Nixon's 1972 Landslide and the Birth of the Blue-Collar Republican

Try this one on a friend who follows politics. Ask which party, in 1936, was the party of the country club and which was the party of the union hall. Nobody hesitates. Republicans: bankers, owners, the people with the tennis whites. Democrats: the men with lunch pails who built the cars. Now ask which party's candidate, in 1972, was endorsed by the Teamsters, carried the vote of a large share of union households, and won the presidency with 520 electoral votes while the head of the AFL-CIO sat on his hands. That one is harder, because the answer is Richard Nixon, and it undoes a picture that most Americans, left and right, still carry in their heads.

So here is my thesis, and I will argue it the way I would argue it in front of a skeptical audience. The blue-collar Republican was not an accident, and he was not a trick. He was the product of a specific set of events between 1968 and 1972, and understanding them tells you what holds that coalition together and what could pull it apart. It is a story about patriotism, work, order and the sense that somebody in Washington finally noticed the people who play by the rules.

Where the working class had been

To see how big the change was, start with where the Republican Party began the century of the New Deal. From 1932 on, the working class belonged, by habit and by loyalty, to the Roosevelt coalition: union members, immigrants and their children, Catholic ethnic neighborhoods in the cities of the North and Midwest, and the white South. The story of how that coalition formed and why Republicans spent two decades out of power is in The New Deal Coalition and the Twenty Years the GOP Spent in the Wilderness. Republicans won presidential elections in the 1950s on Eisenhower's personal popularity, and he did well with working-class voters, but the party's identity stayed upper-income and small-town.

By the late 1960s that identity was under strain from the other side, because the Democratic Party was changing. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, urban riots and the counterculture opened cracks in the old coalition. A voter who had been a lifelong Democrat because of his union and his parish began to wonder whether his party still spoke for him.

The 1968 opening

In 1968, Nixon won the presidency with about 43.4 percent of the popular vote, narrowly ahead of Hubert Humphrey at 42.7 percent. A third candidate, George Wallace of Alabama, took 13.5 percent and carried five Southern states. Add Nixon and Wallace together and you have a majority of the country voting against the Democratic ticket, which says something about the mood. Many of Wallace's voters were working-class whites in the North as well as the South, and the question for the next four years was where they would go.

Nixon's team understood the opportunity. A young analyst named Kevin Phillips published The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969, arguing that a new coalition of Sun Belt, suburban and working-class voters could replace the New Deal alignment. You can argue with Phillips's conclusions, and many scholars have. But the book told a generation of Republican strategists where to look.

The Silent Majority

On November 3, 1969, Nixon went on television and gave a speech about Vietnam. He announced a policy of withdrawing American forces gradually while building up South Vietnamese forces, which came to be called Vietnamization. Near the end he appealed directly to what he called "the great silent majority" of Americans, the people who were not marching and not shouting but who supported their country and their sons in the service.

Whatever you think of the Vietnam policy, the political effect was immediate. The speech drew a flood of favorable mail and telegrams, and Nixon's approval rating rose. It gave a name to a group of Americans who felt ignored by the media and by the loudest voices on the left. The same voters, a few months later, were to appear in the streets.

The hard hats

On May 8, 1970, four days after the shootings at Kent State, a crowd of construction workers in lower Manhattan broke up an antiwar demonstration near Wall Street. The event became known as the Hard Hat Riot. It was ugly, and there were injuries, and I will not defend the violence. But the political meaning was hard to miss. Working men, the core of the old Democratic base, had taken the side of the flag and the government against the protesters.

Two weeks later, a labor leader named Peter Brennan, who headed the New York building trades council, led a march of tens of thousands of workers through the city in support of the president. Nixon invited Brennan and a delegation of union leaders to the White House, where they presented him with a hard hat, and in 1973 Nixon named Brennan Secretary of Labor. A Republican president had put a union man in the cabinet. Nobody should call that an accident: it was a deliberate courtship.

The Democrats' own choices

Now the part that is easy to forget: a coalition is made as much by what the other side does as by what you do. Following the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the party appointed a commission, usually called McGovern-Fraser after its chairs, to rewrite the rules for choosing delegates. The reforms opened the process to activists and increased the representation of women, young people and minorities. They also reduced the influence of the party's old centers of power, including big-city bosses and union leaders.

In 1972, George McGovern won the nomination under the new rules. His campaign focused on ending the war and on a more expansive welfare policy, and it was strongest among young and activist voters. George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO, refused to endorse him, and the federation stayed neutral in the general election. The Teamsters endorsed Nixon. For the first time in a generation, organized labor was not marching in lockstep behind the Democratic nominee.

The landslide

On November 7, 1972, Nixon won every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. He carried 49 states and received 520 electoral votes to McGovern's 17, and about 61 percent of the popular vote. The arithmetic is worth showing: 520 plus 17 is 537, and the 538th electoral vote went to a third candidate when one Virginia elector broke ranks and voted for someone else. It was one of the largest landslides in American history.

What matters is who voted for him. He won a majority of Catholic voters, a traditionally Democratic group, and a large share of union households and of white ethnic voters in the industrial North. These are the people later called Reagan Democrats, a group whose later story is told in The Reagan Democrats of Macomb County and the Voters Who Changed Sides, but the road to them started here. For how a map moved over a longer arc, see How the Republican Electoral Map Moved Across Four Eras from 1896 to 2016.

