Amid National Shift, Is GOP Now the Perennial Out-Party?

Eight months ago, Texas Gov. George W. Bush led Vice President Al Gore by 21 points. Now, he trails Gore by six, and GOP strategists in Washington are worried. They fear that, within weeks, Democrats will blanket the airwaves with issue ads designed to define Bush, and by the time the conventions convene this summer, the Democrats will be well on their way to a third consecutive term in the White House. The truth, of course, may be far worse. The Republicans may be in the process of becoming the political minority for a generation. They are being banished from the national stage and do not even realize it.

Only twice before has a political party been vanquished to the margins for 20 years or more. The Civil War put Democrats out of power for 24 years; the Great Depression kept Republicans out for 20 years. Both political banishments were the result of seismic events that changed the way the country functioned. The same dynamic is at work in today’s politics, where a sea change in American life is priming the pump for one-party rule.

We see a confluence of two events that are devastating for Republicans. The first is the dawning of the information age, which has produced a fantastic, whirling economy. The second is the Democrats’ successful demonization of the religious right.

The gilded age we live in is no less politically significant than the Civil War or the Great Depression. It is not an ordinary economic boom, for it has changed the nature of U.S. industry and the way ordinary people think about money. Democrats, in power at the dawn of this new economy, are reaping its benefits in a way that is inversely proportional to how the parties on the wrong ends of the Civil War and the Great Depression were punished.

What’s more, this trend is self-reinforcing. Suppose that, next January, Gore is president, the Democrats control the House and the Senate is deadlocked at 50-50--a likely scenario. If the Dow Jones industrial average remains irrationally exuberant, as many experts predict, how will Republicans fare in 2002? They will recede even further into the minority, because while the information age has made the stock market more egalitarian, it makes the politically rich richer.

At the same time, Democrats have created a tremendously effective political weapon: the religious right. The religious right is, at best, a medium-small minority group, with only 11% of Americans identifying themselves as members. Yet, the public has an outsized view of them that is overwhelmingly negative: The religious right has a 47% unfavorable rating. The concept of the religious right has eclipsed even the usefulness of the epithets “liberal” in the 1980s or “communist” in the 1950s. People in the suburbs of Ohio and New Jersey--middle-of-the-road voters who decide elections--are terrified by the idea of the religious right; and Democrats are adept at using that fear as an electoral club. Gore’s new slogan for the general election is “Join the fight!” The phrase makes the explicit argument that Democrats aren’t involved in a debate over which direction to take the country, but rather in a war with Christian conservatives.

Meanwhile, signs are emanating from First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s camp in New York that she is going to seek to portray her opponent, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, as a member of the religious right, or, in her words, a “right-wing extremist.” Four months ago, Giuliani led the first lady by five points; today he trails her by three. By Nov. 7, Giuliani could well look like Pat Robertson to New York voters. Giuliani is a pro-choice, pro-gay-rights, centrist Republican who, in an alternate universe, would be known as a “tough-on-crime New Democrat.”

Some Republicans argue that the 1994 election proves the party is in a salvageable, if damaged, condition. In the mid-’90s, it was reasonable to view the 1994 Republican avalanche as a realigning election, but hindsight makes it look more like an aberration. The election of 1874, in the middle of the Republican domination following the Civil War, showed a similar temporary shift when the out-of-power Democrats gained 77 seats in the House of Representatives. Six years later, they were back in the minority.

Similarly, during the Democratic hegemony after the Great Depression, the election of 1946 looked like a Republican landslide. The GOP gained 55 seats in the House and 13 in the Senate. But the reports of its resurgence were greatly exaggerated: Two years later, the Democrats won back both houses convincingly. Years from now, the election of 1994 will be viewed as one of these surprising blips, a freakish win by a thoroughly disenfranchised party.

Other GOP strategists are relying on the old saw that says Americans have an intrinsic distrust of politicians and tend to apportion power relatively evenly between the parties. While this may hold true for normal times, exceptional situations--moments that force the country to reexamine fundamental aspects of itself--have caused the public to hand the reigns to a single party. The Civil War changed the way people felt about democracy, and Republicans were given total control. The Great Depression changed the way people thought about government, and the Democrats were allowed unchallenged rule. It is not unreasonable to suspect that as the information age changes the way we think about economics, we will again see a generation of politics dominated by one party.

Republicans who see the Bill Clinton-Gore years as a wave that has already crested are whistling past the graveyard. The evidence from New York to bellwether California, where the party of Dan Lungren is in massive disarray, is not good. It suggests that a long, dark night has just begun to settle over the GOP.

Even if they did understand their predicament, it isn’t clear Republicans could change their fate. In both previous periods, the minority party needed the help of a mistake by the ruling party to get back into the game. In 1884, James G. Blaine, the “continental liar from the state of Maine,” fumbled the election for the Republicans after the party inexplicably turned its back on incumbent President Chester A. Arthur. In 1952, the country was mired in a less-than-popular war when Democrats put forward the famously pompous and lightweight Adlai E. Stevenson. But even with the weak Stevenson as an opponent, Republicans needed a celebrity candidate--Dwight D. Eisenhower--and a demagogic message (Democrats were the party of “Communism, Corruption and Korea”) to finally return to power.

Which is to say that, barring a war with China, the collapse of the Nasdaq or the nomination of Bill Bradley in 2004, Republicans may be in for a long, long stay in the political wilderness. *