JD Vance Is Wrong About Nixon and Reagan

The vice president’s theory that the Nixon coalition was stronger and more durable doesn’t survive contact with reality.

J D Vance, speaking at the Richard Nixon Foundation, had a story to tell in service of his ongoing effort to downplay the political success of Ronald Reagan:

Nixon’s coalition in ’72 . . . If you look at the top line numbers, you would say, well, that’s exactly what happened in 1984. It’s much different. Nixon’s coalition in ’72 is actually durable and much more closely resembles the Trump coalition of 2024 than the Reagan coalition.

So, what Reagan did in ’84 is he ran up margins basically with white Americans, and of course you know he won a historic landslide, but the country is much less white today than it was in 1984. Nixon’s coalition was unbelievably durable to the demographic change that we’ve seen in the United States of America.

So, this is a guy who could, you know, Reagan could not have won his landslide in 2024. Richard Nixon maybe could have won his landslide in 2024, and I think that there’s a very important political lesson in that for all of us in the Republican Party. He was actually like a political genius.

There’s something of a Nixon revival these days among a faction on the right consisting mostly of people too young to remember either Nixon or Reagan. Christopher Rufo has been one of the voices pushing a Nixon reappraisal. Now, that’s not all bad: Nixon was a brilliant and canny man, a shrewd and ruthless analyst of geopolitics, and a political survivor of the first order. In spite of his stiff, awkward personality, he was a highly successful politician who was on five national tickets, four of them winning (three by landslides) and the fifth losing by a hair in an election that always carried an odor of mischief. Martin Luther King Jr., who was no stranger to charisma, once wrote after an encounter with Nixon that he “has one of the most magnetic personalities that I have ever confronted,” and “has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere.”

But Zombie Nixonism is not a winning formula. The notion that Nixon was more successful, and his coalition more durable, than Reagan — much less that he accomplished more for the right’s policy goals — simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It’s understandable why Vance prefers Nixon as a political model, because Nixon was far less constrained than Reagan by conservative principles in domestic politics, by an assertive pro-American foreign policy, and by the rule of law. But there’s no need for the rest of us to play along with this revisionist fiction.

In the first place, taking Vance on his own terms, what is he talking about? From the presidential exit polls, which began in 1972, Nixon won white voters by 36 points (67 percent to 31 percent) to Reagan’s 29 (64 percent to 35 percent), while Reagan lost Hispanic voters by 25 points (37 percent to 62 percent) to Nixon’s 28 (35 percent to 63 percent). Vance’s entire thesis is based upon Nixon losing black voters by 64 points (82 percent to 18 percent) to Reagan’s 81 (9 percent to 90 percent). But that simply reflects the fact that 1972 was at the tail end of the era when Republicans competed for a significant share of the black vote, and many of the ancestral Republicans among black voters were dying off. Nixon, famously, presided over that era, given that Republicans won an estimated 35 to 40 percent of the black vote in 1956–60, and that collapsed on Nixon’s watch, not Reagan’s. The legend of Nixon and the “Southern Strategy” may contain a lot of myth, but there is also an element of truth to the story.

One can offer some apologies for Nixon on this point. The mass migration of black voters to the Democrats in the 1960s was partly driven by Lyndon Johnson’s decisions more than those of Republicans; it was partly the doing of Barry Goldwater rather than Nixon in opposing the Civil Rights Act, and just as a matter of electoral coalitions, one can argue that Republicans benefited from their improved position with white Southerners more than they lost with black voters.

Sticking to the topic of presidential-election strength, if you squint, you can quarrel that Reagan’s only loss in 1984, Minnesota, was by 0.18 points, while Nixon lost Massachusetts by nine points; on the other hand, Reagan won two states (Massachusetts and Rhode Island) by less than five points, while Nixon’s smallest win was in Minnesota, by 5.5 points. Or one can give the edge to Reagan for winning the Electoral College 525–13 versus Nixon’s 520–17, or to Nixon winning 60.7 percent of the vote to Reagan’s 58.8 percent. I think we can safely say that these are both luxuries that today’s GOP would happily take.

