Tag: Samuel J. Tilden

Bending the Numbers

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt
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. Read more »