The Emerging Republican Majority: Updated Edition

General Editor’s Introduction

American politics, or at least mainstream party politics, generally does not advance in line with manifestos, programs and systematic political analyses. But now and then, a single publication seems to capture a change in the direction of American politics just as it is occurring. Kevin Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority is one of those rarities.

To be sure, as Phillips explains in the introduction to this new James Madison Library edition, much of the original commotion about the book was misplaced. Seeking to make sense of what many considered Richard M. Nixon’s improbable victory amid the turmoil of 1968, pundits from across the political spectrum seized on Phillips’s examination as some sort of master plan, from which the GOP had supposedly drawn what was already becoming known as its Southern Strategy. In truth, Phillips was barely involved in the larger planning of that legendary race. During the late stages of the 1968 campaign, he proffered timely advice based on his findings that proved helpful to Nixon’s strategists, but he always functioned more as an observer of politics than a political operative. The Emerging Republican Majority did not design the shift to conservatism in 1968 as much as it described that shift’s long- and short-term origins.

Phillips’s work offered a dazzling account, filled with charts and other data, of how and why the national coalition that elected Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and then sustained the New Deal had unraveled over the previous quarter century. Then the book explored that unraveling’s profound implications. It was less a blue-print for victory than a topographical map of the changed political terrain of the late 1960s. In providing that map, the book served as a harbinger not of particular events but of the major trends that led to a conservative political era, one that in the 1980s brought the advent of President Ronald Reagan—a leader who embodied the transfiguration of the New Deal majority.

It is difficult to convey how much Phillips’s conclusions ran against the grain of the conventional political wisdom of the 1950s and 1960s. It was a time when scholars and pundits alike were expounding upon a great liberal consensus in American politics. Despite brief outbursts of conservative and even right-wing fury—the latter exemplified by the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy—the New Deal’s basic principles of active government appeared to have triumphed. The most successful Republicans in national politics were moderates, above all President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who campaigned and then governed in the name of what became known as Modern Republicanism. Even in opposition, the GOP appeared to have become reconciled to many of the institutional innovations implemented by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats during the 1930s, notably Social Security.

In 1964, dissident conservatives and right-wingers, having captured the GOP party machinery, nominated Barry Goldwater for the presidency. Mocking what they beheld as the moderate and liberal Republican establishment, the Goldwater forces promised that they would offer the voters a choice, not an echo. Yet the electorate handed Goldwater one of the worse shellackings in the history of American presidential politics. As the victor Lyndon B. Johnson and his administration geared up to redouble the New Deal with Johnson’s Great Society programs, civil rights reforms and War on Poverty, claims about the liberal consensus seemed vindicated. It appeared as if the forward march of liberal politics would never end.

In 1966, however, a stunning Democratic debacle in the midterm elections brought the conventional wisdom up short. Some found the ferocity of the backlash difficult to explain, but others pointed out how acrid the political climate had become in just two years, amid escalation of the American military effort in Vietnam, rioting in urban black ghettoes, Johnson’s declining popularity and a general souring by the public on ambitious liberal reform. Phillips’s figures, though, not only accounted for the sudden reversal; they also showed how a new national political configuration—its foundations in a region stretching from Florida to California that Phillips dubbed the Sun Belt—had been taking shape for many years. That configuration would twice elect Richard Nixon to the White House; it would then survive Nixon’s disgrace in Watergate and in time become the foundation for a Reagan Republican ascendancy that lasted (by Phillips’s own reckoning) until 1992.

Phillips made no secret of his political allegiances amid the great realignment, as he dedicated his book to the two principal architects of the new Republican majority, President Nixon and Nixon’s former campaign manager, Attorney General John Mitchell. Such are the perils of politics and political judgments: six years after the book appeared, one of the dedicatees would be a convicted felon and the other an unindicted co-conspirator who, facing certain impeachment, had resigned the presidency. Following Nixon’s downfall, the entire Republican Party seemed shamed; it even appeared as if liberalism might enjoy a resurgence. Yet to the great credit of Phillips’s analysis, that liberal comeback quickly proved a flash in the pan. Instead, the basic political trends and emerging conservative era that Phillips had detected at the time of Nixon’s election came into their own a dozen years later under Reagan, a far more ideologically charged conservative Republican.

