Political Parties Seek Stability as Once ‘Solid’ Ground Shifts

Vermont Sen. James M. Jeffords’ decision last week to bolt the Republican Party underscores the apparently irreversible force of the geographic realignment transforming both the GOP and the Democratic Party.

Born as the party of the North in the years before the Civil War, the GOP since the 1960s has seen its center of gravity relentlessly shift toward the South and Mountain West.

As those right-leaning regions have consolidated their control within the GOP, they have pushed it toward conservative positions that force the dwindling band of moderate Republicans--most of them from the Northeast--to repeatedly choose between voting against their party in Washington or voting against the wishes of their voters back home. Both are unattractive options.

Caught between those pressures, the number of moderate Northeastern Republicans has suffered a seemingly inexorable decline since Barry Goldwater’s presidential nomination heralded the Sun Belt takeover of the GOP in 1964.

Democrats, in turn, have become the party of the culturally cosmopolitan coasts, dominating even New England and the Pacific Northwest--regions that voted consistently Republican for decades. Meanwhile, the “solid South”--the phrase that described the monolithic control of the region by Democrats--has become an anachronism.

“We have been going through a slow realignment of the parties,” said Columbia University historian Eric Foner, the author of a definitive history of the GOP’s founding.

The squeeze on politicians from each side caught, in effect, behind enemy lines is tightening. Both parties are winning more of the congressional seats in the states that favor their presidential candidates--a trend suggesting a decline in the ticket-splitting that had allowed Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats to survive.

Today, the Southern and Mountain West states that President Bush virtually swept last year provide the basis of GOP strength in Congress as well. Within the two regions, Republicans enjoy a 39-vote majority over Democrats among 159 House seats (one other seat is held by an independent and another is vacant). Among the 42 Senate seats in the region, the GOP advantage is 18.

By contrast, in the rest of the country--especially along the band of coastal and upper Midwest states that Democrat Al Gore carried in 2000--congressional representation tilts strongly toward the Democrats. In the House, the Democratic majority within these regions is 28 seats; in the Senate, it’s 19.

According to calculations by the political analysis firm Polidata Inc., the number of districts that voted for a presidential candidate from one party and elected a congressional candidate from the other dropped to 86 in 2000, fewer than in either 1992 or 1996.

Easier Time for Southern Democrats

This geographic sorting-out increasingly has subjected Jeffords and other moderate Republicans in the Northeast to the same political tension that Southern Democrats faced earlier. In each case, the centrists have found it difficult to bridge the chasm between their party’s national image and the demands of their local voters.

The strains on Southern Democrats have eased somewhat in recent years as former President Clinton steered his party toward the center. Democrats have actually regained ground in some Southern states since the GOP landslide in the 1994 congressional elections. Moderate Republicans, in contrast, may be facing intensified pressure from the momentum that Bush’s election provided to the party’s conservative wing.

Indeed, emboldened conservatives had been sharpening their demands for party loyalty from the moderates. In the weeks before Jeffords’ departure, Capitol Hill conservatives demanded that the White House punish him for voting against Bush’s budget plan. And some conservatives remain unchastened by Jeffords’ decision; as the senator prepared to announce it, a columnist for the online version of the conservative National Review concluded flatly: “Good riddance.”

Jeffords took the bold step of resolving the tension between the national GOP and his region by declaring himself an independent. But few others appear to find that route attractive; instead, these other moderate Republicans have used Jeffords’ defection to more aggressively warn the party’s Southern-dominated congressional leadership that it must adjust its message to a pitch more congenial to a wider group of voters.

“I hope that a few people are looking in the mirror right now, and not just [Senate Republican leaders] and George W. Bush,” said Rep. Michael N. Castle (R-Del.), chairman of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a centrist GOP group.

At a Senate GOP caucus just hours after Jeffords’ announcement Thursday, several Northeastern Republicans passionately argued that party conservatives must show more understanding of the electoral realities the moderates face. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) told his colleagues that GOP incumbents from Northeastern swing states are under great pressure--pressure that Southerners and Westerners with larger electoral bases can’t understand. Referring to Republican Senate incumbents who lost races last November in Delaware, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri and Washington state, Specter said, “We really have to face up to the fact that we lost some key seats in the last election.”

The paradox is that even as the need for a change in the party’s direction has grown among GOP moderates, their leverage to force it has diminished. In effect, the shift of power toward the South and Mountain West inside the GOP is feeding on itself.

The dominance of those regions inside the party caucus has pushed the GOP toward positions on social issues such as abortion and the environment that make it more difficult for the moderates to survive. But as the number of Northern and West Coast moderates shrinks, so does their capacity to tilt the party back toward policies that might strengthen their hand at home.

“We should be thanking the heavens that we have any Republican from Vermont or Rhode Island,” said John Weaver, the chief political strategist for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “But there are many in our party who want us to run . . . like a Southern university fraternity.”

Republican Party Created in 1850s

This striking dynamic precisely inverts the process that led to the GOP’s formation in the 1850s. The opening for the new Republican Party came when the Democratic Party of that era experienced a shift in its geographic and ideological center similar to what the GOP is going through today.

For much of the period before the Civil War, Southern and Northern legislators had roughly equal strength inside the Democratic Party. But in 1854, Southern Democrats, with a few Northern allies, pushed through the ill-fated Kansas-Nebraska Act, which eased the expansion of slavery into the territories.

The backlash against that legislation imposed devastating losses on Democrats in the North and tilted the party balance of power toward the South. In what one historian termed “a vicious circle,” the ascendant Southern Democrats then continually pushed the party toward more pro-slavery measures that further undermined the Democratic position in the North.

That fracture allowed the new Republican Party to emerge as the dominant party in the North--which in turn allowed the GOP to control the White House for 50 of the 66 years after the Civil War. As historian Foner noted, it wasn’t until the Depression and the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt that Democrats again became competitive in the North. “The Civil War basically fixed the structure of American politics until the New Deal,” he said.

Something similar happened to Southern Democrats in the civil rights era. For most of the 20th century, Southern Democrats had enough clout inside the party and Congress to restrain the Northern liberals. But the white backlash against the civil rights bills of the 1960s shrank the number of Southern Democratic legislators, and as their numbers declined, Democrats from other regions demanded liberal policies that further alienated conservative white Southern voters in another “vicious circle.”

Not until the late 1990s--as Clinton led the national party toward a more moderate posture and local Democrats vastly improved their efforts to turn out African American voters--did Democrats partially break their fall in the South. Today, Democrats hold the governorships in five Southern states--including four of the five that Goldwater carried in 1964--and have regained two Senate seats since the mid-1990s, noted Merle Black, an expert on Southern politics at Emory University. Even so, Democrats have continued to lose Southern congressional seats since 1994.

The continued fragility of the Democratic position in the South--Gore, though a Southerner himself, failed to carry a single Southern state last year--shows how difficult it is to reverse the sort of geographic realignment now squeezing the Northeastern Republicans.

“It does seem you need pretty large events--the Civil War, the Great Depression--to interrupt [one of] these trends in the political system,” Foner said.

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Times staff writer Janet Hook contributed to this story.