by Akim Reinhardt
The Republican Party has forever faced a serious statistical obstacle: There are always more Democrats. Never once since the GOP was founded in 1854 have there been more registered Republicans than Democrats in the United States. Democrats are always more numerous. So how can Republicans win?You have to shoot every angle. You have to get lucky. And when sharp angles and dumb luck run out, you eventually you have to bend the rules.
The party’s rise, specifically the election of Abraham Lincoln as president with just under 40% of the popular vote in 1860, precipitated cession Democrats’ withdrawal from U.S. government and the start of the Civil War. During the war, the remaining United States was effectively under one-party Republican rule. Despite this, Northern Democrats remained a force in U.S. politics. When Lincoln ran for re-election in 1864, with only Union states participating, Democrat George McClellan still pulled nearly 45% of the popular vote.
Lincoln had hoped to build Republican support in the South after the war through a coalition of newly freed Blacks and Southern Whites who had opposed cession. However, his assassination placed Southern Democrat Andrew Johnson in the White House, easing former Confederates’ path to regaining U.S. citizenship and voting rights. Former Confederates then waged terroristic campaigns against new Black voters and White sympathizers to regain control of Southern governments. By the time political Reconstruction ended in the 1877, White Democrats in all Southern states, including formerly loyal slave states Maryland and Tennessee, were using the Democratic Party to establish white supremacist apartheid throughout the region.
Republicans were banished to permanent minority party status in the South, and aside from occasional hiccups, the region would remain under one-party Democratic rule for over a century. Meanwhile, Democrats were increasingly popular in many of the North’s growing cities. By 1876, only eleven years afer the Civil War’s conclusion, the Democratic Party it was again competitive in national elections. That year, Rutherford B. Hayes (R-OH) and Samuel J. Tilden (D-NY) faced off in a razor tight and highly disputed election that was ultimately settled by negotiation. The upshot was the Republican Hayes got the White House with Hayes, but Democrats gained control of tens of thousands of patronage jobs across the nation and secured the final withdrawal of all federal troops from the South, thereby cementing Democratic rule there.
Democratic Party rosters in the urban North were further bolstered by foreign immigration. The many millions who arrived between 1880–1924, particularly beginning around 1900, turned out to be mostly Democrats. nce again, the Republicans were firmly outnumbered and needed to find a way to maintain national power. They employed various approaches, but trying to reclaim voting rights for Black Southerners was not one of them. Having abandoned the South to Democrats, Republicans instead looked to geographic expansion. During the second half of the 19th century, Republicans oversaw the addition of new U.S. states that boasted majority Republican electorates. They first employed this tactic during the Civil War, when two states were added: Nevada, which got enough population from a mining boom, and West Virginia, which was amputated from Confederate Virginia. After the war, Colorado was added just as Reconstruction was winding down.
Remote Western states needed to meet population requirements for statehood, but when they did, they came in a flurry. After Grover Cleveland in 1884 became the first Democratic president since Franklin Pierce (1853–7), the GOP began looking for electoral solutions out West. Half a dozen Republican-leaning states were carved out of Western territories in less than two years from 1889–90. With each new state came two new U.S. senators, most of them Republican, and new batches of electoral votes for the GOP. And while these Western territories were bound to become states eventually, Republicans didn’t just rush their entry but also juiced their numbers. For example, it split the very rural and lightly populated Dakota Territory into North and South, thereby creating two states instead of one.
Another approach was to limit the number of new Democrat-leaning voters by restricting foreign immigration. Then as now, immigration was a very complex issue and stances on immigration restriction did not break neatly along party lines; racism, xenophobia, and wage insecurity transcend political partisanship. Nonetheless, staunching the flow of immigrants eventually helped Republicans win state, national, and even some local elections. Major immigration restriction bills were passed or renewed in 1882, 1892, 1902, 1917, 1921, and 1924. All were signed by Republican presidents, except for the 1917 act, which Democrat Woodrow Wilson vetoed. Congress, controlled by his same party in 1917, overrode his veto.
America’s early 20th century immigration debate crystalized along party lines in the 1924 presidential election. In many ways that election was a referendum on immigration. Republican Herbert Hoover and was a native-born WASP from Iowa. Democrat Al Smith was the son of Irish Catholic immigrants and hailed from New York City, home to more immigrants than any other place on the planet at that time. Smith won only 8 states to Hoover’s 40, and he polled barely 40% of the popular vote.
Hoover’s resounding victory proved to be the endpoint of a very long era in which Republicans dominated national politics despite being a numerical minority in the national populace. Despite there being more Democrats in the country than Republicans during a 68 year period from 1860–1928, only two Democrats were able to win the presidency: Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson forged a scant 16 years of Democratic presidencies while Republicans occupied the Whites for the other 52 years.During an even longer stretch, from 1861–1933, Democrats controlled the U.S. Senate for a total of only ten years. The House of Representatives, which despite gerrymandering better represented popular sentiment than the Senate or the presidency, was kinder to Democrats. Nonetheless, they controlled that chamber for just 26 years during that 72 year spell.
