Gary Hart's Electoral Failures Part 2: 1984 And His Battle Against Mondale For the Democratic Nomination

 

Before we begin, full disclosure on my part. I have always had a deep and abiding respect for Walter Mondale, far more than I ever had for George McGovern. Both men were the victims of the two greatest electoral landslides in history – and because Mondale was Carter’s vice president, he was actually a victim one that was just as devastating for the Democrats. But those who simply dismiss him as another failed Democratic candidate define him by his most infamous defeat rather than what he accomplished before that.

Mondale was one of the great liberal Democrats to emerge from Minnesota as it transitioned away from a Republican stronghold to the force in Democratic politics it has been today. He was drawn into politics, like many in Minnesota, because of Hubert Humphrey and was part of his famous campaign to get a civil rights statement on the Democratic Platform in 1948. The two men were friends for the rest of Humphrey’s life and even served together in the Senate during Humphrey second stint starting in 1970. It was fitting because when Humphrey left the Senate to become LBJ’s Vice President Mondale would take his vacated seat.

Like Humphrey he was always invested in civil rights and was a loyal member of the Democratic Party on every battle for liberalism. But by the time he came to the Senate America was now fully invested in the Vietnam War and the great liberal coalition that had been in existence since the New Deal was beginning to fracture. He worked hard for his friend in the 1968 campaign for the White House and never truly forgave what he considered LBJ’s betrayal of his running mate. He was one of the major fighters for liberal causes and was one of the voices who managed to change the rules for cloture in the Senate from 2/3 to 3/5 of the Senate to kill a filibuster. It was only the third time in history that the Senate had changed the rules on the filibuster and while he was troubled by the way the Republicans were using in his autobiography he held firm to the idea that repealing it was not the solution.

By 1975 after Nixon’s resignation many thought Mondale was a contender for the White House. But after nearly a year of touring the country he made it clear he wouldn’t make a bid. However when Jimmy Carter won the nomination Mondale was on the short-list for his chose for Vice President.

For all the issues with Carter both at the time and historically few argue that he set a high standard for selecting the Vice President. He knew that in order to win the White House he was going to need someone from Washington, almost certainly from the Senate and from the North. His first choice had been Frank Church from Idaho, who had beaten Carter in four primaries late in the race for the Democratic nomination. He held meetings with Church and six other prominent Democrats  Other choices included John Glenn of Ohio, Edmund Muskie of Maine and Henry Jackson of Washington.

Carter engaged first by having his staff vet every candidate and then a month later met with all of them. Mondale flew to Georgia and the two men had a civil conversation. Both men quickly formed a rapport and Carter eventually settled on it. Mondale was very active in the campaign, performing well in the first Vice Presidential Debate and his position on the ticket as a Northern Liberal was no doubt helpful to balance the doubts some voters had about the Southern centrist. Mondale’s presence carried Minnesota and probably Wisconsin in an election that Carter received 297 electoral votes to Ford’s 240.

Mondale was critical to Carter’s presidency in a way that no Vice President had been to that point. He was vital in helping provide an Amicus brief for what would be known as the Bakke case, which helped make affirmative action the law of the land by the Supreme Court (for a while) He helped try to work through the Carter agenda through Congress and acknowledged that he played a role in its appearance of ineffectualness. And in a major move he met with the prime minister of South Africa to make it very clear of the administration’s firm disapproval of their policy of apartheid. He also took critical roles in foreign policy, meeting in human rights on the Philippines and trade talks with China.

There’s an argument that the process Carter and Mondale set should be the gold standard of a working Vice President in the new era. And its clear that successful Democratic Presidents  - Bill Clinton with Al Gore and Barack Obama with Joe Biden – have learned how to use their Vice Presidents better than Republican President have during this same period. And after Mondale heard Reagan’s famous line in his inauguration speech: “Government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem” he resolved that he would run against Reagan in 1984.

