How many DUers are old enough to have experienced our bad losses?

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156. The OP is wrong about at least half of the timeline offered

How many DUers are old enough to remember the terrible defeat by Nixon in '68? This was the only time I recall a third party taking electoral votes. - Hubert Humphrey was saddled with Johnson's Vietnam War, an unpopular war cooked up by the Cold War Democratic hawks of whom Hillary Clinton is the spiritual successor. Nixon made a plausible public case for change, while secretly undermining Johnson's back channel peace efforts with North Vietnam - a treasonous action that the Reagan-Bush campaign would repeat with Iran, and Boehner is now committing with Netanyahu.

Who is old enough to NEVER forget the horrible defeat of McGovern by Nixon in '72? That was a landslide that made me afraid to ever admit I was a Democrat in my local school. I campaigned for McGovern, as I have for every Democratic candidate since, and I am proud of it. Nixon was able to crush McGovern largely because the corporate media served as his organ, being afraid to expose or counter the Republican Administration's lies, race-baiting and dirty tricks until after the '72 election was over.

Who remembers the beautiful win by the moderate peanut farmer in '76? Or his crushing defeat at the hands of a B-movie actor in '80 because of a challenge from the left in the primaries? Carter's policies were not that different from Teddy Kennedy's. He was elected by a united Democratic Party, despite the inroads into the moderate-center vote of third-party candidate, John Anderson. The '80 election was held hostage by the major media's obsessions with the Iran hostages, and by the phony "Iranian oil shortage" which saw crude oil supplies on hand in the U.S. actually higher than the year before. The oil companies had shut down much of the country's refineries and were withholding retail deliveries, driving up prices and creating a political crisis for Carter, who took some bad advise (from center-right aides, such as Sec. Schlessinger) and didn't impose available federal emergency powers to force the companies to move sufficient refined product to retailers. Again, the major media did it's part to whip up public hysteria and hoarding behavior.

Who remembers what is possibly the worst landslide suffered by post-war Democrats in '84? Mondale was a bland, centrist candidate (by standards of the day) and a poor campaigner. The Democratic Party was sinking into a funk and losing its commitment to New Deal liberalism. The base was uninspired. 2016 could see a repeat of that malaise.

Or the horrible landslide against Dukakis in '88? Dukakis was a worse campaigner who couldn't effectively communicate and suffered from a staff who couldn't keep him focused.

Then we won with Clinton, who took a different tack. Bill Clinton won largely because Bush, Sr. was a terrible, patrician campaigner who made people's hair stand up on the back of their necks. That includes red necks who instinctively distrusted him. Clinton had genuine populist personal appeal, which counted for more of his popularity in the South than policy differences.

We nearly won with Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 taking the same tack. The legitimacy of the 2000 election is in doubt, and the GOP again got away with dirty tricks in FL. Kerry suffered from the same patrician bearing as Bush, Sr, and lacked populist appeal.

Then Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012. Barack Obama was the progressive left candidate. He won two elections. Hillary was and is the candidate of the hawkish, establishment-centrist right. She went on to preside over a State Department which in concert with the CIA (along with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and France) that systematically regime changed most of the Mideast, leading to the morphing of al-Qaeda into a Sunni regional militia we know today as ISIS. Obama ended up firing CIA Director Petraeus and graciously accepting Secretary Clinton's resignation.