Strikingly, Phillips viewed American electoral politics as an arena of cultural warfare. Whereas many analysts viewed political alignments chiefly in class or in regional terms, Phillips understood the centrality of ethnicity, religion and national origins in shaping political allegiances, even among seemingly similar groups. Scandinavian Lutherans, for example, might be disposed to vote one way, German Catholics another. But at the heart of Phillips’s argument—controversially so, then and now—was his emphasis on the primacy of race. What he called the Negro problem of the 1950s and 1960s had, he wrote in the original introduction, become a national problem rather than a local one and was proving to be the principal cause of the New Deal coalition’s demise.

To its many critics, the book’s translation of the civil rights struggle into the Negro problem, and its seeming indifference to the bigotry, northern and southern, that lay behind much of the alienation of white erstwhile New Dealers, was, as it remains, deeply disturbing. Given the author’s connections to the Nixon campaign, his book has even been read as a piece with the appeals to white prejudice, sometimes overt, sometimes subtle, that accompanied to Nixon-Reagan ascendancy. Viewed more coldly, though, Phillips’s analysis pointed to a palpable reality that Democrats and liberals either tried to wish away or simply denounced as racist—that in forthrightly embracing civil rights, the Democratic liberalism of the 1960s and after, fairly or unfairly, left itself vulnerable to the perception that it had turned away from the interests and values of the broad white middle and working classes. That perception, albeit mutated, still remains a feature of American politics; for a quarter century, it proved essential to the conservative national majority that Phillips perceived so clearly.

We live today amid the rubble of that old conservative coalition, but with no new political order standing firmly in its place. There has been talk for more than a decade of a rising national Democratic majority consisting of minorities, working and single women, the college educated and skilled professionals—yet that coalition, although real, has produced uneven results and its continued success is far from certain. What is clear is that The Emerging Republican Majority still shapes the way political commentators envisage American politics. In 2002, when the political writers John Judis and Ruy Teixeira forecast what they saw as the coming liberal coalition, they entitled their book The Emerging Democratic Majority. It was a fitting tribute. Whatever the future, Kevin Phillips’s youthful labor of love will long remain a landmark work for understanding the political travails of the 1960s—and for interpreting the changing whorls of American politics in our own times.

Sean Wilentz

Preface to the Princeton University Press Edition

The publication of this book in June, 1969 caused something of a stir in national political circles. My position in the new Republican administration and my prior role doing voting pattern analysis and election strategy in Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign gave it credentials. Some observers concluded that The Emerging Republican Majority was the emerging Republican strategy. Newsweek labeled the book The political bible of the Nixon Era.

Not quite. The book was not a blueprint of the GOP’s Southern Strategy as some claimed, but a detailed, historically framed analysis of regional and cultural shifts that had already been in motion for a quarter century. However, the widespread blueprint characterization further assured critics and enemies aplenty, not just in journalism and academe but also within the old Republican establishment based in the Northeast and Midwest.

Between 1969 and 1972, the book had notable ups and downs, sometimes mirrored in the White House. Richard Nixon had read memos based on the book’s analyses during the weeks before the November 1968 election, but in mid-1969 he truthfully said he had not read the actual book. He read it a few months later. In 1970, an economic recession helped to deny the Republicans their hoped-for midterm election gains, which renewed doubts. Some conservatives who had cheered The Emerging Republican Majority thesis in mid-1969 suspended their political support for Nixon in the summer of 1971. And some in November 1972 supported the independent presidential candidacy of right-winger John Schmitz.

However, fortune had shifted gears in early 1972, and that summer the Democrats nominated Senator George McGovern, from their party’s left wing. In May, an assassin’s bullet crippled former Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, ending the possibility of repeating his 1968 independent candidacy. As Nixon headed for a landslide re-election, not a few observers opined that my analyses published three years earlier were coming true.

Fortune, though, had not finished shifting gears. The Watergate scandal undercut Republican gains in the 1972 elections, and by 1974 Nixon’s forced resignation ended any talk of an emerging Republican majority.

On the other hand, the Democratic Party in 1976 continued its pattern of choosing presidential nominees from its cultural peripheries, this time former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, a born-again Baptist. After winning by a surprisingly narrow margin, he got along poorly with congressional Democrats, and by 1979, prospects for another GOP presidential victory renewed interest in my analyses, and Republican nominee Ronald Reagan swept the South in 1980.

