The coalition included labor unions, blue-collar workers, big city machines, racial and religious minorities (especially Jews, Catholics, and African Americans), white Southerners, and intellectuals.
[2] In creating his coalition, Roosevelt was at first eager to include liberal Republicans and some radical third parties, even if it meant downplaying the "Democratic" name.
Republican president Herbert Hoover opposed federal relief efforts as unwarranted, believing that market actors and local governments were better suited to address the situation.
[8] Franklin D. Roosevelt won a landslide in 1932 and spent his time in office building a powerful nationwide coalition and keeping his partners from squabbling with each other.
[9] Over the course of the 1930s, Roosevelt forged a coalition of liberals, labor unions, Northern religious and ethnic minorities (Catholic, Jewish, and Black), and Southern Whites.
The worsening depression enabled the Democrats to convince some Republicans to switch parties while mobilizing large numbers of ethnics who had not voted before.
[12] The president in 1933 wanted to bring all major groups together, business and labor, banker and borrower, farms and towns, liberals and conservatives.
The escalating attacks from the right, typified by the American Liberty League led by his old friend Al Smith, spoiled the dream.
La Guardia was also the nominee of the American Labor Party (ALP), a union-dominated left-wing group that supported Roosevelt in 1936, 1940,and 1944.
In 1940 La Guardia chaired the nationwide Committee of Independent Voters for Roosevelt; in return, the president put him in charge of the Office of Civilian Defense.
[20] The consensus of experts is that: “In the distribution of WPA project jobs as opposed to those of a supervisory and administrative nature politics plays only a minor in a comparatively insignificant role.
[23] Journalist Samuel Lubell found in his in-depth interviews of voters after the 1948 presidential election that Democrat Harry Truman, not Republican Thomas E. Dewey, seemed the safer, more conservative candidate to the "new middle class" that had developed over the previous 20 years.
[26] After the smashing reelection victory of President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, the heavily Democratic Congress passed a raft of liberal legislation.
According to Alan Draper, the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Action (COPE) was the main electioneering unit of the labor movement.
Companies began relocating manufacturing jobs to Sun Belt states, free of labor union influences, and many Americans followed suit.
The closest was Lyndon B. Johnson (president 1963–1969), who tried to reinvigorate the old coalition but was unable to hold together the feuding components, especially after his handling of the Vietnam War alienated the emerging New Left.
The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, in the space of just two months, seem to have been an almost fatal blow to the New Deal coalition prospects.
[citation needed] During the Presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), Republicans took control of prosperity issues, largely because of the poor performance of Jimmy Carter (1977–1981) in dealing with stagflation.
[37] While most Northerners supported the original civil rights movement, many conservative blue collar voters disliked the goal of racial integration and became fearful of rising urban crime.
At the state and local level the GOP made steady gains in both White groups until reaching majority status in most of the South by 2000.
They argue that the collapse of cotton agriculture, the growth of a suburban middle class, and the large-scale arrival of Northern migrants outweighed the racist factor.
Both viewpoints agree that the politicization of religious issues important to White Southern Protestants (i.e. opposition to abortion and LGBT rights) in the "Bible Belt" made for a strong Republican appeal.
Sinclair was narrowly defeated by a combination of defections of prominent Democrats—including Roosevelt—as well as a massive smear campaign using Hollywood techniques and a blackout whereby all the state's newspapers opposed him and refused to cover his ideas.
Sinclair's campaign gave aspiring Democratic leaders a boost, most notably Culbert Olson, who was elected governor in 1938.
[52][53] In the northern states, class and ethnicity proved decisive factors in the New Deal coalition as shown by polling data in presidential and congressional elections from 1936 through 1968.
[56] Among various demographics, ethnicity was the strongest reliable identifier for Democrats that held together the New Deal coalition, listed below is the distribution of party identification in 1944 among the northern electorate: Roosevelt was successful in attracting further support from Italian, Black, and Jewish voters between 1936 to 1940.
Lewis was an isolationist and broke with Roosevelt and endorsed his Republican opponent in the 1940 election, a position demanded by the pro-Soviet far left element in the CIO.
Milton Rakove states: "Holding the South and delivering thumping majorities in the big cities of the North insured national hegemony for the Democratic party.
The White Southerners believed the support that northern Democrats gave to the Civil Rights Movement to be a direct political assault on their interests, which opened the way to protest votes for Barry Goldwater, who, in 1964, was the first Republican to carry the Deep South.
[75] Since the 2010s, younger non-evangelical White Southerners with a college degree have been trending towards the Democratic Party, such as in Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina.