granted that the Democrats were making their greatest strides among silk-stocking voters and Yankees, the two groups remained (diminishingly) Republican; and even though the Democrats were losing strength among Northern Catholics, the blue-collar Poles, Slavs, French-Canadians, Italians and Irish of industrial cities from Saco to Sault Ste. Marie (but excluding New York City) remained the bulwark of Northeastern Democratic hegemony. However much the trends of the Nineteen-Sixties foreshadowed the upcoming cycle, the raw statistics of group voting were a weakening link to the New Deal cycle. In the United States, political change is evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Back in 1960, Richard Nixon had run for President as the candidate of a Republican Party still at least partly controlled, as Henry Cabot Lodge's vice-presidential nomination bore witness, by its traditional Yankee bastion. By 1968, however, things had changed. Not only had the civil rights revolution cut the South adrift from its Democratic moorings and drawn the Northeast towards the Democrats, but it had increased the Southern and Western bias of the GOP to a point—the 1964 Goldwater nomination—where the party had decided to break with its formative antecedents and make an ideological bid for the anti-civil rights South. Goldwater's extraordinary Deep South success, together with the unprecedented party defeat in Yankee and silk-stocking areas, speeded re-alignment already on its way. By dint of the 1964 election, the Republican Party shed the dominion of its Yankee and Northeastern Establishment creators, while the Democrats, having linked themselves to the Negro socioeconomic revolution and to an increasingly liberal Northeastern Establishment shaped by the success of the New Deal, sank the foundations of their future into the Northeast.

As of 1968, the Democratic and liberal record was one of failure—in global diplomacy, Asian warfare, domestic economics, social and welfare policy, and law enforcement—and the Republicans, together with third party presidential candidate George Wallace, rode a wave of popular desire for change. The GOP swept the Farm Belt and Rocky Mountains; more narrowly carried the Great Lakes, Pacific and Border states; split the South with George Wallace; and lost only the Northeast. With a united rather than Civil War-divided conservative power base, centered in the great interior Heartland and peripheral South, a new political alignment and cycle began.

Despite George Wallace's grandiose dreams of achieving an ideologically compelling balance of power between the two major parties, he proved unable to reach beyond the electoral votes of the Deep South. More important, his popular support beyond Dixie followed contours of conservative Southern Democratic tradition (Delaware Bay to Nevada), William Jennings Bryan-era Democratic populism (the Plains and Rockies) or urban Catholic upheaval (cities where Negroes or other minority groups are taking over the Democratic Party). Where these trends were not present, Wallace showed negligible strength in either heavily unionized areas—Scranton, Fall River or Duluth—or among poverty-stricken whites (West Virginia). Some of Wallace's support came from aroused conservative Republicans, but most of it represented Democratic voting streams quitting their party. Among major Democratic electoral groups, only those already in revolt backed Wallace. The Alabaman tapped rather than shaped a protest; his party represents an electorate in motion between major parties rather than a new, permanent entrant into the national presidential arena.

Presumably Wallace's realization of this failure underlay his post-election comment—recognition of the GOP future was implicit—that he had swung the Republican Party to the right and simultaneously diverted enough votes to make Nixon's victory possible. But whatever Wallace's ideological influence, his vote diversions certainly did not help Richard Nixon. On the contrary, Wallace split the conservative electorate, siphoned off a flow of ballots that otherwise would have gone heavily for Nixon, and garnered many of his backers—Northern or Southern, blue-collar or white-collar—from the ranks of supporters of 1964 GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater.

As Chart 4 shows, Wallace's strength proved to be negligible—and he diverted few votes—in the states which found the national Democratic Party most appealing. Of the Alabaman's nine worst showings, six came in the nine best Humphrey states (including the District of Columbia, where Wallace was not even on the ballot). The best Wallace vote came in states where conservatism was powerfully emergent; states where Wallace lured unhappy Republicans or tapped a trend which otherwise would have aided the GOP. Even in liberal states like New York, the Wallace vote was drawn from a usually Republican—given a conservative nominee—electorate. Four of the five states backing Wallace had been among the six to back Barry Goldwater in 1964, and all across the nation, most Wallace supporters would have chosen Nixon in 1968 over Democratic nominee Hubert H. Humphrey. The probable inability of the Wallaceites to take the field in 1972, given the parochialism of their 1968 popular and electoral vote pattern and their vulnerability to a relatively conservative 1968–72 Republican administration, should add an important national bloc of popular votes and a key Deep Southern group of electoral votes to the barebones Republican triumph of 1968.