During the Roaring Twenties, Republicans controlled every branch of the federal government. But that all came to an end with the Great Depression; most Americans blamed Republican laissez-fair policies for what is still by far the worst economic calamity in U.S. history. Afterwards, Democrats finally took over the federal (and many a state) government for a prolonged stretch. Franklin Roosevelt was elected four times, and then Harry Truman led a fifth consecutive Democratic presidential victory.
After World War II, particularly as television became important in national elections and candidates’ charisma (and eventually money) outweighed their policy stances, the two parties began to largely trade the presidency. But in a staggering show of popular dominance, the Democratic Party was finally able to lean on its numbers to thoroughly control Congress for over sixty years. Memories of Democrats leading the nation through depression and war were long, Republicans had run out of angles to shoot, and from 1931–1995, Democrats controlled the House of Representatives for all but four years. During that same stretch of sixty-four years, the GOP did only slightly better in the Senate, periodically gaining control for a total of only ten years.
Democratic dominance ran so deep that once it ran out of steam, it still took more than three decades to unravel. The Democratic Party’s decline began with its Northern wing’s eventual support for Black civil rights, which put it at direct odds with its Southern wing This stance, which was largely stymied in national politics during the 1950s, gained traction during the early-mid 1960s with the passage of several major Civil Rights bills and a constitutional amendment. However, by the late 1960s, political support for Black civil rights had alienated large swaths of White voters in every part of the country, and Northern Democrats’ ongoing support for it split the party. By contrast, Republicans had been tepid on the issue during the 1950s, came around during the early-mid 1960s when it was increasingly popular, and then drifted away from it again during the late 1960s. This allowed the GOP to start peeling off disaffected white Democrats. And not just in the South. As Civil Rights transitioned into Black Power, Republicans increasingly pandered to the brewing White backlash.
In 1968, Richard Nixon began leading the GOP into a politics of resentment. He was very successful. Nixon even cut into the Solid South Democratic stronghold during his two presidential runs, though that region’s ultimate flip wouldn’t be complete until the turn of the 21st century. Nixon’s political demise amid the Watergate scandal proved only a short term setback for the party he had begun to reshape.
During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s star charisma successfully resuscitated Nixon’s approach. Having nurtured the politics of resentment while governor of California (1967–75), he made it central to his two term presidency (1981–89) He defined welfare fraud as a form of Black crime stemming from Black laziness and entitlement, and he cast affirmative action as anti-white racism. When Reagan stormed to the White House in 1980, there were still many more registered Democrats than Republicans in the United States, but the nation was also 80% White. A chunk of White voters who crossed party lines for a variety of reasonscome to be known as Reagan Democrats.
During the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the Republican establishment leaned evermore into the politics of resentment, attacking Black civil rights, feminism, Gay rights, non-White immigration, and Liberal secularism. The enduring Reagan coalition was a wide ranging but successful blend of: secular-minded libertarians and other small government advocates; White Christian conservatives eager to use government to advance fundamentalist agendas; White rural Americans who gravitated towards identity politics; and less ideological voters who responded to coded racist, sexist, xenaphobic, or homophobic political messaging. While developing a politics of White, patriarchal, rural Christianity, the GOP also made room for: non-whites who aspired to social whiteness; women who supported or at least tolerated restrictive gender roles; suburbanites who feared and smeared cities as places of minorities and crime; religious non-Christians discomfited by growing secularism; and other voters who wanted to pay less taxes and were willing to turn a blind eye to all the bigotry and fundamentalism.
Crucially, at the same time, Democrats abandoned many of their blue collar voters by pushing free trade agreements that gutted unions and decimated good paying, semi-skilled and unskilled jobs. The Democratic Party began to take two pillars of its base, African Americans and working class Whites, for granted. Blacks largely stayed because they had nowhere else to go given the state of Republican politics, but working class Whites began leaving for the GOP.
These moves by the Republican and Democratic parties led to a dramatic make over of U.S. politics. Through the 20th century, both parties had featured liberal, moderate, and conservative wings However, by the 2010s, the GOP was almost exclusively a conservative party, while the Democrats were left with only liberals and Clintonian/Obaman centrists. Yet the issue of numbers remained.
Despite many Republican successes and Democratic defeats during the Reagan-Bush era (1980–2009), by the 2010s there were still more registered Democrats than Republicans. Why? Because both parties had narrowed their appeal. Both parties lost supporters. Republican messaging was very effective in certain electoral contexts, and for galvanizing its base in White rural and new exurban regions. However, it appealed to ever narrower slices of the national populace; the non-Hispanic white population approached 87% in 1970, whereas today it is about 58%. And while the Democrats eventually lost nearly all of their conservative constituents and most blue collar Whites, they also moved to the center on many issues, creating a home for moderates who were put off by the GOP’s move to the hard right.
Thus, the two parties’ loss of followers after the 1960s was roughly proportiona. By the early 21st century, about a third of the electorate felt alienated from both parties, or vacillated between them. These voters were perpetually up for grabs. Democrats attempted to widen their appeal by leaning into the center, which had limited success. Republicans went after independents by sharpening their messages and doubling down on the politics of resentment, which was circumstantially successful.
