New Deal Coalition

The New Deal coalition was the alignment of interest groups and voting blocks who supported the New Deal and voted for Democratic presidential candidates from 1932 until approximately 1966, which made the Democratic Party the majority party during the Fifth Party System. Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a coalition that included the Democratic party, big city machines, labor unions, minorities (racial, ethnic and religious), liberal farm groups, intellectuals, and the South. The coalition fell apart after 1966 but it remains the model that party activists seek to replicate.

Realignment

The 1932 election brought about a major realignment in political party affiliation, and is widely considered to be a realigning election that created the Fifth Party System. Franklin Delano Roosevelt set up his New Deal and forged a coalition of Big City machines, labor unions, liberals, farmers, ethnic and racial minorities (especially Catholics, Jews and African Americans), and Southern whites. These disparate voting blocs together formed a majority of voters and handed the Democratic Party seven victories out of nine presidential elections (1932-36-40-48, 1960, 1964), as well as control of both houses of Congress during all but 4 years 1932-1980 (Republicans won in 1946 and 1952). Starting in the 1930s, the term "liberal" was used in U.S. politics to indicate supporters of the coalition, while "conservative" denoted its opponents. The coalition was never formally organized, and the constituent members often disagreed.

Cities

Roosevelt had a magnetic appeal to city dwellers, especially the poorer minorities who got recognition, unions, relief jobs and beer thanks to Roosevelt. Taxpayers, small business and the middle class voted for Roosevelt in 1936, but turned sharply against him after the recession of 1937-38 seemed to belie his promises of recovery. ^[1]

Roosevelt discovered an entirely new use for city machines in his reelection campaigns. Traditionally, local bosses minimized turnout so as to guarantee reliable control of their wards and legislative districts. To carry the electoral college, however, Roosevelt needed massive majorities in the largest cities to overcome the hostility of suburbs and towns. Roosevelt used the Works Progress Administration (1935-1942) as a national political machine through patronage given out by Postmaster General James A. Farley and WPA head Harry Hopkins. Men on relief could get WPA jobs regardless of their politics, but hundreds of thousands of supervisory jobs were given to local Democratic machines; one went to Ronald Reagan's father. The 3.5 million voters on relief payrolls during the 1936 election cast 82% percent of their ballots for Roosevelt. The vibrant labor unions, heavily based in the cities, likewise did their utmost for their benefactor, voting 80% for him, as did Irish, Italian and Jewish voters. In all, the nation's 106 cities over 100,000 population voted 70% for FDR in 1936, compared to 59% elsewhere. Roosevelt won reelection in 1940 thanks to the cities. In the North, the cities over 100,000 gave Roosevelt 60% of their votes, while the rest of the North favored Republican Wendell Willkie by 52%. It was just enough to provide the critical electoral college margin. ^[2]

With the start of full-scale war mobilization in the summer of 1940, the cities revived. The war economy pumped massive investments into new factories and funded round-the-clock munitions production, guaranteeing a job to anyone who showed up at the factory gate.

End of New Deal coalition

The coalition fell apart in many ways but started with Farley and Roosevelts break over the third term nominee in 1940. The first cause was lack of a leader of the stature of Roosevelt. The closest was perhaps Lyndon Johnson, who deliberately tried to reinvigorate the old coalition, but in fact drove its constituents apart. New issues such as civil rights, the Vietnam War, abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, and urban riots tended to split the coalition and drive many members away. Meanwhile, the Republican party made major gains by promising lower taxes and control of crime.

The big-city machines faded away in the 1940s, with a few exceptions, such as Chicago and Albany. The New Deal had made them heavily dependent on the WPA for patronage, and, when Congress shut down the WPA, the cities could not find a substitute. Furthermore, World War II brought such a surge of prosperity that the relief mechanism of the WPA, CCC, etc. was no longer useful as a political tool.^[3]

Labor unions crested in size and power in the 1950s, then went into steady decline. They continue into the 21st century as major backers of the Democrats, but with so few members they have lost much of their influence.^[4]

Intellectuals gave increasing support to Democrats since 1932. The Vietnam War, however, caused a serious split, with the New Left reluctant to support most Democratic presidential candidates.^[5]

The European ethnic groups came of age after the 1960s. Ronald Reagan pulled many of the working class social conservatives into the Republican party as Reagan Democrats. Many middle class ethnics saw the Democratic party as a working class party and preferred the GOP as the middle class party. In recent years Democratic rhetoric has heavily stresssed the "Democrats are for the middle class" theme. The Jewish community still comprises a core Democratic constituency; in 2004 74% voted for Kerry, in 2006 87% voted for Democratic House candidates.^[6]

African Americans grew stronger in their Democratic loyalties and in their numbers. By the 1960s, they were a much more important part of the coalition than in the 1930s. Their Democratic loyalties cut across all income and geographic lines to form the single most unified bloc of voters in the country.^[7]

Region: Realignment in South

White Southerners abandoned cotton and tobacco farming, and moved to the cities where the New Deal programs had much less impact. Beginning in the 1950s, the southern cities and suburbs started voting Republican. The white South saw the support northern Democrats gave to the Civil Rights Movement as a direct political assault on their interests and opened the way to protest votes for Barry Goldwater, who in 1964 was the first Republican to carry the deep south. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton lured many of the Southern whites back at the level of Presidential voting, but by 2000 white males in the South were 2-1 Republican and, indeed, formed a major part of the Republican coalition.^[8]

In many ways, it was the civil rights movement that ultimately heralded the demise of the coalition. Democrats had traditionally solid support in Southern states (the Solid South), but this electoral dominance began eroding in 1964, when Barry Goldwater carried the Deep South (and little else). In the 1968 election, the South once again abandoned its traditional support for the Democrats by supporting Nixon or segregationist third-party candidate George C. Wallace. Once the segregation ended in 1965, the argument that only southern Democrats could protect segregation faded. The South was no longer dirt poor, rural and dependent on crops like tobacco. As it modernized the Republicans took over the southern states one by one, first at the presidential level, then for Congress, governor and legislature. In 1976 the South rallied behind native son Jimmy Carter, a Democrat; 1992 and 1996 the Democrats nominated two southerners and split the region's electoral votes. By 2000 the region was solidly Republican except for Florida. ^[9]

Since the 1990s Democrats solidieified their hold on the Northeast and on California, with Republicans holding the south and southwest. The Midwest has been a closely matched battleground for 150 years. Since 1994 the division between the two parties is virtually even in both houses of Congress, as of 2007, and no party has established the kind of dominance that the Democrats were able to exert during the period of the New Deal coalition.