Democrats won big in 1976, then lost bigger in 1980; lessons for Tsunami-giddy Dems

Jimmy Carter & Hubert Humphrey at the DNC in 1976.
 Jerry Brown is in the background.

 

Even before their big victory on Tuesday, Democrats were bickering over what to do with the Congressional majority they were expected to win. Politico reported on Oct. 29 that

An expected wave of both progressives and moderates in the midterms has members of both contingents feeling strongly that any 2026 gains would be proof that their wing of the party should dictate the legislative agenda ahead of 2028. (Oct. 29)

That debate has heated up since the election, with both sides using the election results to prove their point. Great significance is being attributed to the differences in margins of victory between the moderate and progressive candidates who won.

The question that matters, though, is whether Democrats can govern successfully enough to win the next election in two years. Don’t expect too much. Republicans still hold the Senate filibuster veto power, not to mention the presidential and Supreme Court vetoes. Not to mention the size and complexity of the problems they promised to solve. And the electorate is impatient and prone to vote against whichever party is in power.

Over the summer a couple of articles got me thinking about the Democratic Party I first cast a vote for in 1978—the party that won control of both the House and Senate in 22 out of 24 elections and had overseen unprecedented middle- and working-class prosperity. Both articles prodded the Democrats of 2026 to look for political inspiration from one of the great leaders of the party during that era—Hubert Humphrey, who passed away in 1978, same year that I first voted—the last year of that amazing stretch of Democratic electoral dominance.

I agree that today’s Democrats would do well to take some advice from Humphrey, but they should also study the four key years leading up to the 1980 election when they lost the presidency by a landslide, and the Senate majority for the first time in 26 years.

In the 1976 election, Democrats had won the presidency, a two-thirds supermajority in the House, and a filibuster-proof 61-vote Senate majority—a mandate far greater than their recent “tsunami” has given them.

So, what did the Democrats do with their total control of the federal government? The platform adopted at the July 1976 convention in New York, which nominated Jimmy Carter for president, suggested they would take the opportunity to defend the New Deal policies of President Franklin Roosevelt that had built the American middle class and were then under attack by an insurgent hyper-conservative anti-government wing of the Republican Party. Egged on by corporations seeking tax cuts and deregulation, and led by California Governor and presidential aspirant Ronald Reagan, this movement was in the process of taking over the Republican Party in 1976.

Rick Perlstein's two books on the 1970s chronicles Reagan’s relentless promotion of conservative ideas and policies in the years before, during and after the ’76 election. Speaking to audiences across the country, and in his daily 5-minute radio broadcast, syndicated on 300 stations, Reagan promoted cynicism about government and railed against taxes, welfare, bureaucracy, and regulations while promoting naïve and total faith in corporate power, laissez faire economics, privatization, tax cuts, and de-regulation. His challenge to incumbent President Gerald Ford for the Republican Party nomination was stronger than anyone expected but fell just short (New Hampshire’s own Franklin Pierce was the last incumbent president to lose his party’s nomination—in 1852; we named a mountain after him). In defending himself against the challenge, Ford adopted much of Reagan’s ideology and policies. The Republican Party was being transformed from a right-of-center party with room for liberals to a far-right party where liberals are not welcome. Reagan’s delegates essentially rewrote the platform to embody ultra-conservative doctrines which were seen as radical by most of us at the time, but would become the guiding ideology of the “Neoliberal Order,” which began in 1980 after Reagan won the Republican nomination, wiped out Carter in the general election, and proclaimed in his inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

But back in 1976, the Democratic platform had identified specific ways to parry the rise of neoliberalism, revive and enhance the New Deal, and protect American workers from the corporate-backed attack on working-class prosperity and political power.

The Democrats’ met in New York City in July of the nation’s bicentennial year to nominate Carter, write their platform, and make their case to the American people. That case was best articulated at the convention by Hubert Humphrey, who had been launched to national prominence 28 years earlier with a speech at the DNC credited with getting the party decisively on the side of civil rights for Black Americans. Elected to the Senate that year, he went on to become Lyndon Johnson’s deputy in rounding up Senate votes for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and ’64 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He served as Johnson’s vice president and lost by the slimmest of margins in his bid for the White House in 1968, then two years later regained his seat in the Senate and his role in party leadership. Unlike a lot of “anti-racist” liberals of today Humphrey opposed identity politics and was equally an advocate for working class, blue collar Americans of all races. He was also a staunch ally of organized labor and never lost faith in the power of government to do good. He practiced what the New York Times editorial board said on Monday is the winning combination that led to Democratic victory and “the future of American politics”: economic populism and cultural moderation.

