General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: In 18 years since Naders run, what has been accomplished by attacking the Dem party from the left? [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)And by being the best orator we had nominated since JFK.
And yes, Perot played a role.
But the crucial point is that "running to the center" let's face it, it was actually running to the right of center)didn't increase the Democratic vote(Dukakis, whatever else you can say about him, did increase our share by five percentage points on Mondale. Had he actually defended liberal values and his own character when they were under attack, Dukakis would likely have won. The one time he claimed he was a liberal, the Bush lead was cut by half in the daily tracking polls.
It is not as though the 43% Bill received(three points down on the support level Dukakis received four years earlier) was the highest possible vote share a Democratic candidate could have managed. Our share would likely have at least stayed around there, and possibly gone a few points higher, with anyone we could have nominated. Remember, we'd made sizeable gains in the 1990 congressional elections and Bush's popularity had dropped sharply after he used his political capital from the Gulf War to do...well, nothing, really.
Bill's most popular pledges were on healthcare and LGBTQ rights...the only positions where he was to the left of Dukakis. The people who wanted the people on welfare to be punished simply for being on welfare didn't vote for him.
We didn't lose in the Eighties because our nominees ran liberal campaigns...they didn't. We lost because those campaigns made no effort to inspire people-Bill was good at that, and would have been no matter what program he ran on-made no effort to mobilize everyone that Reagan was going to harm or did harm, offered no compelling alternative vision of what the country could be.
If they had run on Bill's 1992 platform, they would almost certainly have done the same.