What is the emerging Republican majority?

Answer 1

Howard Phillips wrote a book titled, The Emerging Republican Majority, in which he analyzed Richard Nixon's electoral victories in 1968 and 1972. The theme was Nixon's famous "southern strategy." The problem was, Nixon did not win a "solid south" in '68. He lost some border states. Furthermore, many southerners were content to spit the ticket voting Republican in presidential elections and voting Democrat in state and local elections.

The Republican gains in the landslide and McGovern debacle of 1972 were squandered by the Watergate constitutional crisis. Many of the Watergate losses were recouped by public frustration with the weak and feckless presidency of Jimmy Carter. Therefore, the political alignments in1980 were not much different than those of 1968. However, by 1980 several southern Republican Senators and Governors had appeared on the scene as a harbinger of the future. The two landslides of Ronald Reagan and the popularity of his presidency hastened the conversion of the south to the Republican party and created a new class of voters called "the Reagan Democrats." Unfortunately many Reagan Democrats were content to remained Democrats in spite of 12 years of Republican control of the White House (1981 - 1992).

Fred Barnes' book The (still) Emerging Republican Majority (2003) cited a variety of statistics to prove that the Democrats were still the national majority party by a comfortable margin in 1992, when Clinton beat George H.W. Bush. However, by the election of 2000, the two parties were in parity according to the presidential vote and confirmed by statistics cited by Barnes. In the off year elections of 2002, the Republicans made gains in the Senate, Congress, and among governors. Barnes gathered a variety of statistics to show that by 2002, the Republicans had finally emerged as the majority party. Whether you look at the vote in congressional races, control of state legislatures, governors, and voter party identification, the Republicans were now in the majority. Many Reagan Democrats and Southern Democrats had finally changed parties. The Republican majority of 2002 was not as great as what the Democrats had in 1992, but it was a real majority.

In this essay, I shall make the case that the Republican majority increased even more by election day 2004, and that these advantages are enduring. But first we must understand the Republican emergence