Have the Democrats Won an Election On Their Own Terms Since 1964?

The modern Democratic Party was birthed in the wake of Lyndon B. Johnson’s failure in Vietnam. LBJ was an expert machine politician, and through his time in Texas and into the national picture, he proved that he knew how to get his hands dirty and organize a political party and take power. Like Joe Biden, his domestic accomplishments were eventually overshadowed by his foreign policy calamity, and after he stepped down in 1968, the Democratic Party changed dramatically and got more conservative.

While looking back at the last half-century-plus of Democratic politics in the wake of Trump’s victory, a question popped into my head: have the Democrats won an election on their terms since LBJ?

On their terms would be defined as getting a candidate they had planned for, and running the kind of campaign their sprawling consultant class wants to. I would argue that one election since 1964 has gone according to the Democratic Party’s plan, and every election they have won since came because of an outsider reshaping the party in their own image and/or forces outside of their control.

LBJ’s disaster in Vietnam helped deliver future criminal Richard Nixon to the presidency in 1968, and he won reelection in a landslide over George McGovern in 1972. As you may know, Nixon did not finish out his presidency thanks to Watergate, and he left his Vice President Gerald Ford with an uphill battle against Jimmy Carter in 1976. It was still close enough that it’s not unreasonable to assert that Nixon’s crimes were the deciding factor in that election. Carter won the popular vote by two percent and if Gerald Ford could have found 11,117 more votes in Ohio, he would have won. In close elections, you can point to pretty much any factor as the deciding one, but given the dramatic impact Watergate had on the public’s consciousness and trust in government, it clearly was one of the main assets the Democrats had in that election.

This notion is backed up by Ronald Reagan’s wipeout of Carter in 1980, where the incumbent president was taken out with the help of high inflation in a landslide. The Democrats did worse against a more powerful version of Reagan in 1984, and didn’t do a whole lot better in 1988 when his CIA handler Vice President George H. W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis in a rout.

This led to the realignment of 1992, and as I detailed before, this is where the myth at the base of the 21st century Democratic Party begins. That said, Clinton deserves more credit than the Democrats do for his ascension, as he is one of the aforementioned outsiders who dragged the party along with their success. Clinton was not in the mix at all to start the Democratic primary, as evidenced by this November 1991 SNL skit titled, “the race to avoid being the guy who loses to Bush” where there were five candidates in the skit and Clinton was not one of them.

The 1992 election was won for Bill Clinton by Ross Perot and a bad economy through fracturing the Republican Party’s moderate wing (post-edit note: exit poll analysis done by Voter Research & Surveys in 1992 disagrees with my previous assertion that Perot won it for Clinton, but I think the point stands that between the economy and this outside force pulling moderates away from the two parties, the Democrats were not exactly leading the charge in 1992). Clinton’s popular vote share (43 percent) was the lowest since 1912 when Woodrow Wilson won 41.8 percent in a four-way race against Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the socialist Eugene V. Debs. The only other presidents to ever get a lower share of the popular vote than Clinton did in 1992 were Abraham Lincoln in 1860 in another four-way race, and John Quincy Adams in 1824.

Again in 1996 Ross Perot impacted the election, as Clinton did not garner a majority of the popular vote even as a wildly popular incumbent. Adding Perot’s vote total to Bob Dole’s would have won the popular vote for Dole, calling into question how popular the Democratic Party really was at basically the height of their popularity pre-Obama. Further buttressing this notion that the Democrats were not nearly as popular as they believe they were in the 1990s, Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore “lost” an incredibly close election in 2000. In 2004, the Dems ran their dreamboat of nothingness, John Kerry, and an unpopular incumbent with a rapidly deteriorating war dragging him down still beat the Democrats handily.

In 2008, the Democrats cleared the field for their hand-picked candidate, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama came out of nowhere to explicitly run against hers and the party’s support for the Iraq War, which produced one of the nastiest primaries in post-LBJ Democratic history. He then did the same thing to the status quo Republicans and dragged the Democrats to stunning victories in Indiana and North Carolina, states they had not won since 1964 and 1976, respectively.

Obama’s reelection in 2012 is the lone one since 1964 that I would assert the Democrats won on their own with the plan they came into the election with while getting no outside help. By that point Obama had been fully absorbed into the neoliberal wing of the party and believed the obstructionism of the Senate to be more powerful than his now dwindling political capital he used up on Mitt Romney’s health care plan, and he and the Dems ran a savvy reelection campaign painting their health care inspiration as an out of touch elitist.

We all know what happened in 2016, and in 2020, the Democratic primary was one big stalemate between three pluralities—Biden, Bernie, and neither—and the party waited until Bernie spooked them in Nevada to make up their minds on who they wanted, and Obama told everyone to line up behind Biden. Still, Biden’s coalition in 2020 was heavily aided by making concessions to the left flank of the party, as he whipped up enthusiasm with his Warren and Bernie policy teams that helped turn out youth votes across the country who would not repeat in 2024. Not to mention that a once-in-a-generation (we hope) pandemic warped the political arena to a degree we had not seen in our lifetimes, calling into question whether any incumbent president could have won under those circumstances.

The reelection campaign that Biden tried to run, and that his team forced on to Kamala Harris, exposed 2020 as an aberration. In the Democratic Party’s ideal world, they’d rather make kissy faces at Dick Cheney than policy concessions to roughly a third of their base, even if it means supporting genocide and telling us lefties begging them to just copy Ronald Reagan’s policy on Israel that we are dragging the party too far left. This is the legacy of the post-LBJ Democratic Party: an old, out of touch group of effete elites couching a conservative ideology in a provably bankrupt political strategy who have mainly won national elections due to forces outside their own control, culminating in two losses to Donald Trump.