The Republicans then went on to win the presidential elections of 1984 and 1988. Reagan’s 1984 presidential triumph (59 per cent) closely mirrored the Southern-led political geography of Nixon’s 1972 landslide (61 per cent). Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, won the White House in 1988, albeit with a weaker 53 per cent. American presidential politics had a new configuration. The GOP coalition crumbled in 1992, but by then the party had won five of the past six presidential elections with the political geography described and mapped in The Emerging Republican Majority.

I had left the Nixon administration in early 1970, at twenty-nine years old, never again to serve in government or in any Republican party role. The parting was amicable at first, but I declined to play the recommended outside supporting roles and slipped into what became a forty-plus-year stint of doing print and broadcast commentaries, publishing specialized newsletters and writing books—fourteen others followed The Emerging Republican Majority. It is fair to say I was more an outsider than an insider.

That outlook had underpinned the political and elections-related research I began as a teen-ager in the mid-1950s. From an interest in history and geography, I became fascinated by election dynamics, especially how Americans voted for president, periodically replacing worn-out regimes with grassroots realignments. I was an active youth for Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. Then in 1957, I began mapping the county-level voting for president in 1952 and 1956, looking especially at the Border, the Outer South, and the Midwest for the next upheaval. By 1960, I had made several maps of the county-by-county U.S. presidential returns—spectrum-colored from navy blue (most Republican) to red (most Democratic)—from Texas and Missouri east, as well as individual state maps. Kindred research explored the 1940s and even the 1930s. As patterns emerged, I delved further into local histories. It was an unusual immersion.

In late 1960, my college political science thesis explored the changed voting patterns visible in the just completed Kennedy-Nixon presidential race. After I finished law school in 1964, my New York GOP congressman offered me the job as his administrative assistant in Washington. By 1965, I saw hints of the exhaustion of the New Deal Democratic coalition, and further evidence came in the 1966 Republican midterm election gains. That November I started assembling my ten years’ worth of maps and charts into what became The Emerging Republican Majority. I found a publisher in the winter of 1967–68, and in June, 1968, Capitol Hill connections put me in touch with Nixon campaign manager John Mitchell, who enlisted me in July.

Elements of the book were, in a small way, a blue-print for the autumn campaign. In October, as the race tightened, some advisers urged concentration on states like New York, Pennsylvania and Michigan. My view, cemented by a special poll taken in Missouri, targeted a victory corridor running from the Carolinas through Kentucky and Tennessee west to Missouri and adjacent southern Illinois. Whatever the suasion, this focus prevailed. On a larger plane, I expected that victory in 1968 would begin another generation-long national political realignment.

The volume published in June, 1969 was not a blue-print, but rather my explanation of what I saw unfolding based on twelve years of intense research and observation. It contained no instructions. I realize better, almost a half century later, that few would expect a twenty-eight-year-old to have the requisite knowledge and thus found the blueprint description more plausible.

In the 1974–75 aftermath of Watergate, I shared widespread doubts that the Republican Party could transcend that setback, but it did. By the late 1980s, the policies and persona of George H. W. Bush created new strains. Then the breakdown of the coalition came in the election of 1992, when Bush drew only 37 per cent of the total vote, losing many former Nixon and Reagan voters to third-party contender Ross Perot, a maverick Republican with populist and economic nationalist streaks. Large numbers of Perot backers left for good. After 1992, GOP nominees drew smaller shares of the total presidential vote—41 per cent in 1996, 49 per cent in 2000, 51 per cent in 2004, 46 per cent in 2008 and 47 per cent in 2012—well below the earlier Nixon-Reagan peak of 59 per cent to 61 per cent.

In my book I had coined the term Sun Belt to describe a new conservative entity stretching from Florida across Texas to California that would be a mainstay of the new presidential majority. So it proved in the four victories of Californians Nixon and Reagan, but the two subsequent Bush presidents reflected a new Texas center of policymaking gravity that was harsher and more Darwinian in economics and more interventionist and war minded in foreign affairs. During the 1990s, the Sun Belt partly unraveled; California moved into a more liberal and Democratic orbit and Florida became a battleground.

