Jackson’s two presidential runs achieved far more than many pundits had predicted. In 1984, he won 3.2 million votes in Democratic primaries — nearly 20 percent of the total primary votes cast — finishing third (behind Walter Mondale and Gary Hart) in a field of eight candidates.
He won about 80 percent of the black vote. He helped register two million voters, including many black voters, and won several primaries in Southern states with large black populations. The large black turnout for Jackson helped elect other Democrats to Congress and contributed to the party taking back the Senate in 1986.
These efforts gave Jackson leverage as a party power broker. He persuaded the Democrats to change its rules — like lowering the threshold to win delegates and eliminating the winner-take-all delegate process — which made it possible for Obama to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries.
By 1988, Jackson had become a crossover politician, appealing to black voters but also winning support from white voters, particularly white workers thrown out of their jobs by corporate mergers and outsourcing and white farmers losing customers to food imports from abroad. He stressed the theme of economic opportunity for all Americans and the undue influence of big business.
“If whites begin to vote their economic interests and not racial fears, and blacks vote their hopes and not despair, we can change America,” Jackson said.
His speeches included a clear and concise progressive policy agenda around the concentration of wealth and income, job insecurity, housing, poverty, health care, the environment, workers’ rights, racial injustice, women’s equality, gay rights, US militarism, and the centrality of human rights in foreign policy. He called for paid family leave, making it easier for workers to form unions, raising the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation, equal pay for women, global environmental and labor standards, and strengthening regulations on corporate America’s greed and predatory practices.
In early 1988, two weeks after Chrysler announced it would be closing a large car assembly plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Jackson organized a rally outside the plant. He attacked Chrysler, saying, “We have to put the focus on Kenosha, Wisconsin, as the place, here and now, where we draw the line to end economic violence!” He compared the workers’ fight to that of the civil rights movement. The United Auto Workers union local voted to endorse Jackson.