In a sense Mondale was one of the last bastions of the old liberal order that had fallen with the Reagan Revolution. And while his battle ended up being disastrous and no doubt led to the Democrats officially abandoning it from that point on, it was a more noble cause and based more on a man who had fought his whole life – and with more success – then McGovern ever had. (McGovern himself would attempt to run for the Democratic nomination in 1984, but his campaign quickly fell apart.)

Mondale himself had a role in setting the rules. In July of 1981, under the leadership of Jim Hunt the commission of Presidential Nomination was Founded. The commission sought to increase the power of elected officials. This commission allocated 568 delegates, 14 percent of the total, to unelected superdelegates. 411 of the superdelegates were elected officials.

From the start Mondale’s campaign capitalized on this and gained support for Mondale from members of Congress. Mondale faced off against seven candidates for the nomination.

In June of 1983 Senator Alan Cranston of California won a series of straw polls in Alabama, California and Wisconsin. Mondale won a straw poll in Maine. There were many major names in the campaign but eventually it came down to three men: Mondale, Jesse Jackosn and Gary Hart.

Hart announced his run in February of 1983. He was so unknown that those who covered his campaign called him Gary Who? His recognition was less than 1 percent. Hart decided to campaign in New Hampshire, starting in September of that year. Hart criticized Mondale as an ‘old-fashioned’ Democrat who represented ‘failed policies’ of the past – the kind of argument that would not have been out of place with the McGovern campaign against Hubert Humphrey twelve years earlier. Mondale was better organized and better financed. But Hart had been down this road before.

Ironically for a man who would later take on the burden of being a deeply flawed candidate who seemed ill-equipped to understand politics Hart’s early campaign for the Democratic nomination showed a man who not only knew how to play the game but was playing it better than so many of the pros. The fact that so many of the states involved caucuses – the very area Hart cut his teeth in with McGovern – helped play to his advantage almost from the start. Compared to Mondale, who often gave the appearance on the campaign trail as stiff and stodgy Hart could make a convincing argument he was a new kind of Democrat.

It’s worth looking at Hart from the perspective of Mondale. As he wrote in his autobiography The Good Fight:

“Hart was talented, handsome and well-spoken and he claimed the represent the next generation of the party, a generation of new ideas… Early in the fall of 1983 we hired the pollster Peter Hart to survey New Hampshire voters on a set of hypothetical Democratic candidates…by an overwhelming margin, respondents chose a ‘Hart’ type candidate: young, Western and full of new ideas. From that day, we stopped assuming I was the front-runner and realized that, in effect, we were going to lose.

Hart’s first line of attack was that I represented the old crowd, the special interests that hung around the Democratic Party and that he represented the new generation. I never bought it and I don’t think his case ever went far with most Americans. It’s true that the party at the time was organized into caucuses – the unions, the teachers, environmental groups, women’s organizations. They all met separately and separately endorsed a candidate and every candidate sought those endorsements…That’s the funny thing – only after Hart failed to win their endorsement did they become the ‘special interests’. Until that moment, they were the greatest people he had ever known.”

Mondale could not have better encapsulated the hypocrisy of every primary campaign that has existed, Democratic or Republican in the last half-century. It makes one truly question all of those primary campaign where candidates, whether they be Bernie Sanders or Mitt Romney, Trump or Elizabeth Warren, will proudly argue that they are against the ‘special interests.’  Mondale shines a light on this arguing that this may just be purely a campaign strategy.

But Mondale admits the charge did draw blood and it ended up showing as much in Iowa. Mondale managed a sweeping victory in the caucus with 49 percent of the vote. But Hart finished second with 16 percent when no other candidate could manage more than single digits.

It was in the New Hampshire primary that all of Hart’s skills both organizational and personal came to full flower. He’d spent a lot of time on the ground there but it wasn’t until his second-place finish that the media – and the public – took a real look. And during those two weeks between Iowa and New Hampshire everything seemed to work for him.

One of the iconic moments in campaign history came when Hart attended an axe-throwing contest. These are the kind of small ball campaigning that every politician tries to engage in when they are in a primary state. They tend to always look awkward at best and horrible at worst. A legendary story came when George Romney, running what would be a doomed attempt for the GOP nomination in 1968 went to a bowling alley. He knocked over the first nine pins with two balls. He then joked that he would stay around until he knocked down the final pin. It took him more than thirty attempts to do so and it seemed to sum up everything the public thought about George Romney.

