Rise of the ‘Obama Republicans’
Photo Credit: AP…By 1972, many conservative Democrats supported Nixon over George McGovern so at least in presidential campaigns, culturally conservative Democrats were already moving away from their historic home. Only the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, a southern populist reformer–and Watergate–and Betty Ford’s liberalism–forestalled the inevitable.
The Gipper’s massive victory in 1980 was fueled by more that 30 percent of Democrats nationwide, who took a powder on Carter after he moved to the left. Reagan received the same amount in the 1984 election in part because he’d done nothing to disappoint them and the liberal establishment nominated Walter Mondale, a good man who was trapped in a New Deal past.
Reagan ran again as the anti-establishment candidate of the future and swamped the lifetime Democrat, ironically with the help of Democrats. Yet the Establishment Republicans simply could not abide by the realigning elections of 1980, 1984, and 1994.
By the final years of the last century, some inside the GOP wanted the Reagan Revolution to be over, thus the phrase “compassionate conservative.” George W. Bush ran and lost the popular vote in 2000 without once ever calling for a spending cut or the elimination of one single wasteful federal program. After that, the GOP would continue to embrace the persona of Reagan–they had little choice–but no longer would they embrace the American conservative philosophy of the Gipper.
Hence, the stirrings of the Obama Republicans.
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