Journal of Arizona History

The attendees had paid twenty-five dollars a head for the promise of drinks, "little things to nibble on," and the chance to meet a Democratic congressman from Arizona making an apparently quixotic bid for the presidency. Representative Morris K. "Mo" Udall had been running for president for fourteen months and was engaged in a now familiar ritual of appealing for funds from liberal Democrats in an affluent suburb. Most of those present in May 1976 at that suburban home in Newton, Massachusetts, had voted for Udall in the state's primary two months earlier. Also in attendance were Representative Robert Drinan, the Roman Catholic priest who had been elected a Massachusetts congressman on an anti–Vietnam War platform in 1970, and Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor who had become a hero to liberals after President Richard Nixon forced his dismissal in 1973. With his campaign sputtering, Udall had come with what he hoped was a defiantly optimistic message for his audience, maintaining that he still had "a fighting chance" and that there would be opportunities to "turn this thing around." Udall's campaign co-chair, William Carman, plied the audience with tales of the campaign's penury, of its struggle to buy telephones for its field offices, and urged them to "take out another check."¹ [End Page 373]

In most histories of the 1976 presidential election, the Udall campaign is a subplot, overshadowed by the improbable ascendancy of Georgia governor Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan's close-run primary challenge to incumbent President Gerald Ford.² Indeed, the 1976 election itself remains underappreciated, with Kathryn Cramer Brownell noting that historians often "gloss over" it, seeing in the contest simply "more evidence of the nation's rightward turn."³ New work, however, has sought to reappraise that election as the crucible of many trends in modern American politics. Historian Daniel K. Williams, for instance, has argued that the 1976 contest was a pivotal moment in the polarization of the Republican and Democratic parties on issues of values and culture.⁴ Amber Boessner has shown that Jimmy Carter's innovative media management strategies foreshadowed modern candidate-centric and image-centric political campaigns.⁵ This body of work has mostly focused on the overlooked legacies of Carter's winning campaign, rather than those of his luckless Democratic rivals. The only losing candidate in 1976 widely acknowledged to have had a meaningful impact is Ronald Reagan, on the Republican side.⁶

Though Udall's campaign was a failure by the most important metric―winning the presidency―it deserves more scholarly attention than it has so far received. In one of the most crowded Democratic presidential primaries in decades, Udall managed consistently solid results in a variety of states.⁷ He won approximately [End Page 374] 10 percent of the total votes cast, sustained a campaign that ran from November 1974 until the national convention almost two years later, and was the best-performing standard bearer of the party's liberal wing. Most significantly, his campaign was predicated on appealing to a comparatively new constituency: the upper-income liberal suburbanites who turned up to fundraisers like the one in Newton, Massachusetts. Udall's 1976 campaign demonstrated the growing value and influence of these "upper-middle class liberal Democrats of suburbia" to the party's evolving coalition.⁸ Though these voters were not enough to carry Udall to victory in 1976, his campaign was a foretaste of the role they would play in the Democratic Party's future.

According to historian Kenneth T. Jackson, the suburb is "the quintessential physical achievement of the United States."⁹ The emergence of the suburb was one of the most consequential social and political developments of the postwar United States. In 1950, one quarter of Americans lived in suburban homes, and by 1990 the majority of Americans were living in the suburbs.¹⁰ In recent years the "new suburban history" has made a forceful case for the suburb as an important lens for historical enquiry, as scholars have [End Page 375] explored the laws and policies that created these...