The New Deal Realignment in Real Time

Abstract

We offer a new view of the New Deal realignment. It was the wartime experience and the postwar prosperity, not the Great Depression or the New Deal, that gave the Democratic Party its overwhelming hold on the American electorate for the next three decades. The 1948 election plays the critical role, not the 1932 or the 1936 election. The generation that contributed the most to the Democratic ascendancy is the one that came of age in the 1940’s, not the one that did in the 1930’s. Whatever gains the Democratic Party had reaped in party identification by 1936 were short-lived. Generational replacement, not conversion, makes the major contribution to the transformation of partisanship. We reach these conclusions with a “real-time” analysis of party loyalties in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The data come from over 170 polls, mostly conducted by Gallup, that probed party identification during that time.