The Reagan Democrats were members of the Democratic Party before and after the Reagan presidency, but voted for Reagan in 1980 and 1984 and for his vice president, George H. W. Bush, in 1988, producing their landslide victories. They were mostly white socially conservativeblue-collar workers who lived in the Northeast and were attracted to Reagan's social conservatism on issues such as abortion and to his anti-communist hawkish foreign policy. They did not continue to vote Republican in 1992 or 1996, causing the term to fall into disuse except as a reference to the 1980s. The term is not generally used to describe the white Southerners who permanently changed party affiliation from Democrat to Republican during Reagan's presidency. They have largely remained Republican to this day.
Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg analyzed white, largely unionized auto workers in suburban Macomb County, Michigan, just north of Detroit. The county voted 63% for John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election and 66% for Reagan in 1984. He concluded that Reagan Democrats no longer saw Democrats as champions of their middle class aspirations. They instead viewed the Democratic Party as working primarily for the benefit of others, especially African Americans and the very poor.
The Reagan coalition began to fall apart after 1988 when Reagan was ineligible for reelection and Bush won over Democrat Michael Dukakis. Bush lost over 5 million votes and 100 electoral votes in comparison to what Reagan won four years prior. In 1992, Bush faced a competitive primary competition with Pat Buchanan, still winning the Republican nomination with 72% of the vote. Bush went on to lose the general election against Democrat Bill Clinton, with exit polling showing Bush retaining 66% of the Republican vote, Clinton winning 12%, and independent candidate Ross Perot winning 21%. In 1996, Republican Bob Dole lost to Clinton, taking 68% of the Republican vote, improving on Bush's margin, while Clinton took 23% and Perot 7%.
During the election of 1980, Ronald Reagan described the party as a three-legged stool, most combining their different brands of conservatism in opposition to the Soviet Union and the spread of Communism during the Cold War. This political philosophy is often branded as fusionism as both groups have overlapping interests as Libertarian philosopher Frank Meyer, as both shared values and most importantly enemies.[6] During the 2007 Iowa caucuses, Mitt Romney carried a physical three-legged stool, explaining the importance of each leg. He also stated in terms of the importance of the legs as being “our candidate has to be somebody who can represent and speak for all three legs of the conservative stool or conservative coalition that Ronald Reagan put together — social conservatives, economic conservatives, and defense conservatives.”, and without it the party would fail.[5]
Critics often use the stool as a means to criticize party leadership or another member of the stool, such is seen in the lament of the "death of the stool" with the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Pundits often criticize party membership for abandoning the stool, as Business Insider reported, "the person said that thanks mostly to President George W. Bush, the party has failed on the first two legs. The country has shifted significantly over the last one, and there's nothing a Republican candidate can do to change it."[7] Senator Spencer Abraham has also criticized the stool, saying, "The Republican party has much greater divides now in terms of the feelings of its voters than it did when Reagan ran."[citation needed]
↑ CBS News/The New York Times interviews with 12,782 voters as they left the polls as reported in The New York Times, November 9, 1980, p. 28. 1976 data are from CBS News interviews.
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