The Newsmagazine of the North Carolina Center for Voter Education | Thursday March 11, 2010

A Tale of Two Parties
The Republican and Democratic parties are on divergent paths. Which will emerge victorious in the long run?

By Bryan Warner
Published: Dec. 11, 2009

A Fight for the Republican Soul

In the wake of the Democratic Party’s triumph in 2008, retaking the White House after an eight-year hiatus and solidifying its control of both chambers in Congress, the Republican Party was left for dead by many political pundits. 

The inside-the-Beltway echo chamber reverberated with epitaphs for the Grand Old Party, as increasingly loud murmurs declared that the Republican brand would be relegated to regional status, comprised mainly of white evangelicals in the South, destined for the dustbin of American politics alongside Federalists, Whigs and Dixicrats.

But with this year’s gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey, conventional wisdom seemed to echo Mark Twain’s retort that reports of the GOP’s demise were greatly exaggerated.  The governor’s mansion in Virginia, a state Barack Obama won as the first Democratic presidential candidate to do so since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, was now back in Republican control.  And blue-state New Jersey, where Obama expended some political capital campaigning for Democratic incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine, had turned in favor of the Republican contender.

Just 12 months after the Republican Party seemed ready to fade away, did these gubernatorial victories signify the triumphant revival of the GOP?

The answer is not so clear, as demonstrated by another much-examined election occurring the same day for New York congressional district 23 -- a seat held by Republicans since 1872. In that House race, a deeply rooted fissure within the party played out on the national stage, with GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava -- pro-choice and friendly towards labor unions -- deemed insufficiently conservative by many rank-and-file voters and national figures such as Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.

These voters, who were the core supporters of President George W. Bush even when he suffered from rock-bottom approval ratings in his twilight, abandoned the Republican contender and instead threw their support behind insurgent Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman.  Scozzafava dropped out of the race and added to her heresy by endorsing Democratic contender Bill Owens, who won the election by just over 3,000 votes.

Even in defeat, Hoffman has become something of a national celebrity to conservatives, some of whom took part in the various “tea party” rallies held across the nation over the summer months.  These “tea partiers,” referred to dismissively by some observers as “pitchfork populists,” seem driven by profound discontent with what they view as “the establishment” -- be that the media, the president or even the very Republican Party that is somewhat bemused by the movement it endeavors to court.

To those outside of the Republican Party it may seem strange that there could be any measure of internal strife when the GOP platform has been summed up as simply “God, guns, gays and gestation.” That is, for nearly 30 years the party has galvanized its supporters as a bulwark against the secularization of America, defenders of the Second Amendment and opponents of gay marriage and abortion.

A fifth “g-word” to add to the alliterative mix might be “green” -- as in greenbacks. Fiscal conservatives, or “country-club Republicans,” have suffered a sometimes-uneasy relationship with the more socially conservative members who have been the dominant strain of Republicanism for the past decade.  The tension between the two camps is not new. 

Since 1964, when the more moderate Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York lost out on the Republican presidential nomination to the conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, there has been a simmering internal jockeying for the heart of the party. (Of course, Rockefeller’s alleged infidelity did not help his cause or that of his moderate wing.)

The ideological struggle of 1964 continues and was on full display in last year’s election when Sen. John McCain -- ironically the present-day possessor of Goldwater’s Senate seat -- claimed the GOP nomination, much to the chagrin of more conservative Republicans, who thought of McCain as nothing more than a “RINO” (Republican In Name Only).

McCain’s pairing with his vice presidential nominee, Palin, embodied that odd coupling seen in the party -- the centrist pragmatists, exemplified by McCain, and the conservative purists who found a champion in Palin.

After the party’s gubernatorial successes this year, Republican pundits were proud to note that an increasing number of independent voters -- a growing group key to Obama’s victory in 2008 -- are expressing favor for the GOP.  Those trends may be misleading, as an increasing number of voters are also forsaking their Republican affiliation and the boost of support enjoyed among unaffiliated voters may be a reflection of their vestigial fealty to the party.

Another concern facing the Republican Party is the ever-changing demographics of the nation.  Will potential short-term gains that may come from a hard-line stance on illegal immigration cost the GOP the increasingly important Hispanic vote for a generation to come? 

Will its purging of moderates leave forever barren for Republicans the once-fertile soil of the party’s New England home? After all, it was Vermont and Maine that stood alone in opposing Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection bid in 1936.  Now just three of 12 senators and none of the 22 representatives hailing from that region are Republicans.

