We Paid Attention and We Chose
This is hardly the main point Joe Klein makes in his latest Time column but I’ve gotten interested in this particular nugget of CW about political history:
It may be that Obama is not Reagan. It may be that he is more like Al Smith, whose Roman Catholicism was too much for a Protestant nation to handle in 1928.
You hear things like that all the time, but take a gander at the 1928 electoral map (Al Smith in blue, Herbert Hoover in red):
Smith was elected Governor of New York in 1918 lost in 1920, then won again in 1922 before securing re-election in 1924 and 1926. New Yorkers, at least, don’t seem to have been irredeemably opposed to voting for a Catholic. And yet in the 1928 Presidential election he lost his home state of New York. That’s not to deny that Smith’s religion cost him votes in some areas (notably, he lost several Southern states at a time when the South blindly backed Democrats out of allegiance to white supremacy) but there were clearly more fundamental problems with his campaign.
Indeed, by most standards Smith did substantially better than the undeniably Protestant John W. Davis managed in the 1924 election. I’m not especially familiar with the political history of the 1920s, but the Democratic Party seems to have been in pretty sorry state throughout the whole period in a way that doomed the 1928 nominee no matter what his religion.
23 Responses to “We Paid Attention and We Chose”
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August 11th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
America is also completely and utterly different today, especially in geographic demographics. It’s startling to look at that map and see that Pennsylvania has 38 electorals votes compared to California’s 13
August 11th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
The Democrats were in the wilderness from basically the end of the Civil War until Roosevelt. It took some weird circumstances for them to get the presidencies they did win, including Roosevelt’s first term.
August 11th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
More B.S. from Joe Klein. It’s worth noting from the above map that the uber-Protestant South was still firmly Democratic through this election. Smith’s Catholicism probably didn’t help matters, but Matt is right – matters were more complicated than Klein makes it seem.
I still don’t see how this analysis applies to the candidate who is currently, uh, leading in the polls. When Buch won in ‘04 by 3 points, did any of these people call it a “dead heat” or an “eked-out win?” I don’t think so. It was his political capital to spend, remember? Well, guess what: Obama’s about three points ahead right now.
http://www.gallup.com/tag/Election%2B2008.aspx
August 11th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Re Stefan
The trouble is that, given the economic situation here and the debacle in Iraq, Senator Osama should be at least 10 points ahead. He has to hope for a repeat of 1980 when the independents broke for Reagan when they were in the voting booth.
August 11th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
My father was in New York for the 1928 race and there were definitely folks who had voted for Smith as gov who would not vote for him for president. and said so.
As for the south:
a long-retired dean at a southern college told this story (I’ll have to paraphrase, he included it in his memoirs)
” … in the election of 1928 all the family planned to vote for Smith, but no one knew what my grandmother, a strict teetotaling Methodist would do as it was well-known Smith opposed prohibition. Finally, I got up the nerve to ask her and her response was
‘ son, my husband, your grandfather, served in the confederate army. as a young girl, i stood on the hills outside Atlanta and watched the city burn. the republicans couldn’t nominate a man i would vote for and the democrats couldn’t nominate a man i wouldn’t’
”
My father voted for Roosevelt the first time or two, then became a republican (the split between Smith and Roosevelt may have had something to do with it)
years later, two old men were talking about politics and one asked the other if he’d ever considered voting republican. the other said, there were times he had thought about doing so, but every time he thought about it, he remembered Hoover. the other agreed. I passed this one on to my dad who grumbled about it.
August 11th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
One factoid to consider is that 1928 was the only twentieth century election, held when a party had held the White House for eight years and the incumbent was leaving, when the White House party increased its share of the vote. For McCain to achieve that this year would be almost unprecedented.
Since Bush won in 2004 with 51%, the Republicans don’t really have much slack to work with this round.
August 11th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Anyone saying Obama “should be” winning by a much larger margin is pulling those numbers out of his or her *!?@.
The public has been bombarded with anti-government and anti-liberal messages for decades. Obama can’t singlehandedly reverse that with one well run race and a charismatic candidate.
