May 31, 2007
FDR's Electoral Margins II Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:55 AM EST I’m struck by the election returns that John Steele Gordon provides in his latest post. I was aware of the general arc of Roosevelt’s presidential campaigns, but I had never actually looked at the popular vote totals. One interesting characteristic of these numbers, as Mr. Gordon points out, is how they reflect the decline in America’s voting population as a result of the war. Another is the relative stability of Roosevelt’s vote totals over time. His lowest total was 22.8 million in 1932; his highest 27.8 in 1936. These results, along with the other two, are grouped tightly around his average electoral pull of approximately 25.9 million votes. In other words, over four presidential elections, his returns showed remarkably little variation compared with those of Presidents since. (Consider, in contrast, the difference of 10 million votes between Reagan’s returns in 1980 and 1984, and the almost identical drop-off between George H. W. Bush’s performances in 1988 and 1992.) Judging from these returns, if Franklin Roosevelt had not persuaded a single additional person to vote for him after 1932 but had managed to keep his existing voter base intact, he still would have triumphed over his opponents in three subsequent elections. This isn’t a tremendously clever observation; you could say something similar about any candidate winning in a massive electoral landslide. Yet, there’s something significant about the fact that FDR at his worst outperformed all of his Republican opponents at their best. In light of this, I think Fred Smoler’s point, which Mr. Gordon echoes, holds: Newspapers could not bring down Roosevelt, no matter how bilious their headlines. I suppose I’d agree with Mr. Gordon that this is partly due to the fact that in ’36, ’40, and ’44, most “everyone ‘knew’ Roosevelt and knew what they thought about him.” The facts about Roosevelt, however, changed during that time period. He took controversial stances (court-packing, expanding involvement in Europe, etc.) that could have dislodged many more voters and might have caused more Americans to seriously reconsider just how well they “knew” the man in the White House. It was a unique accomplishment for the President to move the country as far as he did without incurring a greater backlash from his base of urban ethnics and racial minorities, white Southerners, and union members. It would take many more words than a blog post contains to fully analyze and explain Roosevelt’s electoral successes. A good bit of it has to be attributed to his inborn political talent. His ability to phrase controversial policy proposals in accessible, folksy language (analogizing the lend-lease program to lending a neighbor a garden hose when his house is on fire, for example) is perhaps the best example of this. Roosevelt also mastered the skill of pacing himself, of not pushing for too much change, too quickly. As Doris Kearns Goodwin has related in No Ordinary Time, her husband’s deliberately slow speed frustrated Eleanor Roosevelt when it came to issues like desegregating the armed forces. On issues like involvement in World War II, though, this gradual pacing helped preserve the President’s political coalition. 1932 was an unmitigated disaster for Republicans, but it’s not necessarily the case that the three remaining elections had to be similarly crushing. Thus, a second cause I’d suggest for Roosevelt’s consistent success would be the repeated failure of the Republicans to present a compelling and well defined alternative to the Democrats, and to engage Roosevelt in his areas of greatest vulnerability. In 1940, for example, Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, who refused to drum up the nation’s spirit of anti-interventionism until the last weeks of his campaign. Charles Peters, in his snappy little volume Five Days in Philadelphia, has suggested that Willkie’s restrained campaign saved Roosevelt’s agenda but doomed his party’s fortunes at the ballot box. This seems a reasonable assessment. There are many lessons to learn from the example of Franklin Roosevelt, and the mechanics of maintaining a national coalition is not the least of them. Except, debatably, for Ronald Reagan, no other leader has built a similarly stable and durable political alliance since Roosevelt’s death. In this case, the numbers do not lie.
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