Political Parties: A Personal View of Recent History.

People talk of “Republicans” and “Democrats” as if they were monolithic groups that never change. That view is false. Throughout my lifetime, both parties have undergone considerable changes.  Yes, they have core traits that can be traced back to the first half of the nineteenth century, when they began, but they have shifted their emphasis and focus. They continue to change.

While I have a memory of the 1960 campaign, it is only of election night. I have more memories of the 1964 Johnson–Goldwater race, but it’s hard to separate my memories from things I’ve since learned. For example, did I see the Daisy Ad at the time? I have no idea, but I have seen it many times since then.

Still, that race marked a key turning point for the Republican party. The party was split between the more business-oriented or establishment Republicans and the new and rising conservatives. Goldwater was the first conservative to get the nomination.

While he lost, this was not seen as a mark against Conservatives as the general consensus was, given the assassination of JFK less than a year before the election, Republicans couldn’t win. This campaign also saw the emergence of Reagan into national politics with his Time For Choosing Speech.

The Democratic party was also changing. Before 1964, it was split. One group was the Northern Democrats, with machine-based politics centered around the city and ethnic groups. The other was Southern Democrats, with machine-based politics centered around race. Democrats had been the party of Slavery, Jim Crow, and the KKK.

The Brown v Board of Education decision effectively, if not explicitly, overturned Plessy. The world was changing and so were the demographics of the South, particularly in the large Southern cities. So were attitudes changing in the country. The South’s political model based on race was doomed.

By pushing for Civil Rights, Johnson hoped to get ahead of this change by unifying the Democratic Party under a national machine. He was only partially successful. Still, the party focuses on groups and operates mainly as a national machine, something still visible today in the near uniformity of terms and phrases. At least until the last election, the party spoke as a group, like a machine.

The first election where I was old enough to be involved was 1968 and Nixon. 68 was a very tough year for the country. (If you think things are bad now, research that year a bit). Nixon was a bit of an outsider. He was not a conservative but was not part of the establishment  Republicans either. He ran on ending the war in Vietnam and restoring order and won. 

The Left hated Nixon. They still held a grudge for what they believed were Nixon’s false accusations against Alger Hiss,  that he was a Soviet Spy.  He was charged and found guilty, but his supporters believed he was framed.  

This controversy was very active into the 1990s and I had many debates with people about it. Since the fall of the USSR and the disclosure in the 1990s of the Venona papers, the discussion has waned but not entirely subsided.  Still, at the time, many on the Left saw little difference between Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. I suspect that for many on the Left, little has changed. Nixon had a successful first term, marked by the end of the war and the return of POWs.

Meanwhile, the Democrats continued their own shakeup following the loss to Nixon.  At that time, a split emerged in the Democratic Party between more conservative Democrats, such as “Scoop” Jackson, and more liberal ones, like George McGovern. McGovern had been on the committee that rewrote the party rules for presidential nominations and, therefore, not surprisingly, won the nomination.  McGovern was, at the time, the most Leftist candidate ever nominated. From this point forward, while Scoop Jackson never left the party, those with similar views became increasingly unwelcome.  

The 1972 Nixon—McGovern race was a massive landslide for Nixon.   However, it was also the beginning of Watergate, which was ultimately Nixon’s downfall. Watergate was an enormous test for Republicans; while they initially supported Nixon, they took an active part as the investigation proceeded.  One of the most critical questions, “What did he know, and when did he know it?” was asked by Republican Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee.  When the evidence grew strong enough, a group of Republicans went to the White House and told Nixon he had to resign. 

For decades, I believed this was the right thing to do; Nixon had broken the law. However, in the last few years, the private papers of prosecutors and judges have been made public, revealing significant misconduct that would have led to disbarment had it been known. Likely, Nixon was not guilty after all.

Following Nixon’s resignation, Ford became President. The Democrats also changed direction somewhat in the nomination of Carter, who was not as liberal as McGovern. While Reagan attempted to win the nomination in 76, it was an uphill battle against an incumbent President. While Reagan did well, it was not enough to overcome the more traditional Republicans. So, 1976 was a race between an establishment Republican and a somewhat more moderate Democrat, which Carter won.

While a good man, Carter was a horrible President. In 1980,  conservatives could again nominate a candidate for the first time since 1964. The Reagan–Carter race was a landslide for Reagan; significantly, it also broke the Democrats’ lock on the Senate, which they had held since 1955. Republicans would keep the Senate until the last two years of Reagan’s second term.

