Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Election Outcome & Douglas (Zarefsky, 1990)

But it was not the debates themselves that eroded Douglas’s position. Many southerners regarded the dispute between Douglas and [President James] Buchanan as a personal feud rather than a question of principle, and they admired the scrappy nature of Douglas’s attacks on Lincoln. In the opinion of one of his biographers, even in 1859-60 Douglas offered more to the South than did any other leader who had a chance in his own section. Mainly, what Douglas could offer was the prospect of further southward expansion, where the climate might have been more hospitable to the spread of slavery. What eventually doomed Douglas’s national appeal was the natural outgrowth of his opposition to Lecompton, which raised the question of whether popular sovereignty truly could be a neutral principle.