The most recent major shift began when the nation elected its first half-Black president in 2008 This eventually led the GOP to turn away from 20th century style Regan-Bush conservatism and towards right wing populism. The reactionary spur was the largely independent but Republican-leaning but Tea Party movement. Sprouting up after Barack Obama’s election, the Tea Party essentially began as non-party Republican activism. One issue in particular left members enraged at the GOP establishment: the bipartisan Wall Street bailout. Many Americans could not stomach handing over half-trillion dollars of public money to the scumbags who had caused the financial crisis, while millions of Americans were losing their homes. In addition to this economic populism, the Tea Party movement was also infected with coded, hysterical racism: the Birther conspiracy that claimed Obama was constitutionally ineligible to be president because he was supposedly born in Kenya.
Democrats ignored and badmouthed the Tea Party movement. Its racism was repugnant; its mostly conservative/libertarian ideology didn’t jibe with Democratic stances; and upper middle class moderate and liberal Democratic voters might be unhappy about the bailout, but were not in a state of rebellion over it However, Republicans could not afford to ignore the Tea Party, especially once the movement began producing a new breed of politicians who challenged established Republicans in primary elections. So the GOP did what U.S. major parties typically do when they get outflanked by social movements; it attempted to co-opt the activists. After an initial phase of dismissiveness, Republican politicians began pandering to Tea Partiers. Tactically, they sought to secure and even expand their base, with an eye towards eventually neutralizing the movement after the populist fire burned out. But the Tea Party, it turned out, was not a spicy morsel for Republican consumption that produced a little indigestion before passing. Instead, it ended up being the parasite that eventually spread and took over the GOP’s brain.
Failed businessman and B-level celebrity Donald Trump had never gotten anywhere in Republican electoral politics, periodically announcing presidential campaigns as more vainglorious PR moves rather than serious efforts. But now he rode the Tea Party’s evolving, populist waves, eventually all the way to the White House. First he became arguably the nation’s most prominent Birther. And when he once again announced a run for presidency in 2016, unlike in the past when he was widely ignored, this time he got serious press coverage. In the primaries, he faced a large field of weak, establishment Republican candidates, from whom he could stand apart. Still mocked by most, he gained an air of legitimacy with a surprising second place showing in the Iowa caucus, and then claimed a “huge” victory when he finished first in New Hampshire with 35% of the vote.
Fast forward to this fuckin’ mess.
Yet through it all, Republicans never gained long term loyalty from most Americans. Even now it is basically a tossup, with about only 27 or 28 percent of Americans affiliated with either party. A staggering figure, nearly half of all voters, are now registered independents, though of course most of them have their leanings.
The Republican Party currently controls all branches of the federal government. But it faces slipping numbers of supporters, and is saddled with a president who campaigns really well but who’s never had so much as a 50% approval rating (currently in the 30s), and whose stupidity, nastiness, pettiness, incompetence, and open corruption lead him to become deeply unpopular after a year or two in office. It’s a pattern at this point. Desperate to maintain power, the GOP is back to shooting angles and bending rules (with the help of a complicit Supreme Court). It is leaning hard into gerrymandering and voter suppression to make up for its numerical disadvantages.
I know what some of you are thinking. Could I write a similar and equivalently damning essay about Democratic party efforts to maintain power over the last two-hundred years? Absolutely. The Republican Party of the 1860s–70s, despite its flaws, was morally superior to the Democratic party of that era to such a large degree that it invites blithe “Good vs. Evil” oversimplifications. And for another century after the Civil War, Southern Democrats were unquestionably the nation’s most heinous partisan manifestation. Any equivalent essay would make minced meat of the Democrats. However, there would still be two important differences.
One is that, numerically, the Democratic Party actually is the more popular party and always has been. That does not erase any of the horrible things Democrats have done, but that statistical reality must be confronted, and begs us to ask tough questions about why such a flawed party consistently maintained popularity, and why a GOP that once prided itself on messages of honest government couldn’t attract more followers.
The other difference is that despite all of its many shortcomings and a multitude of sins, the Democratic Party since the 1970s has not been a bastion racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and religious fundamentalism. In fact, while not fully cleansing itself of these blights, it has taken real steps and made admirable progress in greatly reducing them. Rather, it is the Republican Party that has increasingly and enthusiastically trafficked in these social cancers for nearly six decades now.
Are both political parties awful? In a general sense, yes. Politics is a dirty business for shitty people, so it stands to reason. But not all bad is created equal. I can gravely insult you, and I can punch you square in the nose, hard. They’re not the same thing, and if you think they are, that’s probably because no one’s ever seriously kicked your ass. And I want to believe, though deeply naive it may be, that at least since the 1970s, the Republican message of resentment has attracted fewer Americans than the Democrats’ message, and that the Democrats’ more positive message, even as it is burdened by a seemingly endless string of failed and broken promises and outright lies, is slightly more popular with the American people.
I want to believe that’s what the numbers really tell us. But they probably don’t.
Akim Reinhardt’s website is ThePublicProfessor.com