What Democrats can learn from Robert Redford’s ‘The Candidate’

In the 1972 movie “The Candidate,” Robert Redford plays Bill McKay, a public interest lawyer and longshot Democratic candidate for U.S. Senator from California.  At one level, the widely praised movie explores the incompatibility between a candidate’s ideals and winning political office, but at another — Democrats, especially left-leaning ones, take notice — it’s about what it takes to win elections.

A cagey political operator named Marvin Lucas (played by Peter Boyle) recruits McKay for the race by assuring him that he can’t possibly beat the popular Republican incumbent, Crocker Jarmon (Don Porter). The race, Lucas suggests, is instead a golden opportunity for McKay to promote his liberal ideals. “You don’t have a chance, so say whatever you want.”

Lucas, who has no interest in ideals, is betting on McKay’s Kennedy-esque, California surfer good looks, his famous last name (his father had been a popular governor) and, most of all, on his ambition and ego. After McKay stakes out bold liberal positions — support for busing, welfare, legalizing abortion (the movie came out just before Roe v. Wade), and income equality — Lucas delivers bad polling news: not only is he going to lose, but “you’ll be wiped out, you’ll be humiliated.”

“That wasn’t part of the deal,” says a startled McKay, who allows Lucas to reshape his political positions.

So instead of supporting legalized abortion, McKay starts telling audiences that abortion “not only concerns women but all of us and certainly deserves more study than it’s been getting.” Instead of “crime isn’t an issue it’s a symptom,” McKay pivots to giving policemen “every means to handle crime against person and property.” Asked whether he is still for busing, McKay avoids a direct answer. “We can’t let a school bus carry all the burdens of society. The main problem is — how do we get a first-rate education for each and every child?”

McKay starts climbing in the polls, but at a personal cost. The campaign pressures are destroying his marriage, and he has to beg his father (the two are estranged) for an endorsement. A thoughtful political commentator (ABC’s Howard K. Smith, playing himself) condemns McKay for abandoning candor in favor of “socko salesmanship, no moral considerations involved.”

McKay wins an upset victory, but by then he has been hollowed out. He is no longer sure who he even is. At his victory party, McKay, looking like a deer caught in the headlights, pulls Lucas aside. “What do we do now?”

Redford’s performance is captivating — a well-meaning man caught in a political wood chipper that ground up his ideals, leaving only hunger for office. But McKay’s plight obscures the extraordinary achievement of campaign manager Peter Lucas in taking the neophyte McKay from barely 32 percent in the polls to victory over an incumbent whom no major California Democrat had wanted to take on. (Redford once explored a sequel, hoping again to “skewer American politics.”)

Yes, candidates shade, hedge and prevaricate, to put it mildly, on what exactly they stand for. But then, politics is a cynical, dirty business with hardly any more rules than a back-alley knife fight, which seems to make Democrats queasy. (“When they go low, we go high.”)

With all respect to Howard K. Smith, it is hard to pin down just what, exactly, we should morally condemn when Lucas broadens McKay’s appeal to voters by steering him toward the political center, as it existed in 1972. And in the end, McKay’s reworked policies are still vague enough to give room for his ideals in office.

With bet-your-country elections looming in 2026 and 2028, Democrats could do a lot worse than to find their own Peter Lucases to run their campaigns.

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.