Despite his skimpy electoral vote, George Wallace had come tantalizingly close to holding the 1968 balance of power. Throughout election night, an apprehensive nation watched and listened to reports that perhaps neither candidate could command the clear electoral vote majority needed to win the presidency. What only a few weeks earlier had looked to be a Nixon landslide tightened into a close race, as once-dissident liberals rallied behind Humphrey and Democratic union leaders whipped their pro-Wallace rank and file back to the party line. If Humphrey had proved just a little stronger, the election might have been stalemated as the Wallace forces had hoped.

On the other hand, Wallace's vote would probably have dipped much lower had Richard Nixon chosen to rally aberrant multitudes of 1964 Goldwater backers by sounding the anti-Great Society clarion which had so successfully served as a fulcrum of re-alignment in the 1966 off-year elections. But, reflecting his confidence and a desire to avoid divisiveness, the Republican candidate maintained a mild campaign stance. Nixon, however, cannot be too easily faulted for the course he successfully steered between the Scylla of losing too many moderates to Hubert Humphrey and the Charybdis of leaving too many conservatives in the camp of George Wallace. He won enough moderates to overcome the division in his conservative support base, even as he took a sufficiently conservative stance to minimize the Wallace vote and undermine the third party's future. Under these circumstances, the vast significance of his victory lay in its occurrence and not in its magnitude. Observations that Nixon won no mandate were at odds with the verdict rendered on the Democratic administration by 57 per cent of the nation's voters—an obvious inchoate Nixon constituency.

Little credence can be given to the allegation that the Republican failure to make large gains in Congress bespoke public confidence in national Democratic Party programs and policy; nor did these results indicate continuation of the New Deal cycle in the face of a mere fluke on the presidential level. The ideological reaction against Democratic liberalism had come in 1966, so that there were not many Northern constituencies left for the Republicans to gain in 1968. But much more important was the fact that Congress already had a conservative majority—Republicans from all corners of the country and traditional Democrats from the South and Border. All fourteen Southern and Border states—Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Missouri—cast a majority of their vote against the national Democratic Party's presidential candidate but elected a vast preponderance of conservative Democrats at traditionalist odds with the ideological stance of the national party. Only by this anomaly of nomenclature, which cannot long survive the evolution of the national Democrats into the party of the Establishmentarian Northeast and Negro South, did the Great Society maintain the image of public support. The presidential election of 1968 marked a historic first occasion—the Negrophobe Deep South and modern Outer South simultaneously abandoned the Democratic Party. And before long, the conservative cycle thus begun ought to witness movement of congressional, state and local Southern Democrats into the ascending Republican Party.

Considerable historical and theoretical evidence supports the thesis that a liberal Democratic era has ended and that a new era of consolidationist Republicanism has begun. To begin with, the 1932–68 Democratic reign spanned thirty-six years and a social revolution. History indicates that this is the usual longevity of an American political cycle. For example, the modern American political system dates from the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, which precipitated a Democratic predominance lasting until Lincoln's triumph in 1860. Contrary to general legend, the Civil War did not seat the Republicans firmly in the national saddle, however effectively it unseated the hitherto predominant Democrats. As a matter of fact, once the Southern states had returned to the Union, things settled into something of a stalemate. No president elected between 1876 and 1892 won a majority of the popular vote. Finally, in 1896, the Bryan-McKinley contest tarred the Democrats with the brush of agrarianism and revivalism, thus cementing Republican rule based on the populous, industrial Northeast and Great Lakes. Thereafter, except for the eight-year Wilson Administration, the GOP held national sway until the advent of the Great Depression and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. Actually, the coming of age of urban America had begun to swing the pendulum towards the Democrats even before the Depression, as witness Al Smith's 1928 breakthroughs in the Northeast; however, many Republicans blamed Franklin Roosevelt's personal popularity and refused to face the socioeconomic fact that a new Democratic majority had come into being. Thirty-six years later, it too gave way to change.