A new republican generation?

A WEEK after the 2002 US mid-term elections Karl Rove, the Special Assistant to President Bush, gave a speech at the University of Utah that praised George Bush for leading the Republican party to an unusual victory. Against the tide of history the presidential party had gained congressional seats at the mid-term elections in November, 2002. These gains had been made in both chambers of the national government -- the House of Representatives as well as the Senate. In the face of an election when more Republican-held than Democratic-held constituencies were up for election both in Congress and at the gubernatorial level, the party's candidates had beaten the statistical odds on defeat, holding on to a majority of governorships as well as making legislative gains.

Some of the individual victories were close, but the fact that the balance of power had tilted towards the Republicans at every level, and in every branch, was clear by the morning after election day. There was no 36-day wait for a result in 2002, and Rove was quick to claim a mandate for George Bush. Having become President in the 2000 election where he did not gain a plurality of the popular votes that were cast, George W. Bush picked up the mantle of a mandate from an election in which he was not on the ballot at all.

While he was pleased with the short-term impact of the mid-term results, Rove saw much more potential in this victory. '[S]omething is going on out there', claimed Rove. 'Things are moving in new direction. It's not just that Republicans picked up three seats in the Senate or six or seven or seats in the House. It's something more fundamental, but we'll only know what it is in another two or four years'. In particular he claimed there was a 'pretty dramatic' growth in Republican identification among young voters, a shift in the gender gap, and indications of Republican attraction to Hispanic voters, each of which 'could be a significant trend' for the building of a generation-long Republican future.

There were echoes in this vision of a prediction from a generation before. As Richard Nixon entered the White House, in 1969, Kevin Phillips' book The Emerging Republican Majority set the tone for political analysis of that era. Given the slim margin of the Republican presidential election victory in Nixon's victory in 1968, this seemed to many to be a rather hopeful and partisan position. With the exception of brief periods of Republican control in the 80th and 83rd Congresses, long-term Democratic control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives stretched back to the demise of Herbert Hoover, and the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

The 1968 campaign had been divisive as it was fought in the shadow of the Vietnam War. The Democratic Party campaign imploded in the convention hall and on the streets in Chicago. Television covered vitriolic exchanges between politicians, and riotous confrontations on the streets. Democratic party leaders appeared to be culpable for pursuing the war, Democratic party followers appeared to be fomenting the rebellion on the streets, and a Democratic city appeared to be unable to maintain any kind of order. Hubert Humphrey, the then Vice President, was nominated for the Presidency by the Democrats at their Chicago meeting, but left the city feeling like he had 'been in a shipwreck'.

From then to November 1968 the Nixon/Agnew campaign spent most of its efforts making sure that the Democrats' self-inflicted wounds did not heal. The Republicans were under little pressure to produce a positive agenda -- blaming the Democrats for failures in foreign policy and domestic order was likely to be enough to coast to victory. But the result was still remarkably close. With a lead of fewer than half a million popular votes, albeit a clear Electoral College victory, one might expect it to be difficult for Nixon to claim the foundation for a mandate. And legislative victory still evaded the Republicans. The last time that the Republicans could claim to be the consistent majority party of the nation was when Amelia Earhart flew the Atlantic, and Mickey Mouse was only just emerging from a young Walt Disney's imagination.

Regardless of Nixon's victory, Phillips' confidence that the Republicans were on their way to majority status was quite startling. But his belief that the party political balance of the USA was due for significant change was shared by some others. Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg opined that divisions in the electorate were being re-defined by a complex of tensions that they aggregated as 'the social issue', in a way that tended to benefit the Republican party. Furthermore, there were many in that party who just thought it was their turn to grasp the reins of government authority. The history of party political eras in the USA has been conceptualised by many analysts as a generational cycle, and a good number of Republicans felt that the generation of Democratic strength launched by Franklin Roosevelt's victories should have run its course. They were putting their faith in a party political realignment that would alter the foundations of US electoral politics just enough to shift the advantage to their side .