The next big year, 1968, is most remembered by Democrats as the year the Vietnam War tore the party apart and drove LBJ from the White House. The war’s impact is easy to overstate—by Election Day, most Democratic peace voters had come home to Humphrey, their presidential nominee, who lost narrowly to Nixon. The election was most significant because previously Democratic voters, especially in unions and in industrial states, shifted to Nixon or third-party candidate George Wallace. As Humphrey's assistant, I stood next to him on election night when we learned that reliable Democratic precincts in New Jersey and Ohio had not delivered their usual vote and the election thus was lost.

Post-election survey data indicated that these voters—the forerunners of the Reagan Democrats—defected because they thought the Great Society had brought too much big government and too many programs favoring minorities and the poor—"tax eaters not taxpayers," as Nixon put it.

The defection intensified four years later when George McGovern lost one-sidedly to Nixon. Republicans and the group Democrats for Nixon characterized the Democratic Party as the "acid, amnesty, and abortion" party, committed not only to the welfare state but to permissive stances on social issues. The impression wasn’t completely untrue. As McGovern's platform coordinator, I found myself fighting off an effort by delegates to add marijuana legalization to a list of social-issue planks. "When can we get this done?" one asked. "Sometime in our second term," I answered.

It’s useful to look at 1976 and 1980 together. Former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, a generally undefined populist, was nominated almost by accident in a field otherwise crowded with liberals and won the general election as an outsider, winning voters disillusioned by President Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon. His presidency was sufficiently ineffectual and unfocused that it resulted in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 landslide, comparable to the LBJ landslide over Goldwater 16 years earlier. Reagan's strong-defense, small-government, low-tax platform appealed to voters who by then had come to regard Democrats as on the one hand big-government spenders and on the other hand flubbers who presided over high inflation and interest rates, gas lines, and a failed hostage-rescue mission in Iran. AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland told me after the election, "We [in labor] talked a good game but, to tell the truth, I couldn't tell you how many union members below executive level voted for Carter."

The Reagan landslide triggered Democratic soul-searching. At retreats in Washington and Baltimore, led by new DNC Chair Chuck Manatt and congressional leaders, a cross-section of party leaders began a first-principles review of the party and its agenda. An unofficial party think-tank, the Center for National Policy, was formed, led by Duke University President Terry Sanford and former Secretary of State Cy Vance and with a board consisting of the party's non-elected establishment. Presidential hopefuls and elected leaders all participated in its work and helped raise its money. I served as its president over the next four and a half years.



Over the previous 12 years the party itself had steadily diminished in importance, as single-issue and single-interest groups increasingly provided votes and money directly to candidates. By 1980, for instance, government-employee and teachers-union members typically constituted one half of the delegates at Democratic national and state conventions. Pension and benefit commitments were being made at the federal, state, and local levels that kept the unions happy but clearly could not be sustained long-term. Carter had created a Department of Education as a payoff for endorsement and financial support of teachers unions, in expectation of a 1980 primary challenge from Senator Ted Kennedy. The same syndrome was afflicting both major political parties. Whether you were pro- or anti-abortion, pro- or anti-gun control, pro- or anti-trade liberalization, pro- or anti-tax-code changes and had a letterhead and political money, you used your leverage directly with officeholders. The parties themselves had been reduced to the staging of quadrennial conventions and enforcing rules for the presidential-nominating process.