The same started with Hart. He threw an axe at a log and it went over the log by a small margin. Hart asked for another chance. And on his very next throw he hit the bulls-eye. Everybody cheered. “The first one was Iowa,” he told the onlookers. “The second one’s going to be New Hampshire.”

Things played out better in one of his first national broadcasts. Asked about his prospects Hart said he was hoping for a strong finish. “But what happens if you win?” he was pressed. And Hart burst into laughter, as if the idea was as baffling to him as it was the media.

Then Hart managed to win New Hampshire with 37 percent of the vote to Mondale’s 27 percent, utterly shattering the national perception. By that point John Glenn, who many thought would be the front runner was basically out of contention and while George McGovern stayed in the race until Massachusetts (the only state he carried in 1972 as the Democratic nominee) it was down to Mondale, Hart and Jesse Jackson.

For the rest of March Hart kept moving forward. He won the Wyoming and Maine caucus, Mondale took New Hampshire. But the problems with Hart’s campaign were already becoming clear. Mondale’s campaign was better funded and Hart hadn’t been able to file for adequate delegate slates on many of the states and the rules of proportion could be strange. On March 13^th – in what was then Super Tuesday Hart managed to beat Mondale in Florda, getting 41 percent of the vote to Mondale’s 35. But because of the delegate slates Mondale got 57 delegates and Hart only got 36. By contrast in Georgia Mondale narrowly beat Hart but Hart got 28 delegates to Mondale’s 24. Jesse Jackson managed to get 17.

This led to one of the bizarre twists of the campaign. On Super Tuesday Hart managed to win seven primaries and caucuses. Mondale by contrast managed to win just Alabama and Rhode Island. Yet somehow the television broadcaster ruled that Mondale had ended up ‘winning Super Tuesday’ something that the political journalists couldn’t fathom. And yet somehow frontrunner status went back to Mondale.

Hart’s organizational strength paid off mostly in the caucuses as opposed to primaries. Hart actually managed to win 26 states to Mondale’s 22. (Jesse Jackson won South Carolina and D.C). But in what was a pattern eerily similar to McGovern’s run in 1972, Mondale did far better in the larger states than Hart’s campaign managed. Mondale swamped Hart in Illinois and New York, outflanked him in Pennsylvania, managed a dead heat in Ohio and swamped him in Texas. Only in California – the same state McGovern narrowly won in 1972 – did Hart managed a significant victory. (He also carried New Mexico and South Dakota; the same states McGovern did that day. Mondale managed to win New Jersey and West Virginia.

Hart’s problems were summed up famously in a televised debate when Mondale referred to Hart’s new ideas with the iconic line: “Where’s the Beef?” But during that same debate he made a mistake that was almost entirely unnoticed. Asked what he would do if an unidentified airplane flew over the Iron Curtain from a Warsaw Pact nation, Hart said that he would send up an Air Force plane and instruct them to determine whether or not it was an enemy plane by looking in the cockpit window. John Glenn, who knew of where he spoke, stated this was physically impossible.

Hart continued to show his flaws up until the last moment. Before the primaries ended and Mondale clearly had enough to win the primary Hart was maintaining that unpledged superdelegates that had claimed support for Mondale would shift to his side if he swept the final day. That very well might have happened had he not committed a major faux pas while on the campaign trail in California.

Trying to make a joke he said: “the bad news was that he and his wife had to campaign separately. The good news for her is that she campaigns in California while I get to campaign in New Jersey. When his wife, who clearly had more savvy than him said that she got to hold a koala bear Hart replied, “I won’t tell you what I got to hold samples from a toxic waste dump.” Hart had been leading in the polls in New Jersey by as much at fifteen points. The vote totals aren’t clear but the delegate count is Mondale received 104 delegates. Hart just one.

On July 11^th in what must have been a blow to him McGovern endorsed Mondale and released his 23 delegates. It was icing on the cake.