At the ’76 convention Humphrey invoked that year’s Bicentennial celebration by equating anti-government conservatives with “Tory” loyalists who opposed the Revolution:

The patriots of 1776 believed, and this party has always believed, that a democratic government must be an active force for the betterment of human life. But there are new Tories abroad in the land. And their words are newly fashionable. They appeal to cynicism. They cater to the people's mistrust of their own institutions—a people sickened by lies and corruption. They preach soothing doctrines. They tell us our afflictions will be healed if we but leave them alone—if we seek private gain rather than public good.

He called on Democrats to revive the New Deal and oppose the rise of conservativism by renewing "the revolution” against the "new tyrannies" of selfishness, despair and cynicism, and expanding the rights outlined by the nation's founders to include economic rights: things like housing, education, and decent wages—elements of a middle-class life that have gotten harder to come by since he spoke. With their electoral mandate, beginning in 1977, Humphrey and the Democrats in Congress introduced bills designed to guarantee employment, protect labor unions, and provide universal health insurance.

But those bills would fail during the Carter administration, less because of conservative opposition—the Democrats had supermajorities—than tepid support or downright opposition from a nascent group of “New Democrats” who thought the party needed to move beyond what they saw as outdated policies of the New Deal. They saw themselves as visionaries, paving the nation’s path, via a “third way,” into the post-industrial information age. They were an advance guard of a liberal version of Reaganite neoliberalism.

In a chapter entitled "The New Deal that Never Happened" Jefferson Cowie tells the story of how two key pieces of legislation championed by Humphrey were gutted by a combination of conservative Republicans and New Democrats.

Early in 1977 Congress began debate on a bill that would have outlawed the most egregious anti-union practices and perhaps halted the calamitous decline of labor. But Carter, the New-Democrat-in-chief, "backed only the smaller provisions rather than any of the core principles labor hoped for," Cowie writes. Even that weak bill failed in the Senate after Jimmy Carter declined to lobby for it. A second pro-worker bill, the "Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act," was murdered by unfriendly amendments and passed in a form that was "economically meaningless."

Humphrey died before Carter signed that watered-down bill in October of 1978 and a tax package in November that cut capital gains of investors and raised social security taxes on workers; and he didn't live to see what followed: the near-death of private-sector unions, the declining prosperity and political influence of the American working class, the dramatic rise of middle class precarity, and the concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of an increasingly emboldened plutocratic class that has lately rallied around their own billionaire president, Donald J. Trump.

In the years after the Democrats’ catastrophic losses in the 1980 election, the party would move even more decisively toward the New Democrats, adopting a less extreme version of Reaganism. They would continue to accept endorsements and funding from labor while doing very little to stop the corporate assault on unions and endorsing policies that devastated parts of the working class.

Some of us hoped Democrat Bill Clinton would repudiate and reverse the conservative agenda and the middle class decline after he was elected in 1992. But one of his first acts as president was to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had first been proposed by Reagan in 1980. The labor unions that had backed Clinton’s candidacy were outraged because they feared it would lead to what Ross Perot called a “great sucking sound” as factories left for cheap labor in Mexico. Clinton’s later decision to give permanent free trade relations to China was even more devasting to American factory workers. Economists now point to a “China Shock” in the aughts, when job losses were so extensive and so rapid, that manufacturing workers in the “rust belt” were unable to adjust, their communities were hollowed out, and “deaths of despair” became a thing. It doesn’t take much imagination to draw a line from Bill Clinton’s free trade agreements, to the Trump presidency via Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss of three “Blue Wall” rust belt states—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—and the thus the election.

Clinton also embraced the conservative passion for deregulation by "reforming" 1930s-era telecommunications and banking laws. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 gutted New Deal anti-monopoly provisions and started a thirty-year wave of corporate media consolidation, culminating in the recent deal that brought CBS, CNN, HBO, Paramount Pictures, and Warner Bros. under the control of one family, whose patriarch, Larry Ellison, donated $45 million to MAGA campaign funds in the 2024 election. We could draw another line from Clinton’s repeal of the New Deal’s Glass-Steagall banking regulations to the housing crash and the great recession of 2008-2009, which led to 10-percent unemployment.