During the Reagan years, the more establishment Republicans still dominated among Senate and House Republicans. Democrats still maintained solid control of the House, a position they had held since 1955. Still, conservative strength within the party continued to grow.

1984 saw the Democrats nominate another Liberal, Mondale. Yet, things were going so well in the country that Democrats probably had as much chance in 1984 as Republicans had in 1964. Reagan won in a historic landslide, winning 49 states. Mondale won only his home state and, of course, the District of Columbia, which has never voted Republican since the 23rd Amendment allowed it to vote in Presidential elections.

When the 1988 races drew near, Republicans nominated Reagan’s vice president, Bush, and the Democrats again moved to the Left, though still not as far as McGovern, with Dukakis. Bush was not a conservative, but he was Reagan’s VP and pledged “No New Taxes.” He won.

The loss of yet another liberal, Dukakis, who won only 10 states, caused a significant reevaluation among at least some Democrats. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was formed following the 1984 loss and gained further prominence with Dukakis’s loss.

The fundamental goal of the DLC was to reverse the party’s move to the Left since the 1960s and return it to its more moderate roots. Supporters frequently called themselves new Democrats. Bill Clinton chaired the DLC from 1990 to 1991. In 1992, he ran for President as a moderate DLC Democrat.

While Bush had run on the Reagan Legacy, he returned to his more established roots once in office, alienating conservatives. While popular following the Gulf War, by 1992, the country was in a recession. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress during Bush’s Presidency. To get Democratic support for the Gulf War, Bush agreed to raise taxes, breaking his pledge and making him even more unpopular. 

Because of his unpopularity, Pat Buchanan challenged Bush for the nomination. When he lost, Ross Perot entered the race as a third-party candidate, making it a Clinton—Bush—Perot contest. Many Republicans believe that Perot was a spoiler candidate. There is some truth to this. Perot seems to have had a personal grudge against Bush. He dropped out of the race when Clinton was doing well but reentered when Bush appeared to be gaining ground.

As a counterfactual, we will never know for sure, but I am skeptical of the claim that Perot cost Bush the election. Clinton was running as a more conservative Democrat, and Bush had alienated conservatives in his party. Bush had raised taxes, and Clinton promised a middle-class tax cut. In any event, Clinton won.

Once in office, Clinton “forgot” that he had been in the DLC. The economy emerged from the recession in October, but those numbers were not released until after the election. Even so, Clinton gave a speech saying that the numbers were worse than he had expected, and while he ‘tried as hard as he could,’ they could not do the middle-class tax cut.

It was all a lie, of course. By the time he gave the speech, the economic numbers were already better than the ones he had used in his book with Al Gore, which laid out their plan if elected. The Press, which had been on the Left for a very long time, was beginning to get comfortable with being biased. They were still very far from the naked partisanship of recent years. Still, they were starting to drop any pretense of objectivity. So, they certainly did not call him on it.

While Clinton would still talk as a DLC Democrat, he governed more in the tradition of Dukakis and Mondale in his first two years. His plan to take over healthcare is the most prominent example of this. Clinton put Hillary in charge, and it was quickly dubbed Hillary Care.

Clinton’s policies, particularly Hillary Care, were so unpopular that in 1994, the impossible happened. After the Midterms, Republicans controlled Congress, not only the Senate but also the House. It is hard to conceive now what an upheaval this was. While Republicans won back the Senate for three terms during Reagan’s Presidency, since 1931, Democrats had a solid lock on the House except for one term in the late 1940s, which they then lost, and then three terms later, another single term in the early 1950s.

Since 1955, Democrats have had solid control of the House. Thus, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, in his first two years, had a House controlled by Democrats. Except for the first six years of Reagan, they all have a Democratic Senate as well.  Thus, Clinton was the first Democratic President to deal with a Congress controlled by Republicans since Truman, who had a Republican Congress for only two years in his first term.

In addition, since it had been more than 40 years since Republicans held Congress, few, if any, Republicans had ever been in the majority; the leadership team had been first elected when Reagan or Bush was President. Unlike the previous two times they had won control, this time, Republicans would hold the House for 12 years and the Senate for the remainder of Clinton’s term.

While the new speaker, Newt Gingrich, was a conservative, most of the House, particularly the senior members who ran important committees, were establishment Republicans. While conservatives were growing stronger, they did not have control. This led to a growing frustration.

