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

[Ken Burch]

215. There were so many other votes the party could have won that year.

They could have connected with the anti-nuclear and Central America solidarity movemewnts, and with poor people and workers who were mobilizing everywhere to fight Reagan's agenda. There were massive numbers of people in those movements who didn't vote because dismal campaigns like 1980 had convinced them that electoral politics were useless to them, that political parties were deaf to their concerns and their principles, that money(even then)mattered more than people in the electoral game. Many responded to the Jackson(and, to a degree, the Hart)campaigns. None responded to the Mondale campaign.

Instead, the party put DEFICIT REDUCTION...something Wall Street cared about(which is why then-Mondale advisor Robert Rubin pushed so hard for it)but a goal that could never have led to any improvements in anything for any potential Democratic voters, and a goal that meant having the party abandon any restoration of the cuts in the social wage or any effort to reindustrialize the Rust Belt...above and beyond anything else(that's why Mondale's tax position was such a disaster...not because he proposed raising taxes-voters actually respected the honesty of that proposal-but because it wasn't tied to funding any progressive, grassroots alternative to Reaganism.

And even the potential mobilization of feminist voters behind the Mondale/Ferraro ticket was blunted by Gerry Ferraro's pre-nomination effort, as chair of the Platform Committee, to remove the endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment from the platform(a change that wouldn't have brought ANY significant blocs of "swing voters" over to the party, given that virtually no groups of people who backed the party on any other issues opposed the ERA by then...ERA opposition was always in a clear minority and always a view held solely by people with extreme right-wing views on ALL issues).

All the party gave up on the millions new voters it COULD have brought in because the party establishment was obsessed, instead, with the hopeless goal of appeasing wealthy donors and "fiscally conservative" voters they already knew were totally, mindlessly, unquestioning committed to Reagan and would have voted for him against ANY Dem, even Fritz Hollings, Reuben Askew or John Glenn(or even Sam Nunn). We weren't going to get those voters in 1984 no matter what, or 1988 no matter what. And we didn't actually get them in 1992 or 1996(Clinton was elected with 43% and nudged that up only a few trivial points in 1996....never even trying to get the House back in 1996 when a Dem retake-after the government shutdown-should have been a "gimme&quot .

The lesson, as Barack Obama learned(and HRC wouldn't have if we'd nominated her, since her fall campaign would have been on Bill's exact 1990's program)was that our only hope was bringing in new voters by persuading those voters that, while the party had ignored them in the past, it wouldn't do so again(and yes, Rahm made sure he forgot that message as soon as the votes were in, but the GOP hasn't ever forgotten it-which is why they're doing all they can to stop new voters from casting their votes now).

Our only chances lie with the powerless, the forgotten, the dispossessed....we can't get the comfortable, those who fear change, and those who fear and hate all who are different than they are. We didn't do that in the Eighties and lost. We did that, at least partially, in 2008 and 2012 and won. Not rocket science.