In American politics, a Conservative Democrat is a member of the Democratic Party with more conservative views than most Democrats. Traditionally, conservative Democrats have been elected to office from the Southern states, rural areas, the Rust Belt, and the Great Plains. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that 14% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning registered voters identify as conservative or very conservative, 38% identify as moderate, and 47% identify as liberal or very liberal.
Before 1964, the Democratic Party and Republican Party each had influential liberal, moderate, and conservative wings. During this period, conservative Democrats formed the Democratic half of the conservative coalition. After 1964, the Democratic Party retained its conservative wing through the 1970s with the help of urban machine politics. The numerical decline of conservative Democrats is attributed to the Southern strategy, which realigned conservative white voters in the South to the Republican Party following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 In the 21st century, the number of conservative Democrats decreased substantially. Over this period from, 1960s to 2010s, after the southern strategy, the party generally moved rightward on economic policy, embracing neoliberalism under the New Democrats, deregulation (including the repeal of Glass–Steagall), welfare reform, and fiscal austerity, abandoning New Deal era liberalism while moving leftward primarily on social and cultural issues such as LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, and reproductive rights.
The Blue Dog Coalition represents centrist and conservative Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives.Edward G. Carmines, and Michael Berkman, "Ethos, ideology, and partisanship: Exploring the paradox of conservative Democrats." Political Behavior 16 (1994): 203-218. onlineAdam J. Schiffer, "I'm not that liberal: Explaining conservative democratic identification." Political Behavior 22 (2000): 293-310. Post 2020s the Blue Dog Coalition has shrunken significantly due to electoral losses in conservative districts and primary challenges from more liberal opponents.
History 1876–1964: Solid South
The Solid South describes the reliable electoral support of the U.S. Southern states for Democratic Party candidates for almost a century after the Reconstruction era. Except 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 South provided most of Smith's electoral votes). Democratic Party domination was bolstered by restrictions preventing blacks from voting and built on white supremacist Southerners' animosity towards the Republican Party's role in the Civil War and Reconstruction.C. Vann Woodward, The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951) pp 235–90
1874–1928: Rise of agrarian populism In 1896, William Jennings Bryan won the Democratic Party nomination by promoting silver over gold, and denouncing the banking system. He had a strong base in the South and Plains states, as well 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 most active. "Gold Democrats" were supporters of Grover Cleveland, the hero of conservative Democrats. They formed the National Democratic Party and nominated John Palmer, 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.James A. Barnes, "The gold-standard Democrats and the party conflict." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 17.3 (1930): 422–450. online Bryan and people he supported (especially Woodrow Wilson) usually dominated the party. However the conservatives did nominate their candidate in 1904, Alton B. Parker.John H. Sloan, " 'I have kept the faith': William Jennings Bryan and the Democratic national convention of 1904." Southern Journal of Communication 31.2 (1965): 114–123.
1932–1948: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition
The 1932 election brought about a major realignment in political party affiliation. Franklin D. Roosevelt forged a coalition of labor unions, liberals, Catholics, African Americans, and southern whites.Robert C. Benedict, Matthew J. Burbank and Ronald J. Hrebenar, Political Parties, Interest Groups and Political Campaigns. Westview Press. 1999. Page 11. Roosevelt's program for alleviating the Great Depression, collectively known as the New Deal, emphasized only economic issues, and thus was compatible with the views of those who supported the New Deal programs but were otherwise conservative. This included the Southern Democrats, who were an important part of FDR's New Deal coalition. A number of chairmanships were also held by conservative Democrats during the New Deal years.
Conservative Democrats came to oppose the New Deal, especially after 1936. They included Senator Harry F. Byrd and his powerful state organization in Virginia, Senator Rush Holt Sr., Senator Josiah Bailey, and Representative Samuel B. Pettengill. The American Liberty League was formed in 1934, to oppose the New Deal. It was made 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.James T. Patterson, "A conservative coalition forms in Congress, 1933–1939." Journal of American History 52.4 (1966): 757–772 online .Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950. Political Science Quarterly 108 (1993): 283–306 online
However, most of the conservative Southern Democrats supported the foreign policy of Roosevelt and Truman.Charles O. Lerche, "Southern Congressmen and the 'New Isolationism.' " Political Science Quarterly, 75#3, 1960, pp. 321–37,online
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, except for a major success in defeating John J. O'Connor in Manhattan, a spokesman for big business.Susan Dunn, Roosevelt's Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party (2010) passim, esp. p. 204.
A different source 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 programs on principle; these included Albert Jay Nock and John T. Flynn, whose views later became influential in the libertarian movement.Ronald Hamowy, ed. The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism (Cato Institute). pp. 356–357.
1948–1968: Segregationist backlash
The proclamation by President Harry S. Truman and Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey of support for a civil rights plank in the Democratic Party platform of 1948 led to a walkout of 35 delegates from Mississippi and Alabama. These southern delegations nominated their own States Rights Democratic Party, better known as the Dixiecrats, nominees with South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond leading the ticket (Thurmond would later represent 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 continue in 1956 (T. Coleman Andrews), and 1960 (Harry F. Byrd). None would be as successful as the American Independent 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 race early. In 1968, he formed the new American Independent Party and received 13.5% of the popular vote, and 46 electoral votes, carrying several Southern states.The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics. Dan T. Carter. Simon & Schuster Press (1995). 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.
1970–1999
After 1968, with desegregation a settled issue, conservative Democrats, mostly Southerners, managed to remain 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" in Elections A-Z (ed. John L. Moore: Congressional Quarterly, 1999). Routledge ed. 2013. pp. 27–28.
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.
Split-ticket voting was common among conservative Southern Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s. These voters supported conservative Democrats for local and statewide office while simultaneously voting for Republican presidential candidates. For example, Kent Hance defeated future president George W. Bush in the 1978 midterms.Roger Chapman, Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia (2010) vol 1 Page 136 They were sometimes humorously called "Yellow dog Democrats", or "boll weevils" and "Dixiecrats". According to journalist Ed Kilgore, Yellow Dog Democrats were Southerners who saw the Democratic Party as "the default vehicle for day-to-day political life, and the dominant presence, regardless of ideology, for state and local politics."