In the early 1980s, Democrats had lost two presidential elections in a row, the last one to a 49-state landslide.
As they looked to 1988, Democrats saw an opportunity: Ronald Reagan would be leaving the White House, so there would be no incumbent. Some Democrats also saw a challenge: They fretted that the party had drifted too far to the left. They felt their chances would be better if they could nominate a more moderate candidate.
First, a group of more centrist Democrats — among them, Gov. Charles Robb of Virginia — formed a group intended to promote a different set of policy options. This was the Democratic Leadership Council, which was both influential and controversial for a time.
Second, they tried to reorder the primary calendar for 1988 to benefit a centrist candidate. They did this by front-loading a lot of Southern states to create a “Super Tuesday” primary.
There had been a rudimentary Southern primary in 1984 when three Southern states — Alabama, Florida and Georgia — all voted on the same day. In 1988, that expanded to 17 states holding primaries plus three states and one territory holding caucuses on March 8. Those 17 states included 10 former Confederate states plus multiple border states. Among those states was Virginia, which held its first-ever presidential primary in 1988.
There was just one problem with this plan: Jesse Jackson.
The civil rights leader and former presidential candidate died Tuesday at the age of 84. One footnote in his career is how he upended those plans for a Southern primary to nominate a more moderate candidate.
Jackson had run in 1984 and won just a single primary — in Washington, D.C.
In 1988, though, he won five of those Southern states — including Virginia — and split the vote enough in others that Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, the most liberal of the other candidates still active then, won six. Jackson’s strong showing essentially blocked Tennessee Sen. Al Gore from racking up as many delegates as he’d hoped and allowed Dukakis to claim wins in Texas and Florida.
Gore soon dropped out of the race. Dukakis went on to win the nomination but lost the presidency that fall to Vice President George H.W. Bush.
The state where Jackson scored his biggest win that Super Tuesday was Virginia, where he took 45.1% of the vote, outdistancing Gore at 22.3% and Dukakis at 22.0%. He took 32 of Virginia’s 60 Democratic delegates, to just 15 apiece for Dukakis and Gore.
Those 1988 returns show a geographical split: Gore swept almost all of the western part of Virginia, with the exception of a few cities, which went to Jackson. Dukakis won some localities in Northern Virginia. Jackson won almost everywhere else.
Jackson’s best locality was Petersburg, where he took 84.1% of the vote. But with Dukakis and Gore running about evenly, Jackson was also able to win some localities with as little as one-third of the vote. He carried Greene County with 31.1% of the vote, Clarke County with 32.6%, Orange County 33.7%, Fauquier County with 35.2%, Lexington with 36.1%, Staunton with 36.7%, Roanoke with 37.2%. None of this was what the authors of the Southern Super Tuesday primary intended.
After Jackson’s victory in 1988, Virginia Democrats did not hold another presidential primary for 16 years.
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