During his campaign, McGovern hailed the revamped Democratic Party as a “coalition of conscience” that would not only end the war but also “reorder” the basic institutions of American society. As a campaign slogan, “coalition of conscience” was wholly in character: McGovern, the son of a Methodist minister, was raised in a Methodist manse, graduated from a Methodist college, and had briefly studied for the ministry himself. More to the point, the phrase flattered youthful voters like me who would not have supported President Nixon under any circumstances. But to others, “coalition of conscience” reeked of moral, cultural, and class contempt. McGovern lost every state except for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Eventually he learned to laugh about it: “I opened the doors of the Democratic Party,” he liked to say, “and twenty million people walked out.”
To be sure, enough of the walkouts returned in 1976 to elect another Democrat, Jimmy Carter. But that was after Watergate and with the help of white born-again Christians from the South who saw in Carter—with his born-again bona fides—one of their own. By then, lines of separation by class, education, and income had been drawn, lines that hardened over time and resurfaced in spectacular fashion during the 2016 presidential election.
Far more consequential was the Democratic Party’s alliance with the early feminist movement. In 1968, most of the Democrats who would later vie for the party’s presidential nomination—Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, Eugene McCarthy, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and McGovern himself—were pro-life. By 1992, no Democrat who ran for president or other high public office could identify as pro-life and count on the party’s support. Quite the contrary. At that year’s Democratic National Convention in New York City, placards from Planned Parenthood and the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws were everywhere; the old AFL-CIO placards, meanwhile, were nowhere to be seen. I attended that convention and watched as the platform committee barred Pennsylvania’s liberal, labor-friendly governor, Bob Casey Sr., from presenting a dissent to the platform’s pro-choice plank; worse, in an unprecedented public rebuke, the committee welcomed Casey’s pro-choice Republican opponent to speak in his stead.
One of the earliest effects of the Democrats’ new coalition was to dislodge the Catholic vote from its traditional moorings in the Democratic Party. This led to the emergence of the Reagan Democrats in the 1980s and to Catholics becoming the largest swing vote by the turn of the century. In 2004, John Kerry, the first Catholic presidential nominee since John F. Kennedy, actually lost the Catholic vote. In 2016 and again in 2024, a majority of Catholic voters supported Donald Trump.