By the time Democratic president Barack Obama was elected in 2008 during that disaster, the Party had gone from being primarily labor-funded in 1976, to corporate-backed, especially with money from Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and other “new economy” sources. College-educated professionals—Trump’s “liberal elites” —had displaced blue-collar working-class voters as the backbone of the party.

2016 signaled an end to the neoliberal order when two brash challengers to establishment-anointed front-runners dominated the presidential election that year. Jeb and Hillary from the Bush and Clinton families were favored to win the Republican and Democratic nominations, but Trump knocked Bush out of the race early and Bernie Sanders, the inspiration for today’s DSA-aligned candidates, changed the terms of debate and came close to defeating Clinton on the Democratic side. Trump used culture war issues to activate festering working-class resentments against condescending educated elites and their insufferable virtue signaling, but also by railing against parts of the Reagan-Clinton neoliberal consensus blamed for working-class misery: free trade, outsourcing, lax immigration enforcement, and “forever wars.”

Identity-focused liberals attributed Trump’s victory to a blue collar racist backlash against the first black president. Perhaps. But that belief—along with other liberal nostrums about identity promoted during the “Great Awokening”—further alienated working-class Trump voters—especially those who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and didn’t have a whole lot of white or any other kind of privilege, and resented being called irredeemably deplorable by Hillary Clinton.

On the left, police shootings had fed the liberal focus on race, and distracted party leaders from addressing working-class discontent. President Obama, after campaigning on hope and change, had failed to make significant departures from the neoliberal consensus or to stem the rise of inequality or middle class precarity. Despite significant achievements in health care and banking reform, Obama also staffed his administration with Clinton holdovers (architects of the Democratic version of neoliberalism), bailed out big banks instead of home-owners after the 2008 housing crisis, enacted Heritage-Foundation-style health care reform that was even more favorable to drug and insurance companies than Bill Clinton’s failed plan, negotiated another free trade agreement, and like Carter did nothing to advance a pro-labor reform that he had pledged to support during the 2008 campaign.

The neoliberal era may have ended in 2016, but neither party has come up with a clear vision of what should replace it. Democrats’ midterm tsunami this month is the fifth major anti-incumbency election in the past 10 years. To avoid being the object of a sixth, they will need to iron out their differences and come up with a viable plan to keep their election promises—especially the one about “affordability”—if they want to succeed in building a governing majority that persists through multiple election cycles and makes lasting change.

I’ve been mourning the rise of the Reagan-Right and the Democrats’ abandonment of the New Deal since the Carter presidency. I moved to New Hampshire and became one of the nation’s most powerful presidential primary voters in 1989 and I’ve voted in every quadrennial NH primary for the candidate who seemed most likely to defend New Deal principals, from Tom Harken in 1992 to and Bernie Sanders in 2016 (some years there wasn’t any good choice). Given that background, you’d expect I’d want Democrats to follow up Tuesday’s victory by embracing policies laid out by the Sanders-inspired progressives. But even with a tsunami, the Democrats won’t have the same veto- and filibuster-proof mandate they won in 1976.

So why look to Hubert Humphrey for inspiration at this moment? He might seem an unlikely source of advice for electoral victory and party unity. He ran for president and lost four times and came to be reviled by the activist left wing of the party over his support for President Johnson’s Vietnam policy. During his last run in 1972, New Left “Gonzo Journalist” Hunter Thompson called him “a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack” and a “babbling insult to the presumed intelligence of the electorate.” 

"New Left" anti-war activists opposed Humphrey's
 nomination in 1968. Had they supported Humphrey 
and he won, the war would likely have ended sooner.  

But part of what Thompson and the New Left ideologues reviled about Humphrey were qualities that make his politics worth emulating today. As David Leonhardt wrote in a review of James Traub’s new biography, Humphrey “compromised when necessary” and took a “ruthlessly pragmatic” approach to politics. And instead of denouncing people the activist left saw as irredeemable, he tried to understand them and find areas of agreement or win them over. “We ought to be joyful that we live in a country like this where you even have the right to be wrong. And then you have the time to correct the wrongs,” he said.

