The Trump-era Republican Party does occupy a very different niche from the Party of 1964.
The Trump-era Republican Party does occupy a very different niche from the Party of 1964. When Trump was sworn into office, the G.O.P. held both houses of Congress. In 2018, the Democrats won back the House; the Senate is now a fifty-fifty split. But the Party still controls thirty state legislatures and twenty-seven governorships. In November, Trump, facing multiple, overlapping crises, all of them exacerbated by his ineptitude, won seventy-four million votes. Still, the Republican Party confronts a potentially existential crisis.
Last year, Thomas Patterson, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, argued in his book “Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?” that, over time, the Party has set a series of “traps” for itself that have eroded its “ability to govern and acquire new sources of support.” The modern Republican Party was built upon the Southern beachhead that Goldwater established more than half a century ago. Johnson rightly worried that his embrace of civil rights would lose the South for the Democrats for at least a generation.
In 1968, Richard Nixon won the Presidency, employing the Southern Strategy—an appeal to whites’ racial grievances. By 1980, the G.O.P. had become thoroughly dependent on the white South. In 2018, some seventy per cent of “safe” or “likely Republican” districts were in Southern states. Prior to last year’s election, Southerners composed forty-eight per cent of House Republicans and seventy-one per cent of the Party’s ranking committee members. The South remains the nation’s most racially polarized region and also the most religious—two dynamics that factor largely both in the Party’s political culture and in its current problems. “The South,” Patterson writes, “is a key reason why the GOP’s future is at risk.”
In becoming the party of Trump, the G.O.P. confronts the kind of existential crisis that has destroyed American parties in the past.
The emergence of Trumpism as the Republican brand has also borne out the warning that the G.O.P. would become a white man’s party. In a now famous autopsy of Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama, in 2012, analysts for the Republican National Committee argued that the Party had to expand its appeal to people of color if it hoped to be competitive in future national elections. “Nothing happened,” Patterson told me, speaking of the G.O.P.’s response to the report. “Right-wing media said, ‘You’re going to ruin America if we take the advice of the Republican National Committee.” Today, the Republican electorate is whiter and more male by far than its Democratic counterpart. By 2020, eighty-one per cent of Republican voters were white, and fifty per cent were male.
Republicans knew Trump was a snake, but still they let him in. They did not anticipate the durability of Trump’s version of Republicanism even after his defeat., Trump may have been defeated, but seems that Republicans are all in for Trumpism.
At CPC, Trump shot down the idea that he would form a separate MAGA party, making it clear that the G.O.P. will be cast in his likeness for the foreseeable future. “We have the Republican Party,” Trump said.