The Ohio State University

onCampus

• Help
• Buckeye Link
• Map
• Find People
• Webmail
• Search

  Search Ohio State Go

David Stebenne, History

Posted on | May 21, 2009 | 1,478 views |

Has the Republican Party become too conservative to compete effectively at the national level?

Over the past 20 years, the Republicans have gradually lost touch with the broad middle of the electorate, and especially the broad middle class living in the major metropolitan areas of the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast. The base of today’s Republican Party is heavily concentrated in the South and Mountain West, which isn’t enough to compete effectively for control of Congress and the White House. The clearest sign of the Republicans’ basic problem is how poorly they have been performing in the most populous state: California. From the founding of the Republican Party in the 1850s through the 1980s, California usually preferred it (in presidential elections especially) to the Democrats. The Golden State’s GOP orientation from the 1960s through the 1980s was so pronounced that even when the Republican presidential candidate narrowly lost (as with Richard Nixon in 1960 and Gerald Ford in 1976), he carried California. Over the past 20 years, however, California has become a strongly Democratic state at the national level. Democratic presidential candidates have won easily there in the last five presidential elections.

Can moderate Republicans bring the party back to the political center?

History suggests that the answer is “yes.”  The closest historical analogy to the GOP’s present dilemma was the party’s experience in the 1930s and ’40s, when the Republicans as a national party also had real trouble appealing to the broad middle of the electorate at a time when moderation was increasingly popular. By the late 1940s (having lost five straight presidential elections), the GOP seemed, at least superficially, to be a party on the road to permanent second-class status in the American political system. That didn’t happen, in part because moderately conservative Republicans in the 1950s rescued their party from a bind similar to the one it is in today. Under the leadership of Dwight Eisenhower, the Republicans rebounded then. More specifically, Eisenhower and his supporters reoriented the GOP at the national level in a more moderate direction, won two landslide electoral victories over an attractive, eloquent Democratic opponent, and more generally rehabilitated the Republicans in the eyes of millions of centrist voters.

 

How likely is a moderate Republican revival in the future?

The two major parties in the US tend to be flexible when faced with changing conditions. The worse the GOP does electorally under strongly conservative and/or partisan leadership, the more pressure the party will come under to reorient itself. Most Republicans in Congress and most Republican-oriented pundits are strongly conservative and/or partisan, but that situation does not pose an insurmountable obstacle to a comeback by the moderates. The same was true in the 1930s and ’40s. Moderately conservative Republicans tend to be strongest at the gubernatorial level (and especially among big-state governors). Moderates also are much more prone to recruit a broadly popular candidate who comes from outside the political system, as Eisenhower did in the 1950s. The clearest sign that approach can work even today comes once again from California. Moderately conservative Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger entered politics from outside the system and won two consecutive gubernatorial elections by wide margins. And so, while one cannot be certain the moderates will make a comeback in the national GOP, don’t be surprised if they do.

Comments