In addition to unpopular economics and Middle Eastern wars, the Bush years also crystallized a new cultural vulnerability. As Republicans consolidated their hold in Dixie, Southern Baptists and smaller pentecostal and evangelical denominations gained intra-party clout, and both Bushes catered to them. By the end of the younger Bush’s second term, the Religious Right and other kindred elements were nominating office seekers whom Democrats could easily caricature as extreme. The Republican success of the 1970s in labeling and defeating Triple-A liberals—acid, amnesty and abortion—had come full circle.

But it is a mistake to dwell only on the changes in the Republican presidential electorate. The New Deal coalition that kept the Democrats in the White House most of the time between 1932 and 1968 has also undergone a massive transformation. By 2008, the presidential nominee of the party that had once stood for working-class America handily outscored his GOP rival in attracting contributions from the richest and most fashionable zip codes of metropolitan New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Four years later, Barack Obama—unbelievably for a Democrat—lost every county in West Virginia. In both 1994 and 2010, two years after electing Democrats Bill Clinton and then Obama for president, voters showed their unhappiness and distrust by sweeping Republicans into control of the House of Representatives as a counterforce.

This is why the exhaustion of the 1968–92 Republican coalition did not create a bigger Democratic opportunity. With only occasional interruptions, national polls since the 1990s have shown hostility toward Washington, disdain for Congress, economic disquiet and lopsided belief that the country is on the wrong track. If the U.S. political system still functions—new presidents can be elected and party majorities in Congress can be changed—the party system itself has become calcified and unresponsive. Perhaps, of course, it only awaits a great crisis.

Kevin Phillips

January, 2014

Preface to the 1970 Paperback Edition

Publication of The Emerging Republican Majority in July, 1969, triggered quite a hullabaloo. Over the next six months, critics and observers were to call it everything from baloney¹ to the most talked about book of the year² to the most important political book of the decade.³ Given this degree of controversy, it seems useful to set the record straight—to tell what the book is and is not, how it took shape and the part it played in 1968–70 events. For this reason, I have decided to write a new preface to replace the old one written just after the 1968 election.

First, the book’s genesis. Voting patterns—American history, geography, politics, economics, sociology and demography converging at the ballot box—are an old and favorite hobby of mine, a fascinating slice of Americana. When the results of the 1966 elections convinced me that the New Deal Democratic era was about to end in favor of an emerging Republican majority, I decided to turn a hobby into a book. A first version was complete in October, 1967, and by Christmas I had found a publisher.

But it was decided to postpone publication until after the 1968 presidential election results were in hand. I used the first eight months of 1968 to enlarge and rewrite the book. By Election Day, all the chapters were set up, awaiting only the actual 1968 statistics to ratify and confirm the book’s structure and trend projections. Happily, virtually all the data meshed with the trends I had projected, otherwise the logic and structure of the chapters and subchapters would have come unglued. By early January, 1969, the book was complete.

The book was not and is not a strategy—Northern, Southern or Western. It is a portrait of American presidential voting behavior from Civil War days to 1968. In the first (1967) draft, the 1968 upheaval was a projection of pre-1968 trends; this version tries to project 1960–68 and existing trends forward into the Seventies.

If it were a strategy, it would be phrased instructionally: the GOP should, ought to and so forth. But there is none of this. The book is a projection—and one with a high batting average to date. Read it as such.

My theory of U.S. presidential voting behavior and trend projection is this: American politics has flowed in quite clear cycles of ideology, population movement and regionalism, with 1968 seemingly a turning point like 1828, 1860, 1896 and 1932. Retrospectively, in each of these pivotal years one could have predicted the future bias and coalitional make-up of the new regime by projecting the trend which put it in power. Cyclical upheaval has a great inertia. Parties have never quickly doubled back and swum upstream against their tide. They have kept their shape and geography well into a new cycle. Thus my projection of the varying GOP presidential future in the South, Heartland, Pacific and Northeast.

While it is my theory that American presidential politics ebb and flow in rational (socio-ideological) cycles and regimes, and can thus be projected with a fair degree of accuracy, I do not extend these regimes to non-presidential races. State and congressional races do not necessarily (although they may) follow the presidential pattern. For example, Massachusetts did not support the presidential GOP in 1960, 1964 or 1968, yet in 1970, it had a Republican governor, U.S. senator and a number of congressmen. On the other hand, Mississippi, which did not support the presidential Democratic Party in 1960, 1964 or 1968, had a Democratic governor and a full Democratic set of U.S. senators and congressmen. This book is concerned only with presidential cycles and regimes: Except in a very corollary way, it does not deal with congressional, gubernatorial and local politics.