Why they came: four arguments

Let me lay out the argument in order, since the question is not just what happened but why.

1. Patriotism and the flag. Working Americans, many of whom had served in the military or had sons in it, saw the antiwar movement and the counterculture as hostile to them and to their country. They did not want a quick surrender, and Nixon's gradual withdrawal looked like a middle path.
2. Order and safety. The late 1960s and early 1970s brought riots, campus unrest and rising crime. Working families lived in neighborhoods where crime was a daily concern, not a topic for seminars, and Nixon's law-and-order message spoke to them directly.
3. Work and fairness. Many blue-collar families felt that the people who played by the rules, worked hard and paid taxes were being treated as chumps while welfare and other programs expanded. This was a values complaint as much as an economic one, and it was not irrational.
4. Cultural respect. This one is hard to measure and easy to underrate. Working Americans felt looked down on by the media and by the educated class. A candidate who treated their concerns as legitimate earned their loyalty.

Notice that none of these four is purely economic, and that is an important point about the coalition. It formed around identity and values, not just pocketbook issues.

The strongest objection

Now let me state the other side fairly, because there is a serious one. It runs: Nixon's 1972 landslide was not a realignment. It was a personal victory against a weak opponent. McGovern was a poor fit for the electorate, Watergate soon destroyed Nixon, and the Democrats won big in 1974 and took the White House in 1976. Therefore the "blue-collar Republican" is an overstated story. A different set of critics adds that Nixon himself did not govern as a champion of the working man: in August 1971 he imposed wage and price controls, and his administration's Philadelphia Plan, introduced in 1969, pushed construction unions to open their jobs to minority workers and angered many of the same union leaders he was courting.

That is a good objection, and parts of it are right. The 1972 vote was partly a verdict on McGovern. Watergate did interrupt the realignment. The wage and price controls were a mistake, as I explained in From Diocletian to Nixon, Every Price Control Ends the Same Way, and I do not defend them. But here is my reply.

1. The pattern repeated. The working-class shift did not end with Nixon. Ronald Reagan won large shares of blue-collar voters in 1980 and 1984, and later elections saw further movement in the same direction. A one-time protest vote does not recur for fifty years.
2. The causes were durable. Patriotism, order, fairness and respect did not disappear when Nixon resigned. They remained live issues, and the party that could speak to them kept the voters.
3. The inconsistencies show the point, not undercut it. Nixon courted working voters with symbols and with policy, and some of his policies were bad, but his bad policy did not drive them away because the cultural bond mattered more than any single bill. That should make Republicans humble: voters forgive mistakes from a leader who respects them, and punish condescension from one who does not.

For more on the later chapters, see The Trump Coalition in Historical Context, from Country Club to Cracker Barrel and How Donald Trump won the three states Republicans had lost for a generation.

What holds the coalition together

If the coalition began on culture, what keeps it alive? I think three things.

First, work. A party that treats the dignity of a paycheck as the center of policy will keep working families. That means jobs, fair trade, an economy that rewards effort. It means a tax code that does not punish the worker who gets a raise, a point worth checking against your own pay stub in why your raise feels smaller than the number your boss pays out.

Second, respect. Policy matters, but tone matters nearly as much. Voters know when they are being talked down to, and they remember. A Republican candidate who can talk to a plumber and a professor in the same plain language is worth ten who cannot.

Third, results. The coalition is loyal but not blind. Voters who moved from one party to another once can move again. They will stay if wages rise, if neighborhoods are safe, and if the government keeps its promises. They will leave if the party mistakes their votes for a permanent entitlement. The voters Nixon brought in were not owned by anybody, and the party should remember that. You can see how the party's voters are described on our Republican voters pages.

A caution for any party that wins these voters

One more thing, and it applies to both parties. Every coalition has a price. The voters Nixon won in 1972 did not want a lecture about their own views, and they did not want to be taken for granted. A union family in Ohio or a Catholic parish in Pennsylvania had spent forty years voting one way for good reasons: the party had delivered a pension, a job, a safer workplace. When they changed, they did it with open eyes, and they would change again if the next party did not deliver. That is the discipline that real competition gives a democracy. If you want to keep these voters, earn them every cycle, in plain language, with specifics, and never confuse their loyalty with obligation. You will find the practical side of that advice in the win-number worksheet, how many votes does your race really take.

The bottom line

• The blue-collar Republican was built in 1968 to 1972 from the Silent Majority speech of November 3, 1969, the hard hat rallies of 1970, Democratic rule changes and a 49-state landslide with 520 electoral votes.
• The shift was about patriotism, order, fairness and respect as much as about money. Any Republican who wants working families has to talk about all four.
• Nixon was no saint of the working man. Wage and price controls were a mistake, and Watergate cut the realignment short. Be honest about the flaws and the facts.
• If you run for office, show up at the union hall, the job site and the VFW, and talk plainly. Respect earns votes that ads cannot buy.
• Keep the votes by earning them. This coalition is made of people who have switched before, and they can switch again.