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In the immediate postwar years, policy conflict in presidential elections was
already strongly influenced by issues of social welfare, the main policy legacy of the
New Deal. If these were not actually as tightly tied to the vote as they would be in many
later years, that may be because they had a greater degree of consensus during these early
years than subsequently. They were joined by the great issue of foreign engagement
during the period, as first the Democrats and then the Republicans too tried to move the
general public away from a hundred and fifty years of isolationism and into the
‘entangling alliances’ of the Cold War.
Those policy conflicts were not joined at the polls by national security, where
public divisions showed no clear relationship to voting behavior, perhaps because both
parties offered versions of the same policies. They were not joined by cultural values
either. The public did appear to have a policy alignment here, one opposite to its position
on social welfare, with liberals leaning Republican and conservatives leaning
Democratic. But by and large, neither the nominees nor the events of the day offered
major cultural divisions through which to tap these views.
On the other hand, the two great policy divisions that were regularly reflected in
voting behavior, social welfare and foreign engagement, were joined occasionally by
civil rights. Again, the public appeared to have a clear alignment to its views; again, they
were the reverse of social welfare, with Democrats conservative and Republicans liberal.
Yet here, the public obviously did not give these issues sufficient priority to demand their
reflection on a regular basis, while the majority party, the Democrats, was at first deeply
divided in this policy realm and then began to move to a position opposite to the
alignment that characterized its supporters.
Convention