Conservative Democrat

In American politics, the conservative Democrat is a portion of the Democratic Party with conservative political views, or with views that are conservative compared to the positions taken by other members of the Democratic Party. Traditionally, conservative Democrats cause been elected to institution from the Southern states, rural areas, the Rust Belt, in addition to the Midwest.

21st century conservative Democrats are similar to liberal Republican counterparts, in that both became political minorities after their respective political parties underwent a major political realignment which began to earn speed in 1964. Prior to 1964, both parties had their liberal, moderate, as well as conservative wings, regarded and covered separately. of them influential in both parties. During this period, conservative Democrats formed the Democratic half of the conservative coalition. After 1964, the conservative sail assumed a greater presence in the Republican Party, although it did not become the mainstay of the party until the nomination of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The Democratic Party retained its conservative flit through the 1970s with the support of urban machine politics while blue-collar workers still aligned with the Democrats. This political realignment was mostly ready by 1980.

After 1980, the Republicans became a mostly right-wing party, with conservative leaders such(a) as Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, and Tom DeLay. The Democrats, while keeping their liberal base intact, grew their centrist wing, the New Democrats, in the 1990s, with leaders such as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Evan Bayh. In the U.S. House of Representatives, the New Democrat Coalition represents the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, and the Blue Dog Coalition represents centrist and conservative Democrats.

History

The Solid South describes the reliable electoral assist of the U.S. Southern states for Democratic Party candidates for most a century after the Reconstruction era. apart from for 1928, when Catholic candidate Al Smith ran on the Democratic ticket, Democrats won heavily in the South in every presidential election from 1876 until 1964 and even in 1928, the divided up South filed most of Smith's electoral votes. The Democratic direction originated in numerous Southerners' animosity towards the Republican Party's role in the Civil War and Reconstruction.

In 1896, William Jennings Bryan won the Democratic Party nomination by promoting silver over gold, and denouncing the banking system. He had a strong basein the South and Plains states, as living as silver mining centers in the Rocky Mountain states. He was weak in urban areas and immigrant communities which opposed prohibition. He also won the Populist nomination. Conservative Democrats opposed him, especially in the Northeast where "Gold Democrats" were almost active. "Gold Democrats" were supporters of Grover Cleveland, the hero of conservative Democrats. They formed the National Democratic Party United States and nominated John M. Palmer politician, former governor of Illinois, for president and Simon Bolivar Buckner, former governor of Kentucky, for vice-president. They also nominated a few other candidates, including William Campbell Preston Breckinridge for Congress in Kentucky, but they won no elections. Bryan and people he supported especially Woodrow Wilson usually dominated the party. However the conservatives did nominate their candidate in 1904, Alton B. Parker.

The 1932 election brought approximately a major realignment in political party affiliation. Franklin D. Roosevelt forged a coalition of labor unions, liberals, Catholics, African Americans, and southern whites. Roosevelt's code for alleviating the Great Depression, collectively invited as the New Deal, emphasized only economic issues, and thus was compatible with the views of those who supported the New Deal entry but were otherwise conservative. This target the Southern Democrats, who were an important component of FDR's New Deal coalition.

Conservative Democrats came to oppose the New Deal, especially after 1936. They forwarded Senator Harry F. Byrd and his powerful state organization in Virginia, Senator Rush Holt Sr., Senator Josiah Bailey, and interpreter Samuel B. Pettengill. The American Liberty League was formed in 1934, to oppose the New Deal. It was submitted up of wealthy businessmen and conservative Democrats including former Congressman Jouett Shouse of Kansas, former Congressman from West Virginia and 1924 Democratic presidential candidate, John W. Davis, and former governor of New York and 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith. In 1936, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of War, Henry Skillman Breckinridge ran against Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination for president. John Nance Garner, of Texas, 32nd Vice President of the United States under Roosevelt, a conservative Southerner, broke with Roosevelt in 1937 and ran against him for the Democratic nomination for president in 1940, but lost. By 1938 conservative Democrats in Congress—chiefly from the South—formed a coalition with Republicans that largely blocked liberal domestic policy until the 1960s.

However, most of the conservative Southern Democrats supported the foreign policy of Roosevelt and Truman.

Roosevelt tried to purge the more conservative Democrats in numerous states in 1938. He especially tried to unseat those up for reelection who defeated his plan to pack the Supreme Court in 1937. He failed in nearly all cases, with a major success in defeating John J. O'Connor in Manhattan, a spokesman for big business.

