Democratic Party Presidential Primary Campaigns and the Left, 1980-1988

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This project will use the American Democratic Party Presidential primary election campaigns of Edward Kennedy and Jesse Jackson to assess the power of the American left during the 1980s. Applying the methods of comparative history and Freeden's morphological analysis, the project will examine the campaign material of Kennedy and Jackson to ascertain whether the fundamentals of the Democratic Left shifted over the decade in response to the Reagan presidency, and the degree to which interest groups on the left were able to influence these campaigns. It will examine the changing centres of institutional power within the Democratic Party and the relationship between these campaigns and the politics of race and ethnicity, especially the extent to which constituencies of the Left (e.g. unions and civil rights groups) could influence campaigns in the context of apparent rightward drift in the nation and the party. My analysis will rely on a detailed exploration of C-SPAN's online campaign video archive, campaign media commentary from the Vere Harmsworth Library at the University of Oxford, material from the Edward Kennedy collections at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and collections from figures connected to Jackson like Chicago Mayor Harold Washington in the Chicago Public Library. I have consistently focused on this period in my work, writing a first-class undergraduate dissertation that considered two prominent African-American athletes' interaction with black politics during the 'long1970s'. For this, I won the 'Sport in History Undergraduate Essay Prize 2019' and the University of Nottingham's School of Humanities Masters Bursary. I am building on this work through my MA dissertation's focus on the Kennedy and Jackson campaigns and their significance for understanding liberal ideology in the 1980s. Through my time at the University of Nottingham I have developed a strong working relationship with my prospective supervisor Joe Merton, who supervised both my previous projects, and has expertise on the politics of race and ethnicity that comprise a key part of the project. Moreover, the university's American and Canadian Studies department provides further research expertise, not least Professor Ling as second supervisor, as well as the Centre for Research in Race and Rights and the Centre for the Study of Political Ideologies that make Nottingham the ideal centre forstudying the subjects my project examines.