JD Vance Wrong: Nixon Coalition Was Not Stronger and More Durable than Reagan’s

JD 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:

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.”

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Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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JD 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:

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.”