As Leonhardt points out, after dismissing the Republicans’ law-and-order rhetoric as racist during his 1968 presidential campaign, he came to see rising crime rates as a legitimate issue driving working-class voters away from Democrats they saw as soft on crime. In a speech to the American Bar Association during his 1970 run to regain his seat Senate seat he said that liberals need to show that “they too condemn criminality and riots and violence and extreme social turbulence, and scorn extremists of the left as well as extremists of the right.” Contrast that with the recent orgy of intolerance on the left that injected terms like purity politics, cancel culture, narcissism of small differences and basket of deplorables into common parlance.

Humphrey understood that compromise was unavoidable in politics and embraced compromises that led to partial victories. “Never turn your back on a crumb,” he said in persuading the head of the NAACP to support the weak Civil Right Bill of 1957, which paved the way for the great Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Humphrey foresaw the rise of cynicism about politics and institutions that is rampant today and the elevation of private gain over public good that has justified the rise of an obscenely wealthy plutocratic class and the world’s first trillionaire. But he died prematurely in 1978 while fighting for the vision he laid out at the DNC so didn’t live to see Carter sign the gutted Humphrey-Hawkins Act or the landslide election of Reagan in 1980 which launched the 40-year neoliberal era.

Here’s the most important thing about Humphrey: faith in government and in politics. As the Democrats struggle to define a replacement for the Neoliberal Order, they should embrace what another Traub reviewer called the “bold, big-hearted brand of New Deal liberalism” that Humphrey practiced—because the immense problems we face require nothing less. Humphrey was a child of the New Deal and a devotee of Franklin Roosevelt and he recognized that faith in government as an instrument for the public good was the sin qua non of the program that ended the Great Depression and created the American Middle Class. In his 1970 book on the Political Philosophy of the New Deal he quoted Franklin Roosevelt approvingly:

The Nation or state which is unwilling by governmental action to tackle the new problems, caused by immense increase of population and the astounding strides of modern science, is headed for a decline and ultimate death from inaction.

But faith in government had taken a beating in Humphrey’s last decade of life thanks to a futile war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. In the face of those failures, Reagan’s anti-government propaganda found a receptive audience, even among the New Democrats and their president, Jimmy Carter, who said in his second State of the Union Address:

we really need to realize that there is a limit to the role and the function of government. Government cannot solve our problems, it can't set our goals, it cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy. And government cannot mandate goodness.

The problems of today are no less immense and astounding than the ones faced by Roosevelt when he took office in 1932, and will require political leadership of the sort practiced by Roosevelt and Humphrey—leadership that can maintain the diverse coalition of voters that led to Tuesday’s tsunami and is not afraid to use government to solve problems.

This faith in government is where the progressive wing of the Democratic Party may be more in line with Humphrey than the cautious moderates and better fit to shape policies for the Post-Neoliberal Order. In launching his government-funded grocery stores, New York’s DSA mayor Zohan Mamdani repudiated the anti-government message promoted by Reagan and unchallenged by New Democrats.

Standing here this morning, I cannot help but think of the words of our 40th president, Ronald Reagan. He famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.” It's a good quote, but I disagree. I think nine more terrifying words are actually, “I worked all day, and can't feed my family.”

We are going to use the power of government to lower prices and make it easier for New Yorkers to put food on the table. When government understands its purpose as serving the very working people that it has left behind time and again, it can make a difference in the most pressing struggles facing our city today. It's not just that government can help; it's that government must help and our government will help.

And Mamdani, like Humphrey, seems willing to compromise and resist the constraints of purity politics. He has worked out a successful alliance with moderate Democratic Governor Kathy Hotchul and to criticism from the purity left of his cordial Oval Office visit, he said: “As long as someone can help the city, I'll talk to them.” Never reject a crumb.

The electorate is impatient for action. People struggling to pay the rent and put food on the table and wary of politicians and their promises will not tolerate a lot of dithering. They may not be able to get past the Republican filibuster and Trump’s veto, but they can give the voters a preview of what they could do if the voters erase those roadblocks in 2028. They could do worse than take a page out of the Humphrey playbook and give their support to the sort of “bold, big-hearted brand of New Deal liberalism” that worked in the past, while being open to talk with any Republicans who can help Americans.