One of the ironies about Hart’s run was that he must have felt the same way the Democratic elders did after he had helped McGovern win the nomination 12 years previous. The overall popular vote was extremely close. Mondale received just under 7 million votes at a little more than 38 percent of total votes cast, while Hart received 6.5 million votes and just a shade under 36 percent. But Mondale managed to win 1929 delegates in what amounted to 22 primaries and caucuses  to Hart’s 1164 in 26 primaries and caucuses. And there was a sense of unfairness among the Hart voters: a later poll indicated that a third of the people who Hart supporters in the primary would vote for Reagan in the general election. That probably didn’t make a huge difference in the final count, however,  considering that Mondale lost by nearly nineteen million votes and only carried Minnesota and DC.

Mondale it should be noted did make some progress compared to McGovern. He was trailing Reagan by 25 points after the convention and managed to lost by ‘only’ 17 points. And he does deserve credit for being the first Presidential candidate to nominate a woman for the Vice Presidency. That it didn’t end up helping his electoral prospects doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve the credit for it: Kamala Harris almost certainly wouldn’t have gotten to where she is if Mondale hadn’t been willing to go out on a limb for Geraldine Ferraro.

Since Hart became the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 1988 due both his coming up short for the nomination in 1984 and Mondale’s massive defeats, it’s worth at least speculating on what could have happened had Hart been the nominee in 1984.The obvious answer is very little: just like Nixon in 1972 Reagan was almost certainly going to win 1984 regardless of his Democratic opponent. One could also argue the flaws that did much to go against Hart even before the Monkey Business affair in 1987 would have hurt him just as much in 1984. But rather than deal with those problems, let’s engage in some magical thinking.

The first problem is the exact same problems that plagued the McGovern campaign in 1972 were just as present for Hart’s primary campaign. With the sole example of Georgia Hart didn’t win a single Southern primary or caucus. Combined with his problems with the major electoral prizes he would have the same trouble McGovern did. But Hart does have one major strength that McGovern didn’t that could have worked for him – and perhaps shifted the Democrats going forward.

In the history of Presidential politics there has never been a major party nominee for a Western state. (Texas has always crossed the border between Southern and Western and by the time Nixon was nominated by the Republicans, no one could say it had the same values as Wyoming or Idaho.) Hart came the closest of any candidate from a Western state to winning the nomination. And it is worth noting that he had managed to sweep all of the Western caucuses or primaries, including New Mexico.

Ever since Eisenhower’s landslide in 1952 with the exception the 1964 LBJ landslide the West has been exclusively Republican territory. It has taken until only the past decade for the Democrats to make progress in Western states at all when Joe Biden managed to carry Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado along with the three Pacific Coast states. It is at least possible Hart could have managed to carry all of them and certain other Western states. It would have been easier for a man with his Western credentials to carry states such as Idaho and Montana then any other Democrat since then and many of those states did still have a Western based. And while the South might have been out of reach he probably could have carried quite a few of the New England states and the Midwest states that returned to the Democratic fold. Other states that were still in the Democratic column  such as Massachusetts, New York, West Virginia and Hawaii would have gone his way too. I can’t, however, see California going to Hart: it wouldn’t shift to its reliably blue status until the Clinton years.

There’s also the fact that a third of Hart’s supporters claimed they voted for Reagan in 1984 and while that may have only amounted to two to three million votes that’s not insignificant. And more important would have been the fact of youth. Hart would have been the youngest candidate for a major party since JFK in 1960 and he would have been running against the man who to that point was the oldest nominee by a major party. Reagan might have been able to land a punch at the debate about inexperience but he wouldn’t have wanted to argue youth to a man who was a quarter of a century younger than him. It worked against Walter Mondale because Mondale was a Washington fixture for so long; it wouldn’t have had the same resonance against a man who was campaign on New ideas – something that Hart could have used to much better effect against Reagan.

And unlike the McGovern campaign of 1972 Hart would have had far more of the establishment behind his campaign than McGovern did. Hart had not isolated the Democratic elders the same way McGovern did in his campaign and he’d done a far better job at reaching voters than McGovern had. Hart was also more popular with the press at the time and far more photogenic.

