The six preceding chapters have sought to outline the different phases of the Democratic Party's attempts after 1876 to maintain a sufficiently strong base in the North so that it was capable of winning presidential elections and obtaining congressional majorities. But how did the party do overall in this effort during the entire period between 1877 and 1962? There are two quite distinct parts to any answer to this question. The first concerns whether the Democrats could win enough individual states in the North to be in a position to construct a majority coalition. The second concerns their ability to make the constituent parts of a potential coalition cohere, and thereby create a coalition. Being competitive enough in some northern states was a necessary condition for winning a national majority, though it was not a sufficient condition. In the first part of this concluding chapter, we resume the discussion started in Chapter 2, Section 4, as to how the Democrats were placed in relation to individual northern states, before turning to summarize the factors that affected the party's ability to aggregate certain northern states into a national coalition.

It was shown in Chapter 2 that for the entire period 1877–1962, Democratic strength in relation to the winning of state governorships varied little until the middle to late 1950s when it started to increase.