And will the implementation of a litmus test on abortion drive away women who otherwise might agree with the party on other issues, such as fighting crime and lowering taxes?

Though it is Ronald Reagan who is most often invoked by conservative Republicans, they may owe their flavor of ideology more to Goldwater, who famously declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

What remains to be seen, and may be evidenced in the 2010 congressional contests, is if such Goldwaterian steadfastness in ideology is enough to carry the day for the GOP, or if a return to Rockerfellian moderation will prove to be the salvation for the Party of Lincoln.  Then again, perhaps a Republican resurgence will have little to do with its party identity, but rather could come about because Democrats overreach with their newfound dominance.

The Tenuous Big Tent of the Democratic Party

The mid-term congressional elections of 2006 were good to the Democratic Party.  Two endless wars, copious Republican scandals and a weakened president who spent much of his political capital on a quixotic quest to reform Social Security provided the opposition a ripe opportunity to retake control of both chambers of Congress -- something that had eluded Democrats for the 12 years before.

But was the Democratic triumph of 2006 proof that the U.S. had shifted significantly leftward, as might be presumed with the emergent speaker of the House coming from, of all places, San Francisco?

Not quite.  While the Republican Party lurched toward homogenization, the key to the Democratic takeover of Congress came from broadening its tent and running such conservative candidates for Senate as Jim Webb of Virginia in 2004  -- perhaps the ultimate Reagan Democrat, having served as that president’s secretary of the Navy -- and “blue dog” Democrats for the House, such as North Carolina’s Heath Shuler in 2006.  In addition to running conservative Democrats in districts typically held by the GOP, the party carefully avoided such third-rail polemics as gun control -- an issue that some observers believe cost Al Gore the White House in 2000.

The strategy was repeated in 2008, which saw additional gains for Democrats in Congress and their winning the holy grail of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.  With the White House now in their hands and Republicans reduced to Lilliputians who could do nothing to stop the Democratic agenda from moving forward, the sky was the limit.

But winning elections and effectively governing are quite different things, as shown by the ongoing saga that is health-care reform.  While much is made about securing a bipartisan piece of legislation -- even to the farcical point that winning just one GOP supporter is trumpeted from the mountaintops -- the cold fact is that not a single Republican vote is needed to pass whatever piece of legislation Democrats fancy, so long as they are united.

But with a caucus that includes such polar opposites as Shuler and Dennis Kucinich, nothing is simple. Even a singular Republican vote is intensely coveted so that the comforting label of bipartisanship can be affixed to the bill, thus giving cover to the 49 House Democrats who represent districts won by McCain in 2008.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party largely bit its tongue in 2006 and 2008 when it came to their party putting forward conservative contenders.  Being out of power and enduring two terms of a president they despised was more than enough motivation to lay aside ideological differences for the sake of the partisan banner.

But the tolerance for dissent even in the big-tent Democratic Party has its limits, as evidenced by the left-flank attack on Connecticut Sen. Joe Liebermann in 2006. 

That year, Liebermann lost his primary race to a more liberal rival. Still, Gore’s running mate emerged victorious as an independent and continues to caucus with Senate Democrats, providing the all-important 60th vote for a filibuster-proof majority.  Yet Lieberman’s vote comes at a cost, manifested by his self-described stubborn opposition to the public option proposed as part of health-care reform, a stance that has re-kindled liberal ire in ads railing against him in his home state.

The Lieberman conundrum is the price of majority rule in a nation as politically complex as the U.S.  Twice before when the Democratic Party enjoyed domination over the federal government it crumbled into competing camps.  In the 19th century the original iteration of the party, the Democratic-Republicans, divided into the Democrats and National Republicans.  In the 20th century, a contingent of Southern Democrats broke away to form the States’ Rights Party as a reaction to the civil rights movement and carried four states in the 1948 presidential election.

That is not to say that such a fracturing will happen anytime soon or at all, but the question remains: How long can Democratic leaders unite such disparate and oft-times feuding wings of their party? With the specter of his administration fading into memory, the superglue that President George W. Bush provided to the fractious pieces of the Democratic Party is showing signs of strain.

Will the Democratic big tent collapse under its own weight? Will the Republican Party purge itself into obsolescence? 

History tells us that parties are in constant flux, with cyclical epochs of growth, decline and rebirth.  And with the modern political system built to favor two robust parties, the alternating rise and fall of each will continue for years to come. 

For although the reins of power may change hands, the one constant in American politics seems to be the voters’ inclination toward “throwing the bums out,” without regard to which party those bums belong.