All three Democratic presidential losses in the Eighties were caused by centrism.

[Drunken Irishman]

101. The only election the Democrats lost because of centrism was 1980 and that was due to a primary.

Jimmy Carter was well to the right of the National Democratic Party. He clashed with many high-ranking liberals - specifically Teddy Kennedy - and pretty much had a presidency that pushed conservative-leaning deregulation and spending cuts. He was only truly progressive on two major issues: the environment and foreign policy. Domestically, though, for the most part, he ran a right-of-center presidency that had a golden opportunity to pass healthcare reform (Carter had even larger majorities than Obama) and failed to do so because he wanted to tie reform to the deficit and ease it into policy so that the deficit wouldn't balloon. Kennedy didn't like the idea and, well, the rest is history.

Every other presidential election in the 80s, which turns out to be two, were lost because the candidates *failed* to actively work the center.

Your description of Dukakis is NOT what most Americans saw. They saw a Massachusetts liberal who was against the death penalty, for higher taxes, unabashedly pro-choice and a bit out of step with most of America. The fact he had to put Bentsen on the ticket shows this - they had to balance out his liberalism with a southern conservative.

You seem to be under the impression that if a person isn't to the left of, say Leon Trotsky, they're centrist. That's laughably bull.

Democrats didn't lose in the 80s because they were too conservative. They lost in the 80s because, a decade earlier, Americans turned on the ideology. America in the 80s was the antithesis of everything liberalism - it was pro-intervention, subtly racist with a lot of resentment and embracing the ideology of greed. It was not a left-of-center nation and most Americans looked at the Democratic Party as too extreme to ever put into the White House.

In 1984, liberals made up just 16% of the voting electorate. In 2012? 25%.

In 1984, 26% of Democrats voted for Reagan. In 2012, only 7% of Democrats voted for Romney.

That's all you need to know about the 80s. White Democrats were abandoning the party because of their policies and it wasn't because they perceived 'em as too conservative. The only change now is that the demographics of the groups who stuck with Democrats (blacks, Hispanics) have grown considerably since then.