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That year they turned to Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson II as their standard bearer. Stevenson was reluctant to enter the race at first. He was trounced in the election by popular General Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower won the popular vote by 55% to 45%. Stevenson carried only nine states and lost the Electoral College vote 442 to 89.
The year after his defeat, Stevenson went on a well-publicized world tour through Asia, the Middle East and Europe. He wrote about his travels for Look magazine, making connections with foreign leaders and dignitaries. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1953. In the 1954 mid-term elections Stevenson took went on the campaign trail for a number of Democratic congressional and gubernatorial candidates around the nation. The Democrats won control of both houses of Congress and picked up nine gubernatorial seats. More importantly for Stevenson, many of those candidates were in his political debt. This time it appeared that there was no reluctance on Stevenson's part. He had his eyes on his party's nomination once again in 1956, and on the presidency.
Unlike 1952, Stevenson was actively campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1956. At first many wondered why anyone would want the nomination. Polls showed Eisenhower heading for a landslide re-election. Competition among Democrats for the nomination wasn't fierce. No one else really wanted the 1956 nomination. Stevenson hoped that he could win the nomination without much of a fight and without entering any presidential primaries. This changed when, on September 24, 1955, Eisenhower suffered a serious heart attack. The President recovered and got medical permission to run for a second term, but concerns about his health led two prominent Democrats, Kefauver and New York Governor Averell Harriman, to challenge Stevenson for the Democratic nomination.
Stevenson's advisers recommended that he enter several primaries to establish momentum by defeating Kefauver and Harriman. Stevenson ran in the Minnesota, Florida, and California primaries. Stevenson was upset by Kefauver in the Minnesota primary. Kefauver relied on his crime busting credentials and was able to successfully portray Stevenson as what he called a "captive" of corrupt Chicago political bosses and "a corporation lawyer out of step with regular Democrats."
The two candidates had their rematch in the Florida primary, where Stevenson agreed to debate Kefauver on radio and television. Stevenson eked out a win, narrowly defeating Kefauver by 12,000 votes. His knockout punch came when he won the California primary over Kefauver with 63% of the vote, effectively ending Kefauver's presidential bid.
But Stevenson was dealt another blow when at the 1956 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, former President Harry Truman endorsed Governor Harriman. To counter this, Stevenson once again relied on the endorsement of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who continued her enthusiastic support of the intellectual Stevenson. Stevenson easily defeated Harriman on the first ballot, winning his second Democratic presidential nomination. He had strong support from younger delegates at the convention, who formed what was dubbed the "New Politics" movement.
In a bid to raise enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket, Stevenson employed the tactic of leaving the selection of his running mate up to the convention delegates. This attracted a number of prominent Democrats who competed for the position, including Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, and Estes Kefauver. Kennedy mounted a surprisingly strong challenge, but in the end, Kefauver narrowly won the vice-presidential nomination on the second ballot.
Stevenson waged an energetic presidential campaign, delivering 300 speeches and traveling 55,000 miles. He crossed the nation three times before the election in November. Robert F. Kennedy traveled with the Stevenson campaign. Kennedy later expressed disappointment with Stevenson's campaign. Kennedy said "I thought it was ghastly. It was poorly organized. My feeling was that he had no rapport with his audience, no comprehension of what campaigning required, no ability to make decisions. In 1952 I had been crazy about him. Then I spent six weeks with him on the campaign and he destroyed it all." Kennedy said that he voted for Eisenhower in the November election.
Against the advice of many of his political advisers, Stevenson called for an international ban to above-ground nuclear weapons tests, and for an end to the military draft. He was criticized by President Eisenhower and Vice-President Nixon, who attacked his proposals for being naive. Eisenhower said that Stevenson's policies would benefit the Soviet Union in the cold war. Stevenson did not retreat from this position. He held his ground despite the criticism, saying: "Earth's atmosphere is contaminated from week to week by exploding hydrogen bombs. We don't want to live forever in the shadow of a radioactive mushroom cloud."
Stevenson also lost support on the issue of civil rights. He urged caution and warned against aggressive enforcement of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, doing so in an effort to gain Southern white support. The strategy helped Stevenson to win most of the southern states in the fall campaign, but it cost him some of the African-American vote, a constituency which usually voted for the Democrats since the Roosevelt administration.
Stevenson lost the election to Eisenhower by a landslide. Although Eisenhower suffered from heart problems, the economy was in good health. In October, Eisenhower's doctors gave him a clean bill of health. As international crises developed in the Suez and Hungary, the public had more confidence in the steady hand of the man who had led the Allied forces in the second world war. They were not convinced that a change in leadership was needed. Stevenson lost his second bid for the presidency by a landslide, winning only 42% of the popular vote and losing the electoral college vote by 457 to 73. Stevenson won just seven states, Missouri and the rest in the solid Democratic South.