Next the book’s connection with the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign and with the ensuing Republican Administration: In June of 1968, I approached the Nixon campaign for a job premised on my voting behavioral research and expertise. I submitted some of the material from my book and was signed on in July, eventually becoming special assistant to Nixon campaign manager John N. Mitchell.

Statistics and analyses from the book were used in campaign memoranda, and as Roscoe Drummond noted in an October, 1968 newspaper column, the Nixon press office distributed excerpts from the book (short summaries of the cyclical theory of an emerging Republican majority).

After the 1968 election was over, I added its results to the appropriate chapters. I want to make clear that the completed manuscript (sent to the publisher in mid-January, 1969) was in no sense cleared or censored by the Nixon Administration. Galley proofs were made available only the usual number of weeks before publication.

The book does not represent—or purport to represent—the past or present strategy of the Nixon Administration. Critics who say it does ignore the fact that it makes no strategic or policy recommendations. If its statistics, analyses and projection suggest courses of action, they merely parallel the role of market research from which an advertising campaign can be blueprinted.

Now for the inhibitions under which I wrote the book. As I completed the final version in November, December and January 1968–1969, I knew that I would be in the new GOP Administration; and not unreasonably, I had been advised to keep away from policy matters and to make no policy recommendations. Nor did I feel free to criticize the Republican Party. So I wrote a clinical book, projecting trends and not moralizing over their occurrence.

Inasmuch as the book does project relatively low presidential Republicanism among Negroes and in the Northeast, I have been accused of writing off both segments. This is not true. I simply projected existing trends perhaps with more candor than is usual.

Now, as for policy. My own feeling, as a Northeasterner born and bred, is that no region of the country has a worse record—from the Federalist era to Herbert Hoover—of defending worn-out and institutionalized political credos. Today, the Northeast, its Eastern Establishment Republicans in the vanguard, is once again the final bastion of status quo liberalism. I hold no great brief for the politicians of the Liberal Establishment, but I very much oppose writing off the Northeast.

As a matter of fact, far from writing off the Northeast, I expect President Nixon to carry six or seven of its eleven states in 1972 because of heavy Middle American gains. Elsewhere in the nation, he should do even better, providing he is Middle American enough to largely head off Wallace.

The emerging Republican majority of the Nineteen-Seventies is centered in the South, the West and in the Middle American urban-suburban districts. Whatever limousine-liberalism says, this is not reactionary country. On the contrary, it has been the seat of every popular, progressive upheaval in American politics—Jefferson, Jackson, Bryant, Roosevelt. Today, the revolt against established political interest has to be conservative because the interests are liberal, and so I have called both the anti-establishment politics of South, West and Levittown and the emerging Republican majority conservative, even though in many ways they are unconservative.

The emerging Republican majority I hope for is in this tradition: another popular upheaval which over-throws the obsolescent liberal ideology and interests of today’s Establishment. Policies able to resurrect the vitality and commitment of Middle America—from sharecroppers and truckers to the alienated lower middle class—will do far more for the entire nation than the environmental manipulation, social boondoggling, community agitation and incendiary promises of the Nineteen-Sixties.

But this book is (I hope) just a clinically written social demography and political geography of the Republican majority which I believe to be emerging. I have supported and worked for such an emergence, but I am not without some dissenting thoughts. Although my own views—on the need for positive programs for the Seventies, on the future of the two parties, on the dangers that lie ahead—have been left out of The Emerging Republican Majority, they are subject matter for a new book.

Kevin P. Phillips

Washington, D.C.