Still, they did get a lot done, particularly the first balanced budget in decades and welfare reform, both of which Clinton resisted but eventually signed and took credit for.

Given the victory in 1994, 1996 looked to be a promising year for Republicans. In the 1990s, I was asked by a friend if the Republicans would ever nominate Bob Dole for President. I answered no because he could not win. I was only half right. Dole was the establishment candidate, and it was his turn, so he got the nomination and then lost.

Clinton won, but this was a mixed blessing for the Democrats. Clinton was a test for Democrats like Nixon had been for Republicans. One that they failed. Long before he ran for President, Bill Clinton had the nickname Slick Willie. Nor was Arkansas in those days known for doing everything by the book. Thus, scandal plagued Clinton even during the campaign and followed him into the White House.

Looking back now, it is clear that Clinton, while he had incredible political skills, was a world-class liar. A bit of a shady conman who had a problem with women. While there was a long list of other scandals, the latter would get him in the most trouble.

He was the poster child of the me-too villain, long before me-too, leaving a long line of victims and one credible accusation of rape. During the campaign, Hillary’s job was to silence these “Bimbo eruptions,” a term coined by Betsy Wright when she was deputy Chair of the first Clinton presidential campaign.

With Nixon, Republicans believed that he was not responsible for the break-in, so that they could ignore. Still, he had been credibly accused of obstruction of Justice, which they could not ignore. It was the coverup, not the crime, that was the problem. Thus, they sent a group to the White House asking him to resign.  

The Democrats faced a similar choice. Sex with an intern they could ignore, but it became clear that Clinton likewise had obstructed Justice.  Worse, he had also committed and suborned perjury. Like Republicans, when his crimes were clear, Democrats also went to the White House. However, rather than asking him to resign, they held a rally of support.

This was a classic short-term victory for Clinton but a long-term loss for the party and a lowering of standards for the President. While counterfactual and thus difficult to be sure, had Clinton left office, Gore would have become President.  With Clinton in the past, Gore would have run in 2000 as an incumbent and likely won. In addition, since he would have taken office in 1999, his first term would have been short enough that he still could have served two more full terms.

The two unfortunate but key lessons Democrats learned from the Clinton years is that because the Press supported them with increasingly partisan coverage, they could defend their people at all costs. Second, they could disconnect what they say from reality. What they said was for show. It is what they do that matters. Thus, they could talk all they want about defending the middle class and sticking it to billionaires while ignoring the middle class and courting billionaire donations. The Press had their back.

So, the Democrats defended Clinton, and Gore became their nominee. On the Republican side, the establishment’s clear candidate was George W. Bush, who ran on compassionate conservatism. While not liked by conservatives, there were too many “conservatives” dividing up the vote, and Bush won the nomination.

Given the sour aftertaste of the Clinton years, it should have been a clear victory for Bush, except again, the Press stepped in to try and save the day for Gore. In addition to their regular slanted coverage, there was the release on the Friday before the election of a story that Bush had been arrested on a DUI in the 1970s.

Then, a network called Florida for Gore an hour before the polls closed in the state’s western, more pro-Bush part. This was estimated to have cost Bush 30,000 votes. Not only did it nearly cost Bush the election, but it also nearly spawned a constitutional crisis as the counting and court cases dragged on.

To this day, some Democrats still feel the election was stolen, and they attempted to block it in the Senate and have electors change their votes. I know more about this as my mother was an elector in that election. Since Nevada voted last in the electoral college that year, she told me she cast the vote that put Bush over the top. The 2004 Bush-Kerry race was also close with charges of election fraud by the Democrats and efforts to block certification, though not as much as in 2000.  The Bush-Kerry race also marked an increasing shift in press coverage to the Left when compared to 2000.

As expected, Bush governed as an establishment Republican, causing conservatives to become increasingly frustrated. They continued to grow in numbers, but leadership continued to ignore them. This was particularly true given that Democrats were increasingly breaking norms to oppose Bush.  

One of the innovations of Bill Clinton’s Presidency had been the continuous campaign. Before Clinton, there was campaign season, which ended with the election and was followed by governance. Sure, this was more an 80-20 vs 20-80 thing, but there was a distinct difference, and people expected there to be one. Clinton was a master politician; it was his strength, so his White House was always in campaign mode. That was probably one of the reasons he survived his many scandals.  

