The late Rev. Jesse Jackson might best be remembered as the founder and longtime leader of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a Chicago-based civil rights organization, but he also played a pivotal role in presidential politics.
Jackson ran for president in 1984 and 1988, and although he lost the Democratic primary both times, he helped pave the way for Barack Obama to get elected the nation’s first Black president in 2008.
Not only did Jackson’s two bids for president send millions of Black voters to the polls, many for the first time, but it solidified Jackson as a major force in the Democratic Party, and persuaded its leaders to change the party’s rules for presidential primaries.
In 1983, Jackson began his first campaign for president, becoming the first African American to launch a nationwide presidential bid. While former Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm was the first Black person to run for president in 1972, she wasn’t able to get on the ballot in several states.
Jackson was the first Black candidate to get on the ballot for president in all 50 states.
In the midst of his 1984 presidential campaign, Jackson helped broker the release of a U.S. Navy pilot who was being held hostage in Syria after his plane was shot down over Lebanon, and President Ronald Reagan welcomed Jackson to the White House to applaud Jackson’s success.
Veteran political strategist Delmarie Cobb recalled how Jackson managed to take the podium outside the White House while Reagan wasn’t looking.
“And Reagan looks and does a double take, and Jackson has commandeered the podium and is holding the news conference,” she said. “That was how amazing he was.”
While Jackson would end up winning only one primary contest in 1984 he would go on to much greater political success in his second bid for the White House four years later.
Political insiders said he had an unmatched political eye. Never more was it on display than on his history-breaking run for president in 1988.
“All along the way, we kept hearing all the pundits say a Black man could never win a northern industrial state,” Cobb said.
But when he surprisingly won Michigan, it changed national politics forever. Cobb would know. She was Jackson’s traveling press secretary for that campaign.
“We had our first million-dollar month after that. So that was a major step forward in terms of credibility for a Black campaign,” she said.
His surprise victory in the Michigan caucuses in 1988 would briefly give him the lead in delegates in the race for the Democratic nomination, leaving the favored Michael Dukakis campaign scrambling.
Despite the growing populist appeal of Jackson’s campaign, polls after his Michigan victory showed him trailing far behind Vice President George H.W. Bush in head-to-head matchups in a general election, while polls showed a Dukakis-led ticket with Jackson as vice president narrowly beating Bush.
With the focus on the campaign turning to the question of electability, Dukakis went on to pull out a decisive victory in the Wisconsin primary, and went on to take the nomination.
But a key facet of the campaign was Jackson’s frequent criticism of Democratic Party rules for earning delegates. Party rules required candidates to receive 20-30% of the vote in a congressional or legislative district and statewide in order to qualify for delegates.
While Jackson ended up with approximately 1,000 delegates in the race, he was shut out of any delegates in a few states with winner-take-all rules for their primaries.
After Jackson’s surprising performance in the 1988 campaign, the Democratic Party changed its rules to allow candidates who receive at least 15% of a state’s overall vote to get a share of that state’s delegates. In exchange for Jackon’s support in the general election, Dukakis agreed to replace winner-take-all Democratic primaries with proportional allocation rules.
That rule remains in place today, and helped Barack Obama go on to win the 2008 presidential election. Because all Democratic contests allocate delegates proportionally, Obama was able to maximize his delegate count even in primaries he lost, winning the delegate race despite a marginal edge over Hillary Clinton in the popular vote.
Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch called Jackson’s 1988 campaign “an earthquake to American politics.”
The shifting political landscape, among other things, gave way to Welch being elected Illinois’ first Black speaker of the house.
“I don’t believe this would’ve even been possible without someone like Reverend Jackson telling us to ‘keep hope alive,'” Welch said. “We don’t have Barack Obama as the president without Jesse Jackson running in 1984 and 1988.”
On the historic night 20 years after Jackson’s run – the night Obama was first elected president – it was the barrier breaker himself whose emotion still resonates, as Jackson wept tears of joy while celebrating Obama’s election in Grant Park.
“I was there that historic night, I was in that park, I saw it on the screen live, and I’ve got to tell you, I cried that night. I cried this morning, and I’m getting emotional just thinking about Reverend Jackson and what he meant to President Obama and me,” Welch said.
Cobb said what’s so sad about Jackson’s death is that he’s needed more than ever.
“Imagine if we had stayed on the trajectory that we were on when he ran; of bringing everybody together, of widening the tent,” Cobb said.