January, 1970

¹ Senator Hugh Scott

² Washington Star

³ National Review

The Emerging Republican Majority

I

Introduction

Far from being the tenuous and unmeaningful victory suggested by critical observers, the election of Richard M. Nixon as President of the United States in November, 1968, bespoke the end of the New Deal Democratic hegemony and the beginning of a new era in American politics. To begin with, Nixon was elected by a Republican Party much changed from that deposed in 1932; and such party metamorphosis has historically brought a fresh political cycle in its wake. Secondly, the vastness of the tide (57 per cent) which overwhelmed Democratic liberalism—George Wallace’s support was clearly an even more vehement protest against the Democrats than was Nixon’s vote—represented an epochal shifting of national gears from the 61 per cent of the country’s ballots garnered in 1964 by Lyndon Johnson. This repudiation visited upon the Democratic Party for its ambitious social programming, and inability to handle the urban and Negro revolutions, was comparable in scope to that given conservative Republicanism in 1932 for its failure to cope with the economic crisis of the Depression. And ironically, the Democratic debacle of 1968 followed the Party’s most smashing victory—that of 1964—just as the 1932 toppling of the Grand Old Party succeeded the great landslide of 1928. A comparison of the two reversals is apt:

The changed makeup and outlook of the GOP reflects its switchover, during the 1932–68 span of the New Deal era, from orientation towards the establishmentarian Northeast—especially the Yankee and industrial bailiwicks of New England, upstate New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania—to representation of the rising insurgency of the South, the West, the New York City Irish and middle-class suburbia. At the same time, while the New Deal institutionalized into a nationally-dominant liberal Establishment, the Democratic power base shifted to the Northeast, historically the seat of America’s dominant economic, social, cultural and political elite. By 1964, the transition was reasonably obvious; whatever the strategic ineptitude of the Goldwater candidacy, it was not a geopolitical fluke. As Chart 2 shows, the Republican Party had been moving its reliance South and West since the beginning of the New Deal cycle in 1932. The 1968 election confirmed the general Southern and Western impetus of 1964—only the Deep South parochialism had been an aberration—and set a cyclical seal on the partisan re-alignment.

Chart 1. The Great Upheavals: 1928–32 and 1964–68

Maps 1–4 illustrate the regional tides at work and Chart 3 estimates the group voting currents of 1960–68. In 1968, only six states and the District of Columbia gave the Democratic presidential nominee a majority of the vote; seven other states produced Humphrey pluralities in the face of Nixon-Wallace majorities. In thirty-seven other states, Nixon-Wallace majorities divided in such a way as to award victory to either the Republican candidate, who carried thirty-two states, or Wallace, who carried five. Most of the Democratic states were Northeastern—Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland (as well as the District of Columbia)—or (West Virginia excluded) they were states—Michigan, Minnesota, Washington and Hawaii—which had been heavily settled or influenced by Yankees or Scandinavians. In light of its concentration in an area which had been the prime sociological core of post-Civil War Republicanism, 1968 Democratic strength was peculiarly ironic.

Chart 2. The Metamorphosis of the Republican Party’s Regional Support Base, 1932–68

    * The regional figures represent the GOP share of the Republican-Democratic-Dixiecrat presidential total.

  ** The regional figures represent the GOP share of the Republican-Democratic vote only. (The Wallace vote has been excluded.)

Map 1. The Election by States, 1968

Map 2. The Extent of Wallace Support, 1968 (Generalized Contours)

Map 3. The 1960–68 Shift in Democratic Party Presidential Support (Generalized Contours)

Map 4. The Top Twenty Democratic States. Ranked by Humphrey share of the total vote for President

Chart 3. Gallup Poll Presidential Voting Analysis, 1952–68

1960–68 Trends (Chart 3)

Men showed a strong anti-Democrat trend between 1960 and 1968; women showed considerably less change. Historically, men have spearheaded political upheaval while women have given greater backing to status quo politics (since 1964, the Democratic Party).

In the eight years, the Democrats lost heavily among white voters, but fashioned much increased support among non-whites. The new popular majority is white and conservative. Vocationally, the Democrats lost ground with almost every group, but their loss was greatest among farmers. On the plane of education, the Democrats scored a gain among the college-educated elite, but slipped badly among the country’s huge high-school-educated middle spectrum.

The relative age profiles of the two parties did not change much, although Wallace scored his greatest inroads among young people.

Between 1960 and 1968, Nixon lost a large bloc of Protestants—mostly Southerners, Borderers and other conservatives temporarily switching to Wallace. Nixon gained sharply among Catholics, many of whom are leaving the Democratic Party. These statistics indicate Nixon’s 1972 opportunity—acceleration of the Catholic GOP trend and recapture of the conservative Protestants who backed the Republicans in 1960 but bolted to Wallace in 1968.

