Why am I pushing so damn hard for a Coalition of 100 Million? Why am I so focused on the twenty mega-Democratic states? Why am I so intent on forging a strategic message that contrasts the American Dream with an Un-American Nightmare?
The answer, my friends, is losing offers us painful lessons, lessons learned too late to do much good. That’s particularly true in presidential campaign strategy when the lessons learned cannot be applied for four or even eight long years later.
For me, personally, the lessons of 1984 were hard to fathom. Walter Mondale lost forty-nine states and won only 13 Electoral College Votes. End of analysis. Yet, the deeper I dove into the historic state-by-state election results, the contrasting messaging, even how the candidates celebrated the Fourth of July gave me cause to pause. Eventually, I came to realize that an immature strategy had been crushed by a complete strategy.
So, in December 1986, I laid out a Steel and Seaboard Strategy for a couple dozen liberal activists and union political directors and a somewhat larger CSPAN audience. I knew the strategy was so so radical and risky that I tucked it into the back of the attendees’s notebooks, and only spoke about it in my closing remarks. As a defeated and humiliated congressional candidate from the 1984 rout, I had as much standing as a gnat in Washington.
That Steel and Seaboard Strategy, however, was based on presidential election results going back to 1952, and focused on only eighteen states. Those two facts — election stats and not polls, targeted states and not a national campaign — were radical departures from past practices. Even more radical was dropping the states of the Deep South from the targeting list, unless the Democratic nominee was a Southerner. And most radical of all was focusing on states that were trending ever so slowly towards the Democrats, but seldom had been won by its nominees for president.
Dropping the Deep South was as controversial as it was absolutely necessary. Since FDR election in 1932, Democrat had won those thirteen states 63.6% of the time. But since LBJ’s landslide in 1964 and passage of his Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation in 1965, that winning average had dropped to 34.4%. Only Jimmy Carter, a son of the New South, had prevented that average from dropping even lower. So why waste time and money on those losing propositions?
Targeting the Pacific and Atlantic Coast states and most of the Steel States was a better bet. But only slightly so. They had been trending Democratic in the last decade. Six Democratic gubernatorial, twelve Democratic Senators and ninety-five Democratic House members won there regularly. And they shared Democratic-friendly economic and demographic similarities.
The key was California and its 54 Electoral College votes. Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan was on the Republican ticket in 1952, 1956, 1960, 1968, 1972, 1980, and 1984. Reading the tea leaves, Nixon sat out the 1964 cycle. In 1976, Reagan challenged Ford in primaries, and then refused to join the ticket. Only then did the Democratic ticket have a chance to win.
Republican dominance, however, was not limited to California.The GOP had won seventeen other states 8 out of 9 times between 1952 and 1984. They had won ten more states 7 out of 9 times. In the aftermath of the 1984 debacle, the Republican base in the Electoral College stood at 453 votes! The Democratic base was 75 Electoral College Votes (ECVs), on a good day.
November 8, 1988 wasn’t a good day for Mike Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen. Even with a Southerner on the ticket, Dukakis lost all 13 southern states. He lost the Steel States of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois. He lost California but won Oregon. Dukakis lost the Steel and Seaboard States and their 273 ECVs by a net margin of 823,720 votes out of 47,286,701 ballots cast or 1.7%. Close, but close doesn’t count.
Dukakis’s strategists ran a traditional Democratic presidential campaign — a national campaign with a Boston-Austin Axis. They relied on polls, not election statistics. Instead of targeting but 18 states, they set up offices in every state, and closed them quickly as their polls cratered. They picked a Texan who winged Dan Quayle, yet lost his home state by 684,00 votes. And Dukakis’s strategists avoided anchoring their strategy in any Steel or Seaboard State, including nominating anyone form California. In fact, not until 2016 — eight cycles later — would a favorite daughter of California, be nominated by either major party.
But Dukakis had the lead in California until the final debate. His first question from the moderator was would he support the death penalty if Kitty Dukakis, his wife, were raped and murdered. “No, I don’t,” Dukakis answered. Three words tanked his candidacy.
And yet, Dukakis ended up closing California’s 1.5 million vote margin from 1984 to 352,000 votes in 1988. And he lent credence to the idea that the Pacific Seaboard States were influenced by a California hydraulic—its waves of Hollywood news and life style stories flooded Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington. It never quite reached Alaska. However, a tectonic shift in the state’s political orientation from “Rock Solid GOP” to “Marginal Dem”— the term battleground states came later — could create a tsunami that might engulf other western states. Another risky bet but one I felt worth making.
So who was I betting against? Only myself. The Gift of Strategy was less a memoir than a series of essays. Starting in 1989, I sent a monthly missive to a list of 200 Democratic opinion leaders, national political reporters, union presidents and their political directors, and the offices of governors, Senators and Members of Congress who might seek the presidency in 1992, 1996, or beyond.
Headlined as On Democratic Strategy, those essays helped me think more deeply about who might run, what President Bush’s post-Dessert Storm approval numbers meant, the plausibility of an Appalachian Trail Strategy addendum, and the most legitimate way to overthrow the most powerful government in the world: at the ballot box. Most, if not all of the recipients, probably thought I was nuts.
Between 1989 and 1990, those essays profiled virtual all of the ‘Most Impressive Candidates’. All but one thought that President Bush was unbeatable. In alphabetical order, Lloyd Bentsen, Bill Bradley, Dick Celeste, Bill Clinton, Mario Cuomo, Mike Dukakis, Dick Gephardt, Al Gore, Jesse Jackson, Sam Nunn, Chuck Robb, Jay Rockefeller, and Pat Schroeder declined to become a sacrificial lamb.
By Independance Day, 1991, only Paul Tsongas and George McGovern were running. Not exactly the ‘Most Impressive Candidates’ in my mind’s eye. So I mailed out a blistering essay titled “It’s Over Folks” followed by a quote from Lee Atwater in 1984—“We now have a lock on an electoral majority. In a very real sense, the election is over…” Towards the end of an essay describing the massive obstacles a late start created, I underlined this paragraph:
Those candidates who would wait until after Labor Day, 1991 to start campaigning do not want to be president. They only want to run for president. They want the jazz, not the job.
Eleven days later, on July 15, 1991, I received my one and only fan letter… from Governor Bill Clinton (D-AR). He wrote:
“I appreciated your last essay. You raised several very good points in it. Time is running out. I think all the lesser known candidates are aware of that, and I think you will see a lot of activity, very quickly, over the next several weeks. I know my decision will have to be made very soon.
“I appreciate your efforts in doing this. You have caused a lot of people to stop and think about what is going on. You should be commended for your efforts.”
Clinton announced the formation of his exploratory committee on August 15, 1991, eighteen days before that Labor Day ‘deadline’.
So I laid down my pen and picked up a new client, the AFL-CIO, that wanted to hold a candidates debate on November 12, 1991 in Detroit, Michigan. At the time, it crossed my mind that maybe, just maybe, not every Democratic opinion leader thought I was nuts.
As Robert Frost wrote, I had preferred the road not taken, “the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” I still do.
The Road Not Taken, Part II will discuss the 1992 campaign, with a special focus on its AFL-CIO Candidate Forum, an Al Shanker column in the New York Times, and Ross Perot’s iconoclastic run. Each has important lessons for winning in 2024.
The Road Not Taken, Part II … will be posted on… Saturday, June 29, 2024.