August 11th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Ironically, Al Smith probably can be best remembered as the first modern Democratic candidate — his coalition of urban residents and southerners would persist until the realignment of the south in the 80s and 90s.
In any event, it is hard to overstate how prosperous 1928 was if you weren’t a Midwestern farmer (and they voted Republican anyway). Hoover was elected on the platform of finally eliminating poverty — and he literally meant it. More than anything, Al Smith lost because the environment was perhaps more favorable to the incumbent party where there wasn’t a sitting president running than any of the 20th century (well, 1908 was pretty favorable too).
August 11th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
With the economy muddling along and median real incomes declining since late last year, but not yet in a full fledged downward drag of a recession, the presumptive challenger being about 2% ahead of the presumptive nominee of the incumbent party is definitely in the right ball park.
Housing construction employment will take another downturn sometime this year … completions are at the moment at about the rate that houses are taken off the market, so there is another downturn ahead before the housing market starts really going into the inventory backlog. When it does, it will take a substantial growth driver showing up to keep the economy from sliding into a full blow recession … and I may be a mere regional economist, but I just cannot see where that growth driver is going to be coming from.
August 11th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
When Buch won in ‘04 by 3 points, did any of these people call it a “dead heat” or an “eked-out win?” I don’t think so.
Um… yes. Remember we didn’t even know who won on election night? John Edwards came out and refused to concede so they could count all the votes in Ohio?
The only reason people didn’t marvel as much at the closeness is that the 2000 election was so absurdly close. But by any historical standard, 2004 was a very close election.
August 11th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Times seemed good for most; Coolidge fit the times; Hoover was something of a hero; Smith was not only Catholic but a New Yorker whose mannerisms were a pretty hard sell west of the Hudson. As Matt says, even without religion, I don’t see how the Democrats could win in 1928.
August 11th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
So, if I’m reading Klein correctly; African-American is the new Catholic?
August 11th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
One factoid to consider is that 1928 was the only twentieth century election, held when a party had held the White House for eight years and the incumbent was leaving, when the White House party increased its share of the vote.
This is largely because Robert La Follette won 16.6% of the vote in 1924. Coolidge won 65% of the two party vote, as opposed to Hoover, who won only 59% of it.
Still, certainly an achievement. The closest to repeating it was Gore, who on very nearly as large a percentage of the vote as Clinton did in 1996.
August 11th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
As to 1928 more broadly, the very deepest south, where there was no such thing as a Republican Party, and where voting for the Republicans was seen as something close to treason, did indeed remain true to Smith. Even there, though, he did quite poorly. He barely won Alabama, which Davis had won by 40 points. Georgia was also surprisingly close. And, of course, he lost five of the eleven confederate states (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Texas), and all of the border states (Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Maryland), although Davis, too, had lost most of these latter (save Oklahoma). Nonetheless, Smith’s performance in the south was far worse than Davis’s or Cox’s four and eight years before.
Outside the South, he didn’t do so badly, given that the Democrats had been utterly massacred outside the south in both 1920 and 1924. His victories in Massachusetts and Rhode Island marked the turning point in the conversion of those states from Republican strongholds into Democratic ones, and he nearly won New York (aside from Wilson’s anomalous 1912 win, he did the best of any Democrat in New York since Grover Cleveland in 1892). He did reasonably badly most everywhere else, but way, way better than Davis had (for example, Coolidge won 58% of the vote in Illinois to Davis’s 23%; Smith won 42% to Hoover’s 56%; Davis got 23% in Ohio to Smith’s 33%; and so forth).
Any Democrat nominated in 1928 would have lost. This, in fact, is why the Democrats nominated Smith – a lot of people thought he would never win because he was Catholic, but felt he was owed the nomination, and figured it would do no harm to give it to him in a year the Democrats weren’t likely to win anyway.
To compare this situation with Obama’s is somewhat absurd. Smith was running in what was clearly a Republican year, and was only accepted by the party’s dries (largely the South) because they knew he’d lose anyway. Obama is running in what would seem to be a Democratic year. He may yet lose, but, like Matt, I don’t think the comparison to Smith is valid.
August 11th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
So, if I’m reading Klein correctly; African-American is the new Catholic?
Black is the new red?
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