In a review of a biography of William F. Buckley, Louis Menand wrote: "In 1948, eighty-eight per cent [of Yale students] supported Thomas E. Dewey for President; four per cent backed Harry Truman." Although the New Yorker has a reputation for thorough fact-checking, that seemed unlikely to me--you rarely find a margin that large in any group. I looked in the archives of the Yale Daily News and found they reported a survey of Yale students which found 68% for Dewey, 21% for Truman, 7.5% for Norman Thomas (Socialist), 2.5% for Henry Wallace, and 1% for Strom Thurmond.* The story said that graduate students were evenly divided--34% for Dewey and 34% for Truman--but there's no mix of 34-34 and 88-4 that produces 68-21 for the total. By itself, this is just a piece of trivia, but the changing relationship between college education and vote is an important issue, so I while I was at it I looked for data on subsequent elections. Procedures were not uniform, so there's some extra margin of error, but here they are:
R D
1948 68% 21% 7.4% Thomas 2.5% Wallace 1% Thurmond
1952 67% 33%
1956 71% 29%
1960 64% 33%
1964 30% 70%
1968 27% 45% 11% neither 9% undecided
1972 12% 76%
I've written about similar surveys at Harvard before. Harvard students were more favorable to the Democrats, but showed the same general pattern: mostly Republican in the 1930s and 1940s and heavily Democratic since the 1960s.
R D
1948 72% 8% 8% Thomas 1.5% Wallace 10% Thurmond
1952 73% 27%
1956 73% 27%
1960 71% 29%
1964 27% 66%
1968 28% 40% 11% Gregory 4% Wallace 4% Paulsen
1972 (35% 65%)
Princeton traditionally had a lot of students from the South, which explains Thurmond's strength in 1948. In 1968, comedian Dick Gregory was on the ballot as candidate of the Peace and Freedom party, getting 0.1% of the national vote. Pat Paulsen was another comedian who was not on the ballot but was running a joke campaign. In 1972, there was a story about a poll, but it didn't give the totals, so I combined the numbers they gave to get an estimate. Democratic support was consistently lower at Princeton than at Harvard or Yale, but it had a similar swing in the 1960s.
Moving outside the Ivy League, here are figures for Stanford:
R D
1948 68% 10% 4% Thomas 8% Wallace
1952 68% 28%
1956 No data
1960 57% 36% 5% Pauling
1964 30% 70%
1968 24% 33% 18% McCarthy 2.5% Wallace
1972 23% 67%
"Pauling" is the chemist Linus Pauling, who was not a candidate but was included on the student ballot. He was an opponent of nuclear testing and supporter of nuclear disarmament, so he could be regarded as a leftist option. Stanford shows the same pattern as the others.
The long-term movement from Republicans to Democrats is no surprise, but the timing is interesting. Rather than a gradual shift, there was a sudden swing between 1960 and 1964. In 1968, there were a lot of protest or "none of the above" votes, but the 1972 distribution was similar to what it had been in 1964. That is, in less than a decade, the campuses went from solidly Republican to solidly Democratic. Presumably the change in 1964 was a reaction against Goldwater and/or his supporters, not a positive attraction to Johnson. That raises a couple of questions. First, how much difference did the candidates make? If the Republicans had nominated different candidates (say William Scranton in 1964 and George Romney in 1968), would the eventual change have been smaller or would it just have been more spread out? Second, why didn't Republicans make more effort to win back the universities, especially the "elite" ones? Political analysis wasn't as data-driven back in the 1970s, but this change was big enough to be visible without high-quality data or elaborate analysis. College graduates were a minority, but still a substantial group, and one that was clearly going to grow. Moreover, college graduates, and particularly graduates of elite colleges, have extra political weight--they are more likely to vote, donate money, appear in the media, and run for office. But I don't have the impression that Republicans ever made much effort to reverse or even contain the shift.
*I've said this before, but I'll say it again: It's remarkable that online editions of newspapers and magazines haven't developed reasonable conventions about including links to sources. The New Yorker didn't have any link for the 88-4 numbers, but it did have a link for "Harry Truman"--another New Yorker story about his general impact.
You attribute the timing to the anti-Goldwater effect. I graduated in 1963. I'd suggest a combination of effects: the civil rights movement in the South, a change of opinion on JFK stemming from Cuban missile crisis, his 63 speeches, and assassination. But mostly I think it was coalescing around Johnson-. He engaged in a whirlwind of activity before the election, touching all the bases. So when Goldwater won the nomination it was a contest between the "Master of the Senate" in Caro's phrase now become the master of the presidency and some rightwinger who opposed civil rights.
ReplyDeleteI voted for LBJ (and still think he's underrated), my mother who I suspect never voted Democratic in her life did also.
My thought was that the change was mostly due to civil rights--that by that time most educated people had come to think that segregation was wrong and it was time to finally do something about it. I don't have any real evidence that was the most important factor, though. I was born in 1959, so I don't have any memory of the election.
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