Democrats, perhaps because many thought Bush was an illegitimate president, continued the continuous campaign. For example, before 2000, Judges were not filibustered except in very extreme circumstances. When nominated to the Supreme Court in 1991, Clarence Thomas was viciously opposed by Democrats. Still, no Democrat thought it proper to filibuster him. When Bush 43 became President just nine years later, filibustering judges became routine.

Terrorism and war consumed most of Bush’s focus. During his second term, he wasted most of his remaining goodwill on an effort to fix Social Security, which, as expected, was demonized by Democrats as an attempt to destroy it. As such, his reforms failed, and the system continued its glide path to bankruptcy, now only about 10 years away.

He also made two attempts to fix a growing problem with the housing market, one in 2003 and another in 2005. The Democrats also demonized these as racist and an attack on affordable housing. These also failed. The problem in the housing market escalated and led to a banking crisis at the end of his term.

Republicans did have the House for the first six years of Bush’s term and the Senate for four in the middle. Establishment Republicans like Speaker Dennis Haster still dominated. They were able to reign in spending that had exploded from the Dot.Com bubble and the war, reducing the deficit to $161 billion. When Democrats won back the House, it shot back up to $459 billion, the highest of the Bush years before the financial crisis the following year.

By the end of his term, Bush was very unpopular. Before he was elected, I predicted he would probably serve two terms but would undermine the party and ensure a Democrat was elected in 2009. I was right. In 2008, Republican candidates ranged from establishment, conservative, libertarian, to renegade. In the end, the renegade, McCain, won. He was the worst possible candidate. He ran on Foreign Policy, which many in the country were tired of. Worse still, when the financial crisis struck a few months before the election, McCain was clearly out of his depth and unprepared.

He attempted to bolster his campaign by nominating Sarah Palin, a relatively unknown rising star in the party. It worked somewhat; I heard many Republicans say she was the best part of the ticket. But McCain misjudged the Press, who had treated him well as long as he was attacking fellow Republicans.  They turned on him when he got the nomination and descended on her like locusts seeking to destroy her. She was unprepared for this, and the press attacks worked.

This is one of the main concerns I have about first-time or relatively unknown Republican candidates. The Press’s sole goal is to destroy them. Such as when Katie Couric asked Palin about abortion over and over and over (I believe the number of times was in the teens) until Palin became flustrated with repeated questioning. When they aired the interview, it was edited to make it look like Couric asked her one question, and she became frustrated.

My simple rule, going back to the Steve Forbe campaign in 1988, is that noobies make noobie mistakes, and these can end a campaign. This happened to Vivek during the last election cycle when he was surging.

In any event, in 2008, people were ready for a change, and the Obama–McCain race was a massive landslide for Democrats. Not only did they win the Presidency and hold the Congress, but they also had a filibuster-proof Majority in the Senate. They could do whatever they wanted, and there was little, if anything, the Republicans could do to stop them. 

Obama had run on change but was vague on specifics. Once in office, it was unclear how he would actually govern. He chose to move left, with, among other things, ObamaCare and environmental policies. These proved so unpopular with the public that the Democrats lost their veto-proof majority due to a special election. Obama still got a version of ObamaCare that had passed the Senate before the loss through the House only with extreme effort.  As for his environmental policies, since he could not get those through Congress, he pushed them through regulation.

The net effect was that at the midterms, Republicans won back the House and made significant gains in the Senate. In the Senate, Republicans, though in the minority, began using the same tactics that Democrats had used against Bush, particularly filibustering judges. This caused Majority Leader Reid to create the Reid rule, which did two things. First was the rule itself, which eliminated filibusters for all judges except those on the Supreme Court. The second was how he managed to get the rule passed. The majority could change the rules during a session with a simple majority vote. McConnell said at the time they would regret the Reid rule, which came to pass.

In 2012, Republicans thought they had a real chance at defeating Obama. The candidates included one establishment candidate, several conservatives, and a libertarian. While this was the establishment’s last gasp, it was a familiar story.   The conservatives and the libertarian split the vote, and Romney won the nomination. Perhaps he could have won the Presidency. Hugh Hewitt puts his loss down to Sandy, Candy, and Orca. Hurricane Sandy struck before the election, giving Obama a chance to shine and he did handle it well.