None of this I should be clear would have likely led to a Democratic victory in November because of the biggest problem the Democrats had in Presidential elections from 1968 until the end of the 20^th century. With the exception of Carter’s win in 1976, no Democratic candidate was able to get more than 46 percent of the popular vote. Clinton was only able to get 43 percent of the popular vote in 1992 and almost certainly won because of Ross Perot’s strong showing. (Clinton benefited from incumbency in 1996 so I left that one out.) Humphrey had only gotten 43 percent of the vote in 1968; Jimmy Carter got 41 percent when he ran against Reagan in 1980 (in fairness John Anderson’s third party run ciphered votes from his campaign more than Reagan’s) and Dukakis’s came up with just 45.5 percent. None of these Democrats lost as horribly as McGovern or Mondale and Clinton was able to win but it does show how unpopular Democratic Presidential candidates were until Clinton’s second term.

It’s very hard to see Hart coming within anymore than ten points of Reagan regardless of how good a campaign he ran. Remember that the theme for Reagan’s reelection was: “It’s Morning in America” the most positive campaign slogan and approach that has happened in modern history. Reagan was still immensely popular and he had an enormous ability to deflect criticism. Hart could have made inroads against Reagan that Mondale couldn’t but I doubt even he believes that would have translated to a win in November.

However if he had managed a closer race he might very well have taken the shine off Reagan’s halo both at the time and in the eyes of Republicans. So much of Reagan’s legacy among the Republican party is not so much his accomplishments but his electoral mandate from the voters. As I wrote before when you received 1015 electoral votes against 59 by your opponents its hard to argue with that form of Republicanism. However if Reagan’s reelection had been closer – had he been held to under 400 electoral votes or fewer in 1984 – then it has the appearance of the same kind of wins Eisenhower received.

That argument would have held weight based on how Congress turned out. It’s worth remembering that Reagan’s landslide didn’t lead to a Republican majority in Congress: the Republicans only gained 16 seats in the House and actually lost two in the Senate. Had Hart been the nominee, it’s conceivable those margins would have been even smaller. Given the narrowness of some Republican wins they might have taken the Senate back. And considering that the only gain Republicans made in the Senate was Mitch McConnell’s very narrow win in Kentucky, the national repercussion would be felt to this day had he lost.

And had Reagan had both Houses of Congress be under Democratic control for all of his second term rather than just the last two years of it  much of his domestic agenda might very well have been died before it got started. Considering that one of them was legislation to preempt the FCC decision to repeal the Fairness Doctrine – which Reagan famously vetoed in 1987 – the world might well have be a different place had Democrats had a larger majority starting in 1985.

None of this would have been in the minds of most Democrats in 1984. All that mattered were three distinct but related factors.

1.      Mondale’s sweeping defeat meant that the brand of liberalism he had spent his career preaching was no longer capable of winning the Presidency. This was proven by the fact Mondale had gotten just over 37.5 million votes for President while Democratic Congressional candidates had gotten just under 43 million votes nationwide.

2.      Had someone else been at the head of the ticket the Democrats would have likely taken both Houses of Congress.

3.      1988 was going to be a Democratic year.

 

The first two were theoretical; the last was not. Aside from the era of FDR, the last time a political party had won three consecutive elections was from 1920 to 1928 and even that had been based more on the death of Warren Harding in 1923 which led to Coolidge’s assent.

And now the argument for Hart becoming President loomed large in everyone’s mind. Hart himself believed it. Rather than seek reelection in 1986, he chose to step down in order to seek the Presidency again. His successor Tim Wirth was one of eight new Democrats to win election in the 1986 midterms as the Democrats regained control of the Senate. Among those elected were Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Harry Reid of Nevada, both of whom would be future majority leaders in the Senate. It looked certain that the Democratic nominee for President would win the White House.

In the next article I will deal with the numerous character flaws of Gary Hart, how they set him up for trouble and how his own failings, not the press or the system ended his run for the Presidency in 1988 – sort of.