Left: President Richard Nixon at a press conference in Washington, D.C., September 5, 1973.
Right: President Ronald Reagan at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, Calif., December 28, 1982.
(David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images; National Archives)
The vice president’s theory that the Nixon coalition was stronger and more durable doesn’t survive contact with reality.
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:
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
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