But what about durability? Both running three-way races, Reagan won a popular majority, 50.8 percent, in 1980 and defeated an incumbent by almost ten points, leading to a 489–49 Electoral College landslide; Nixon in 1968 got 43.4 percent and won the popular vote by 0.7 points over a candidate who hadn’t even won a single primary, taking the electoral vote 301–191 (with 46 for George Wallace). And at the end of his term, Reagan’s coalition was still strong enough that the colorless George H. W. Bush won 53.4 percent of the vote and 426 electoral votes. In 1976, by contrast, Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford fell off to 48 percent of the vote, and Democrats won one of just two popular majorities they carried between 1948 and 2004. To argue that Nixon’s coalition was more durable than Reagan’s is to ignore that Nixon’s didn’t actually endure, and Reagan’s did. One might think that a matter of particular importance to Vance, who seeks to continue the Trump coalition and would prefer Bush’s fate to Ford’s.

If we are being fair to Nixon, we should note that he typically ran in higher-turnout elections than did Reagan, so if we measure their share of all eligible voters, Nixon ’72 beats Reagan ’84 by 34.1 percent to 32.4 percent, while Reagan ’80 beats Nixon ’68 only by 27.5 percent to 27.1 percent. Nixon also drew 31.6 percent of all eligible voters in 1960, an even larger share in defeat than Donald Trump in 2020, and was on the two Eisenhower tickets that drew the biggest share of eligible voters of any Republican ticket since Teddy Roosevelt. On the other hand, Reagan’s handoff to Bush in 1988 hung on to 28.2 percent of all eligible voters, compared with 26.3 percent for Ford in 1976.

This is before we consider a fact most inconvenient to Vance: Successful coalitions are not just votes for one man, but depend upon the overall strength of the party. Here is where we see the difference. In 1968, Nixon had coattails: Republicans gained five Senate seats, five House seats, and five governors. But that was nothing compared to the Reagan Revolution in 1980, which carried twelve Senate seats, 34 House seats, and four governors. In 1984, Republicans did marginally better down-ticket than in 1972, gaining 16 House seats and one governor compared with twelve House seats and a loss of one governor in 1972 (in both years, the GOP lost two Senate seats). Given that Nixon had a better midterm in 1970 than Reagan in 1982, that evens out.

But look at what followed. Republicans had a rough year in close elections in 1986, losing eight Senate seats, seven of them (including five incumbents) by less than two points. They lost five House seats, actually not bad for a second-term midterm, and gained eight governors. It helped that a Gallup poll just before the 1986 election showed Reagan’s approval rating at 63 percent and 29 percent disapproval. Nixon was another story. His approval rating was 67 percent in January 1973, and 54 percent in April 1973. But by October 1973, when his vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned, it was 27 percent, and it stayed below 30 percent for all of 1974, hitting 24 percent by the time Nixon himself resigned in August.

In November 1974, Democrats added five governorships, 45 seats and a veto-proof majority in the House, and four Senate seats, which, along with one independent, gave them 62 senators in their caucus. Not coincidentally, they then rewrote the filibuster rule in 1975 to make 60 senators the threshold to close debate. They rewrote the budget rules in ways favorable to more spending that are still with us today. The 1974 midterms also launched dozens of long Democratic careers in Congress. And Democrats held onto those gains while attaining a trifecta by taking the White House in 1976.

It’s true that Nixon inherited a tougher landscape on Capitol Hill than Reagan did. Democrats held the White House, the House, and the Senate for eight years after Nixon’s 1960 defeat — the only eight-year trifecta for either party since 1946. Still, if we’re just asking who had a stronger coalition and more sway in the political system, it was obviously Reagan. Nobody talked about a “Nixon Revolution.” Reagan had a Republican Senate majority for six years, and for his first two years the House was close enough to give him a de facto majority (given Reagan’s support among conservative Southern Democrats) on issues such as tax cuts and the defense buildup. Nixon at his peak faced a 51-seat Democratic majority in the House in 1969–70 and a ten-seat Democratic majority in the Senate. Democrats came out of 1972 with 31 governors and control of 38 state legislatures.

