Democrats Today Face Similar Problems in the Past

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President Barack Obama stands on stage with Vice President Joe Biden before signing an economic stimulus bill on February 17, 2009. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

A year ago this month, the 2020 presidential election was called for Joe Biden, who was hailed by a majority of Democrats at the imminent end of Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s less than a full year since Democrats achieved what once seemed a more impossible dream: seizing trifecta control of the federal government through two victories in Senate runoffs.

But wow, the sweet taste of success is bent for the Donkey Party! For months now, it’s rare to read a story about the state of affairs in Washington that doesn’t prominently feature the “Democrats in disarray” trope; the party is said to be divided on a president’s agenda with continuing to drop job approval ratings, doomed to a mid-term defeat that could also send Trump back to the brink of power. From hot picks to data-based analyzes of hard cold electoral facts, almost everyone agrees that the future for this recently successful party is bleak, and fingers of blame are pointed. in every direction.

There’s one positive thought that Democrats can focus on as we move into this time of hope: It’s far from the worst they’ve ever experienced. For all their struggles, Democrats remain the oldest continuously running political party in the country, since the 1820s. As comedian Henry Gibson sang in the bicentennial satire film Nashville: “We must be doing something right to last 200 years!”

Here’s a recap of some similar sticky situations from the Democratic Party’s past, which it has been able to survive.

Joe Biden is the seventh Democrat to serve as president since the end of World War II. His current job approval rating from Gallup is 42 percent. Of the other six, five (all except JFK) have Gallup job-approval ratings that are somewhat lower than that. (Truman: 22 percent; LBJ: 35 percent; Carter: 28 percent; Clinton: 37 percent; Obama: 38 percent). Clinton and Obama were re-elected after posting these bad numbers. And while Truman’s popularity was achieved near the end of his presidency, he, too, was re-elected in 1948 after receiving a job approval rating of 36 percent in April of the same year.

By these standards, it is too early to regard Biden as a failed president, or as any kind of convincing underdog for re -election, for that matter.

The loss of Virginia’s governorship earlier this month combined with a close brush with defeat in New Jersey is the latest apocalyptic sign of Democratic decline, by some accounts. It’s true that both states were condemned as “blue” in these elections. But even so, Democrats have done poorly in off-year elections that have been seasonal for a long time.

To be specific, since the late 1960s, Democrats have lost six times the gubernatorial race in New Jersey (in 1969, 1981, 1993, 1997, 2009, and 2013) and six times the gubernatorial race in Virginia ( in 1969, 1973, 19977, 19977, 1997, and 2009). State -level defeats were followed by midterms gains for the national party in three cases and losses in five cases. Democratic presidents who served in the years when the party lost one or both of the gubernatorial elections of these states were re-elected in 1996 and 2010 and lost in 1980. The point is, there is no pattern here; Election defeats outside of the year are never a good sign, but neither is it always predictive.

For anyone with a long memory, less knowledge of history, the idea that Democrats are currently ideologically divided on an unusual or difficult level is ridiculous. The centrist-progressive rift now exists to a more disturbing extent as Barack Obama tries to adopt his own legislative agenda. In the Clinton administration, conventional liberal Democratic dissent from the presidential agenda was so intense and regular that the president often garnered more or more support from Republicans than Democrats for initiatives from trade expansion. until welfare reform. Clinton’s “New Democrats” (she originally campaigned as “a different kind of Democrat”) and their orthodox liberal opponents continued to fight until the effort to impeach the president united with them.

Going back, Jimmy Carter had to face a major re -election challenge inspired by the “liberal lion” Ted Kennedy. The divisions between pro-administration and antiwar Democrats during the LBJ’s second term led to that president’s forced retirement as he faced an almost certain major defeat, and a convention that severely split the host mayor. city ​​is shouting anti-Semitic obscenities at a U.S. senator delivering a nominating speech with the entire world watching.

In 1948, so divided Democrats that not one but two splinter parties (the Progressives under FDR vice-president Henry Wallace, and the Dixiecrats under then-Governor Strom Thurmond) ran of candidates against Harry Truman. And in return, the 103-ballot at the 1924 Democratic convention almost fell apart during a brutal battle over a platform plank (which was defeated) to condemn the Ku Klux Klan.

Much of what is being talked about today is about inflation, supply-chain disruptions, and budget deficits, which are causing a free collapse in Democratic support (actually, according to Gallup, the percentage of Americans citing economic problems as the main concern are fixed.lower than historical averages, but whatever). The economic turmoil today is small compared to those who unfairly blamed Barack Obama for office in the midst of the Great Recession.

And neither Biden nor Obama have encountered anything like the frightening combination of economic conditions (double-digit inflation, double-digit interest rates, up-and-down unemployment) that Jimmy inherited. Carter from the Nixon and Ford administrations. In running for president, Carter coined the term “misery index” for the combined inflation and unemployment rate – a term that boomeranged when Republicans introduced it to him in 1980.

One thing Democrats can say today as an unprecedented problem is an opposition party that is entirely committed to blocking. But it’s important to note that today’s chief obstructionist, Mitch McConnell, is the same man who declared the primary goal in 2009 was to make Barack Obama a one-term president. After 2010, Obama also had to deal with an unchanging tea-party movement that in turn hardened the backbone of the entire Republican Party.

And even though Bill Clinton worked and often ran around his Republican opponents, he confronted after 1994 House Speaker Newt Gingrich a congressional leader who took partisanship to unknown levels.

Largely forgotten in Jimmy Carter’s false recollections of the futility that the New Right and Christian Right movements that rose up to strike him in the hip and thigh were the ancestors of yesterday’s tea-party movement and of the extremists of MAGA now.

It’s true that the task of beating and ousting President Donald Trump has put countless strains on the Democratic Party – strains that can’t be cured until the tyrant’s return is fully functional.

But once upon a time, a similarly unscrupulous Republican president, Richard Nixon, stood in a sprawling Donkey Party after winning re-election in 1972 by a 23-point margin, carrying 49 out of 50 states. It searched the whole world as if a massive and perhaps irreversible realignment had taken place in favor of the GOP, whose ugly culture-warrior vice president Spiro Agnew was the apparent heir to Tricky Dick.

But less than two years after their electoral apotheosis, both Agnew and Nixon resigned in disgrace, leaving Democrats on the brink of a midterm landslide and then a presidential victory.

It is true that Democrats are prone to self-doubt and pessimism, just as Republicans are prone to success and rotation. But history shows that you often don’t know what’s right around the bend.

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