the depths of the Great Depression, in a nation where industrial production had plummeted and nearly 25 percent of Americans were out of work. The two major candidates offered voters different solutions to the crisis. President Herbert Hoover argued that government’s role was to encourage business to fix itself, while his challenger Franklin Roosevelt declared that bold government action was the only way to restore prosperity. Voters sided with boldness, and Roosevelt—and his vision of a “New Deal” with the American people—won, fundamentally changing the relationship between citizens and the state. As with nearly every twentieth-century president, Roosevelt won not just because of the substance of his message, but because of the style of his delivery. He used the new medium of radio to deliver powerful, personal messages into voters’ living rooms. His campaign staff used stagecraft as well as tough-minded political strategy to edge out the other Democratic challengers and, ultimately, Hoover himself.
Full of political plot twists, electrifying moments, and unbearable tragedies, the election of 1968 redefined both liberal and conservative politics. It also set the stage for the next four decades of presidential campaigning. An incumbent president chose not to run again, hobbled politically by an escalating and increasingly unwinnable overseas war. Inner-city neighborhoods were in flames, protests rocked college campuses, and assassins’ bullets felled iconic leaders. Television brought all this strife and cultural transformation into American living rooms. The tensions between the political establishment and the youthful counterculture erupted violently at the Democratic convention, helping set up a Republican victory in November by a candidate whose political career seemed finished only a few years before, and laying the foundations for today’s red- and blue-state America.
Ultimately, the story of 1968 doesn’t just explain 1968. It explains what comes afterward. The Democratic Party was a much bigger tent, and much more open to new voices, but it had lost the establishment power it had enjoyed from the New Deal through the Johnson years. Meanwhile, the Republican Party had found a new way to talk to voters, and had made inroads into critical parts of the old Democratic base. Twelve years later, Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory over Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter was a triumphal execution of the political messages and strategies employed by Richard Nixon in his first White House win.
For all its drama and hype, the 1992 election can be overlooked because it seems to pale in comparison to the earth-shaking contest of Reagan versus Carter, and the cliff-hanging and hotly disputed 2000 race between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Without diminishing those other two critical political moments, the 1992 election rises in significance because of the profound global transformations surrounding it. It was the first presidential race after the end of the Cold War, and the first to feature a candidate born after World War II. It happened at the cusp of the high-technology revolution, and was the first campaign driven by—and perhaps decided by—the all-consuming media environment of cable television.
Riding high after the success of the Gulf War, incumbent George H. W. Bush seemed at first to be a sure bet for reelection, but a souring economy changed the electoral math. After a series of failed Democratic campaigns for the White House in which “liberal” became a dirty word, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton ran as a centrist “New Democrat,” espousing policies like welfare reform and government efficiency. But the election, and Clinton’s ultimate victory, hinged on the insurgent third-party candidacy of businessman H. Ross Perot, whose campaign reflected the growing power of the independent voter and of communication in the Information Age.
Elections connect to one another. The progressive themes of 1912 echoed on in the campaigns following it, creating a rhetorical and substantive foundation for the debates of 1932. The contest of 1968 revolved around debates and constituencies set in place by Roosevelt’s New Deal, and reflected both the great hopes and crushing disappointments that emerged from the struggles of the 1960s, from civil rights to Vietnam. It also signaled the rise of a powerful new sort of conservatism, born of frustration with social unrest and anxiety about the new racial and economic order, and fueled by the movement of people and jobs from North to South, East to West. The connective tissue stretches across election cycles. While 1968 laid the groundwork for Reagan’s victory in 1980, the Reagan Revolution helped make possible the political rise and electoral triumph of Bill Clinton in 1992.
Three major themes run throughout the chapters that follow. The first is the extraordinary dynamism of the American political spectrum over time. These cases show us that the United States is neither a conservative nor a liberal nation, but one in which political categories and identities are far more messy, multilayered, and difficult to categorize. Politics has a symbiotic relationship to the broader society. The balance between the two ends of the political spectrum and the composition of the debates and temperaments along it change as the economy changes, as culture changes, and as the makeup of the electorate changes. Rather than thinking of American political history as a pendulum swinging between left and right, we should focus on the center, which shifted more incrementally in either a liberal or a conservative direction as times changed. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the center of American politics was several steps to the left of where it landed two decades later, in the eras of Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Definitions of “liberal” and “conservative” changed over the course of the century, and something considered dangerously radical (or alarmingly conservative) in one generation became centrist in the next.
Successful candidates adapted and responded to these electoral recalibrations. The winners were those who adapted the best to changing times, not necessarily those candidates who first gained traction because they epitomized the new political mood. Teddy Roosevelt brought progressive political ideas to the national stage in 1912, and Woodrow Wilson won partly because he took on some of these ideas as his own. Law-and-order populism propelled the southern segregationist and Democratic candidate George Wallace into the national spotlight in 1968, but Nixon won in part by delivering the same message in less strident and more slickly packaged ways. Reagan led the conservative revolution after 1980; Clinton adapted some of these ideas and words into the platform that brought him victory in 1992.
The second major strand is the continual redefinition of the two major parties through pivotal presidential contests, and the role of third parties in this redefinition. The bedrock constituencies of the Republican and Democratic parties changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century, as did the issues the two parties championed. At the start of the century, the GOP was the more progressive of the two parties, based in the urban Northeast and advocating a bold government action and promoting the growth of a public bureaucracy. The Democrats were the party of the rural South, of more minimal central government and less federal regulation.
Independent parties and voters also made a difference. In three of these four elections, third-party candidates played a disruptive, even decisive role in the ultimate outcome of the election. Teddy Roosevelt’s run siphoned so many votes from the Republicans that the Democrats won back the White House for the first time in years. George Wallace garnered far fewer votes, but he fractured the Democratic base and introduced populist rhetoric that Republicans later employed to win national victories after decades of Democratic dominance. While H. Ross Perot did not manage to win a single electoral vote, he won the largest share of the popular vote of any third-party candidate since TR, and he forced the other candidates to take new issues seriously. Even when third parties don’t win, they have an indelible effect on how elections play out—and on the two major parties.
The third theme of the book concerns political communication. Over the century, changes in media and communications changed not only the way campaigns were run, but also the relationship between presidential candidates and individual voters. Breaking with the nineteenth-century pattern where candidates gave few speeches and relied on surrogates to hit the road on their behalf, the 1912 election ushered in a new era of candidate-centered campaigning. The rise of national media further fueled a new emphasis on the personalities and charisma of the men who ran for president. By 1932, most American homes had a radio, and this created an opportunity for an even more personal relationship to develop between president and voter. Television was another earthquake on the campaign landscape by 1968, beaming news
