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Exaggerated Fears of Joe McCarthy the Campaigner

- September 6, 2010

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bq. At first, some politicians stood up to McCarthy, most notably four-term incumbent Democratic Senator Millard E. Tydings of Maryland and Senator Scott W. Lucas of Illinois, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader at the time. In 1950 and 1952, McCarthy campaigned against those who confronted him and Tydings and Lucas – both well entrenched incumbents – lost their races. Politicians interpreted these defeats as signaling public support for McCarthyism. While politicians on both sides of the aisle continued to privately express concerns about McCarthyism, in public, they fell silent.

bq. Elites may have correctly interpreted the defeat of politicians such as Tydings and Lucas as a signal of public support for McCarthy. It is also possible, however, that they gravely erred.

A new paper (pdf) by Adam Berinsky and Gabriel Lenz tackles the question of how much McCarthy’s efforts affected the 1950-52 Senate elections. Examining news accounts and historical sources, they identified 12 Senate races in which McCarthy campaigned. In each case, he campaigned for the Republican and against the Democrat. They then estimated a model of the outcome in all Senate races in these years, looking to see if the Democratic candidate underperformed in those races where McCarthy campaigned, controlling for other factors.

They find only 3 cases where McCarthy’s efforts appear to have hurt the Democrat (the 1950 MD and IL races and the 1952 AZ race). However, in far more races, his efforts actually appear to have _helped_ the Democrat. See the above figure, which is entitled “McCarthy’s Not So Scary Record Against Democrats.”

Berinsky and Lenz conclude:

bq. …our analyses found no evidence that McCarthy reliably influenced the outcomes of the 1950 and 1952 Senate elections. McCarthy’s reputation thus appears to have been undeserved, arising from selective attention and a failure to appreciate voters’ anti-Democrat mood.