This is why domestic policy during the Nixon years was an almost unbroken record of failures and setbacks, which can at best be defended as necessary concessions to stave off even worse things: wage and price controls, racial preferences, Roe v. Wade (written by a Nixon appointee two days into Nixon’s second term), the Federal Election Campaign Act and the massive expansion of environmental regulation (including NEPA and the Endangered Species Act), the creation of the EPA, EEOC, HUD, the CSPC, Amtrak, the FEC, and the Legal Services Corporation, and the institution of Title X family planning grants, the alternative minimum tax, ERISA and the Rehabilitation Act, and the installation of a D.C. delegate in the House. Nixon’s weakness by late 1973 left him unable to prevent the passage over his veto of the War Powers Act. In the aftermath of Watergate, Democrats gave us the independent counsel, the FISA court, and the inspectors general. The ruinous foreign policy of the 1970s, from the fall of Saigon forward, was the fruit of Nixon’s collapse. Nixon left behind a diminished presidency, a massively expanded administrative state, and a template for lawfare that Reagan beat back in 1987.

The Reagan record should not require a full recitation here, but while Reagan had his missteps and his sins of omission — Vance defenders will surely point to the immigration bill — nobody would have considered the Reagan years a time of great expansion for Democrats at home or Communists abroad.

As I wrote in 2015:

Reagan revolutionized the politics of taxes — in 1980, the top federal income tax rate was 70%, and married couples making $30,000 a year paid a top rate of 37%; at $35,000 they hit the 43% bracket. Taxpayers over $200,000 in income paid, on average, a total effective tax rate over 40%. These would be unthinkable tax rates today, when we argue over top marginal rates in the 35-39.6% band. Other long-term policy wins that shifted the conversation included ending the Fairness Doctrine, nominating the first explicit originalist to the Supreme Court (Antonin Scalia), breaking the air-traffic controllers union, finishing the (started under Carter) project of airline and trucking deregulation, and starting the free-trade processes that would yield dividends into the 1990s (he promised a NAFTA-like agreement in his 1979 speech announcing his candidacy). And Reagan’s victories laid the groundwork for the welfare reforms of Newt Gingrich (presaged in some of Reagan’s own policies as California Governor) and the law-enforcement revolution spearheaded by his U.S. Attorney in New York, Rudy Giuliani.

Note the handoff to Gingrich. Even when the Reagan coalition finally collapsed in 1992, it proved much more immediately resilient than the Nixon coalition, and so did its agenda. Republicans came back in a massive wave in 1994, and in contrast to the flood of liberal legislation in the 1970s, the Clinton years were played between the yard lines that Reagan staked out, with Bill Clinton feeling compelled to intone that “the era of big government is over” and sign a battery of conservative priorities in 1995–96. The Bush era in 2001–08 was much more a continuation of Reagan’s themes than Reagan was of Nixon’s.

Reagan didn’t just win in a hostile partisan environment, as Nixon did: He changed it. Again from my 2015 summary:

We talk today about a general electorate dominated by Democrats, because the exit polls showed a D+7 electorate in 2008, D+6 in 2012 (that is, for example, 38% Democrats and 32% Republicans in 2012), and how this gave Barack Obama an unbeatable edge. But the electorate in 1976 and 1980 was D+15, with only 22% of voters in 1976 identifying themselves as Republicans. Yes, many more of the Democrats in those days were fairly conservative-leaning, not just in the South but in the Midwest, but these were still not people you could walk up to and say “I’m a conservative Republican” and have their vote (a March 1979 poll had Reagan trailing Carter 52-38). Even the South had gone heavily Democrat in 1976, with Carter carrying all but one state (Virginia) below the Mason-Dixon Line. Reagan in 1980 carried 27% of Democrats to Carter’s 67, and 56% of independents to Carter’s 31. And Reagan’s success changed the electorate’s view of his party — the electorate was D+3 by 1984, D+2 by 1988.

It may be argued at this point, as Vance did, that the destruction of Nixon’s coalition and political movement was engineered by his enemies in Watergate. But enemies are a permanent fixture of politics; they came for Reagan in Iran-Contra, but they didn’t get him. Nixon himself understood that he had been the author of much of his own self-destruction: As he told David Frost in 1977: “I brought myself down. I gave ’em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I’d been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.”

There is a lesson there, too, for this administration and its would-be successor: You don’t have to give them a sword, and if you do, you should expect them to twist it.