Question of the day

Don't worry, ol' McCainie will be declare his undying hatred of fags, black people, brown people, non-English speaking people, bitches, environmentalists, and what have you soon enough. Hell, he's already said as much. The base'll come around if they have to.

Before his first election to the Presidency, Richard Nixon was widely despised in (what was then) the GOP : he was seen as a serial election-loser, a sweaty no-class also-ran from the sticks, merely Ike's hatchet man as VP. Of course, the GOP of those days still had a large contingent of the genteel monied families of the north-eastern states, Rockefellers and suchlike, and none of these-here southern white folk; irredentist southerners would still in those days "vote for a yaller dog before they'd vote for a Republican" because of Lincoln a century earlier.

Nixon won by creating on this structure the modern Republican party base, with his famous dog-whistle "Southern Strategy", taking advantage of the opportunity created by LBJ's signing of the Civil Rights Act to expand the GOP tent to include the race bigots. (Of course Nixon himself was famously bigoted, not just against blacks, but against Jews and women.)

And the former party of Lincoln watched and learned. Nothing succeeds like success; if success could reliably be had by courting the votes of bigots and those who vote their fears and resentments, why then the more bigots the merrier.

The last out-faction Republican nominee was the incumbent Gerald Ford, who of course didn't "win" the presidency. Nixon in '68 doesn't seem to fit the bill to me although Reagan remained the conservative wing challenger through a lot of the campaign, as Nixon had a commanding lead throughout the party.

The last Republican to fit this description is probably Dwight Eisenhower. People forget the '52 contest between Ike and "Mr. Republican" Taft, but the conservative half of the party was definitely shut out in that nominating contest. Curious how the second time it happens it's also someone with an inspiring military bio. You might be able to extrapolate from this a lazy rule that GOP candidates need to hit one of the psychological sweet spots in order to overcome the liability of coming from the country-club set (call them decorated military heroism, public piety in service of the clergy, and... maybe being Jack Bauer).

But it's important to remember that the alignment of "the base" with the Christian right is really a very recent phenomenon and this concept doesn't translate perfectly through time. Not until the Moral Majority in 1980 were evangelicals a particularly political constituency---they didn't vote in large numbers at all in '76 and years prior, and when they did vote they didn't exhibit a marked partisan preference. You might be able to argue that this constituency is a continuation of the anti-civil rights voters who supported the Southern Strategy candidates, but that only gets you back to 1964, before which the Dixiecrats were still Dixiecrats. I'm not sure who "the base" even was in 1948, let alone whether they supported Dewey.

Yes. I'm thinking post-Nixon. And I came up with losers like Bob Dole and Gerald Ford and GHWB in his re-election bid.