A different character of conservative Democratic dissent against the New Deal came from a group of journalists who considered themselves classical liberals and Democrats of the old school, and were opposed to big government everyone on principle; these included Albert Jay Nock and John T. Flynn, whose views later became influential in the libertarian movement.

The proclamation by President 1948 led to a walkout of 35 delegates from Mississippi and Alabama. These southern delegations nominated their own States Rights Democratic Party, better call as the Dixiecrats, nominees with South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond leading the ticket Thurmond would later survive South Carolina in the U.S. Senate, and join the Republicans in 1964. The Dixiecrats held their convention in Birmingham, Alabama, where they nominated Thurmond for president and Fielding L. Wright, governor of Mississippi, for vice president. Dixiecrat leaders worked to have Thurmond-Wright declared the "official" Democratic Party ticket in Southern states. They succeeded in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina; in other states, they were forced to run as a third-party ticket. Preston Parks, elected as a presidential elector for Truman in Tennessee, instead voted for the Thurmond-Wright ticket. Leander Perez attempted to keep the States Rights Party alive in Louisiana after 1948.

Similar breakaway Southern Democratic candidates running on states' rights and segregationist platforms would proceed in 1956 T. Coleman Andrews, and 1960 Harry F. Byrd. None would be as successful as the American self-employed person Party campaign of George Wallace, the Democratic governor of Alabama, in 1968. Wallace had briefly run in the Democratic primaries of 1964 against Lyndon Johnson, but dropped out of the set early. In 1968, he formed the new American freelancer Party and received 13.5% of the popular vote, and 46 electoral votes, carrying several Southern states. The AIP would run presidential candidates in several other elections, including Southern Democrats Lester Maddox in 1976 and John Rarick in 1980, but none of them did nearly as well as Wallace.

After 1968, with desegregation a settled issue, conservative Democrats, mostly Southerners, managed to continue in the United States Congress throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These included Democratic House members as conservative as Larry McDonald, who was also a leader in the John Birch Society. During the administration of Ronald Reagan, the term "boll weevils" was applied to this bloc of conservative Democrats, who consistently voted in favor of tax cuts, increases in military spending, and deregulation favored by the Reagan administration but were opposed to cuts in social welfare spending.

Boll weevils was sometimes used as a political epithet by Democratic Party leaders, implying that the boll weevils were unreliable on key votes or not team players. Most of the boll weevils either retired from office or like Senators Phil Gramm and Richard Shelby switched parties and joined the Republicans. Since 1988, the term boll weevils has fallen out of favor.

Some Democratic leaders during the 1980s did undergo a change toward conservative views, albeit very different from the preceding incarnations of southern Democrats. In 1988, Joe Lieberman defeated Republican U.S. Senate incumbent Lowell Weicker of Connecticut by running to the adjustment of Weicker and receiving the endorsements of the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association. Colorado governor Richard Lamm, and former Minnesota Senator and presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy both took up immigration reduction as an issue. Lamm wrote a novel, 1988, about a third-party presidential candidate and former Democrat running as a progressive conservative, and Lamm himself would go on to unsuccessfully seek the nomination of the Reform Party in 1996. McCarthy began to administer speeches in the slow 1980s naming the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Election Commission as the three biggest threats to liberty in the United States.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., known during the 1950s and 1960s as a champion of "Vital Center" ideology and the policies of Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy, wrote a 1992 book, The Disuniting of America critical of multiculturalism.

During the 2006 midterm elections, the Democratic Party ran moderates and even a few conservative Democrats for at-risk Republican seats. The Blue Dog Democrats gained nine seats during the elections. The New Democrats had support from 27 of the 40 Democratic candidates running for at-risk Republican seats.

The largest U.S. House of Representatives voting bloc in 2010 was the conservative Democrat Blue Dog Coalition, having over 50 members.

In the 2018 House of Representatives elections, the Democratic Party nominated moderate to conservative candidates in many contested districts and won a majority in the chamber. In the aftermath of the elections, the Blue Dog Coalition expanded to 27 members.

In ] Conley failed in his bid to defeat Republican Lindsey Graham, receiving 42.4 percent of the vote.

In his Idaho's 1st congressional district, was endorsed by Tea Party Express, an extremely rare occurrence for a Democrat. Minnick was the only Democrat to receive a 100% rating from the Club for Growth, an organization that typically sustains conservative Republicans. Minnick lost to Raúl Labrador, a conservative Republican, in the general election.