Candy refers to Candy Crowley, who moderated the second debate and stepped in to save Obama by falsely fact-checking Romney. However, she is a representative for a press that had moved from being merely biased to taking sides. Finally, Orca refers to the get-out-the-vote software the Romney campaign used, which failed miserably on election day.

Following the 2012 loss, Republicans conducted a deep post-mortem. Conservatives were becoming increasingly frustrated with a party that seemed only to pay them lip service. While Republicans held the House, the Republican leadership’s claim that they only controlled one-half of one-third of the government was wearing thin. 

There was also a growing fear that the Press was so dominant and so biased that many conservatives thought it may be impossible to overcome their demonization. Thus, an oft-heard question was that, regardless of his politics, Romney was one of the nicest and most caring people ever to run for president and look at what the press did to him. Who could Republicans nominate that the Press wouldn’t destroy?

There was also the Tea Party, which began as a grassroots movement in response to the financial crisis of 2009, expressing anger with Washington in general, regardless of whether it was Republican or Democrat. Yet, since Democrats controlled Washington in 2009, they received the majority of the criticism. The resulting demonization of the Tea Party by Democrats and the Media effectively pushed them into the Republican Party, where they became a populous wing. Going into 2016, the Republicans were a coalition of Establishment, Conservative, Libertarian, and now Populous.

This brings us to 2016 and Trump. In the briefest of outlines, it was a crowded field for Republicans, mostly conservatives. Jeb Bush was the establishment candidate but never really had a chance. The Press and the Democrats wanted Trump, running as a populist outsider, to get the nomination as they saw him as unelectable. Perhaps because of this, Hillary campaigned even further to the Left than Obama. Trump’s victory was a surprise to all. 

During the election, I believed Trump would be a certain loser. Later, when I reviewed the data, I concluded that Trump was the only one who could have beaten Hillary. He was able to win because he got all but one section of the Establishment Republicans, the Never-Trumpers.  But even with them, he, and any other Republican, would have lost. What made the difference was the Tea Party and populous Democrats who voted for Trump. These put him over the top, but probably would not have voted for a more traditional Republican.

Trump’s most endearing characteristic for many of his supporters was not just that he was a populist, but his fighting spirit, which was evident in his willingness to take on both the Press and the establishment. A term that began to gain prominence was the UniParty, the Democratic + Establishment Republicans who seem vested in the status quo. 

Democrats never accepted their loss to Trump and effectively attempted a soft coup to remove him from office. Forces within the bureaucracy sought to undermine his Presidency to the point of not just breaking norms but committing crimes to do so. These all failed.

Democrats were also struggling following the loss to Trump. As 2020 rolled around, they had their own battle with their establishment. For a while, it looked like Sanders might win the nomination. Still, the Democratic establishment was able to block Sanders and maneuver Biden into the nomination.

The 2020 election was one of the most unique and challenging elections in American history. Before COVID, Trump certainly had the edge. Even in the early days of COVID, Trump looked OK. When, toward the end of March, some Democratic governors, including Cuomo, said very nice things about Trump and his response, I remembered thinking, ‘ This cannot last; this is an election year. ‘ It didn’t. 

Biden won a narrow victory, but there were also numerous questionable practices. Trump grasped at every report, some true, many false, to question the election. Still, in the end, he lost, as whatever the merit of his charges, we do not have a mechanism to resolve such debates. Whoever wins the count wins the election.

Biden, or whoever was running things given his decline, took the country hard left. It is a testament to the strength of the press bias that he was even close in 2024. Still, Trump won a commanding victory. He is also building a new coalition.  The establishment Republicans are mostly gone. The main factions vying for power are the conservative and populist wings. In addition, despite the failed attempts at demonization, Trump is bringing increasing numbers of minorities into the party.  In short, the transformation of the Republican Party is well underway. It is unclear how the tension between conservatives and populists will ultimately play out.

Trump’s victory broke not just the Democratic party but the Democratic machine and the Press. Democrats no longer speak with quite the same unanimity of words and phrases. The Press, while still effectively a part of the machine, is no longer believed, and many people get their news from other sources.

Democrats are floundering. Some want to drop the Left and move back to the center as they did with the DLC following Reagan. Others want to move even further to the Left as they did with McGovern.  Some want to fight on but don’t realize that their rallies, singing, and fighting videos only make them look pathetic. The growing violence from the far Left doesn’t help, either.  They are clearly in the wilderness, and it is unclear how they will get out.

Both parties are changing, as they always have.