The forces shaping this parochialism are clear enough; they explain why, even as 1968 saw the nation turning against the Democrats, a handful of the New England and above-mentioned states swam against the current and gave the Democrats a higher vote share than in 1960. First of all, no other part of the United States shares the historical penchant of the Northeast for supporting the politics and ideology of a hitherto nationally dominant, but fading, group of interests. The Jeffersonian, Jacksonian and New Deal upheavals all captured the White House against ballot opposition centered in the Northeast. And on top of growing national Democratic Party identification with Northeastern interests, another major fulcrum of 1968 upheaval was the erosion of Civil War political traditions which had been the source of American sectional politics and partisanship for a century. Because of loyalties formed in the crucible of slavery and civil war, Yankees and Scandinavians in New England, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and the Pacific Northwest were the driving force and numerical bulwark of a Republican Party they had principally created. But as a result of the social upheaval of the Nineteen-Sixties, these were the groups and states among whom and which the Democrats gained (or suffered only minimal losses) in 1968. In many of the same areas where the Civil War had ingrained the most intense Republicanism, Democratic identification with the Negro social and economic revolution precipitated that party’s best gains a century later.

On the other side of the coin, the conservative and Republican alliance of 1968 mobilized in areas with an insurgent record—the South, the West and the Irish sidewalks of New York (as well as the emerging tax-revolt centers of middle-class suburbia)—and a record of support for popular movements like those of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These voting streams were inclined to move away from, rather than towards, the emerging Negro-Establishment entente; and harkening back to the Civil War, the new conservatism was generally taking shape (there were exceptions, of course) in areas where Civil War feeling had been secessionist, divided or ambiguous, as in the South, Heartland, West, Border and German-Irish urban centers. Persistent ethnicultural cleavages were prompting a turnabout of partisanship.

But at this point it is necessary to lay down a few caveats. Granted that the Democrats were making their greatest strides among silk-stocking voters and Yankees, the two groups remained (diminishingly) Republican; and even though the Democrats were losing strength among Northern Catholics, the blue-collar Poles, Slavs, French-Canadians, Italians and Irish of industrial cities from Saco to Sault Ste. Marie (but excluding New York City) remained the bulwark of Northeastern Democratic hegemony. However much the trends of the Nineteen-Sixties foreshadowed the upcoming cycle, the raw statistics of group voting were a weakening link to the New Deal cycle. In the United States, political change is evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Back in 1960, Richard Nixon had run for President as the candidate of a Republican Party still at least partly controlled, as Henry Cabot Lodge’s vice-presidential nomination bore witness, by its traditional Yankee bastion. By 1968, however, things had changed. Not only had the civil rights revolution cut the South adrift from its Democratic moorings and drawn the Northeast towards the Democrats, but it had increased the Southern and Western bias of the GOP to a point—the 1964 Goldwater nomination—where the party had decided to break with its formative antecedents and make an ideological bid for the anti-civil rights South. Goldwater’s extraordinary Deep South success, together with the unprecedented party defeat in Yankee and silk-stocking areas, speeded re-alignment already on its way. By dint of the 1964 election, the Republican Party shed the dominion of its Yankee and Northeastern Establishment creators, while the Democrats, having linked themselves to the Negro socioeconomic revolution and to an increasingly liberal Northeastern Establishment shaped by the success of the New Deal, sank the foundations of their future into the Northeast.

As of 1968, the Democratic and liberal record was one of failure—in global diplomacy, Asian warfare, domestic economics, social and welfare policy, and law enforcement—and the Republicans, together with third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, rode a wave of popular desire for change. The GOP swept the Farm Belt and Rocky Mountains; more narrowly carried the Great Lakes, Pacific and Border states; split the South with George Wallace; and lost only the Northeast. With a united rather than Civil War-divided conservative power base, centered in the great interior Heartland and peripheral South, a new political alignment and cycle began.

Despite George Wallace’s grandiose dreams of achieving an ideologically compelling balance of power between the two major parties, he proved unable to reach beyond the electoral votes of the Deep South. More important, his popular support beyond Dixie followed contours of conservative Southern Democratic tradition (Delaware Bay to Nevada), William Jennings Bryan-era Democratic populism (the Plains and Rockies) or urban Catholic upheaval (cities where Negroes or other minority groups are taking over the Democratic Party). Where these trends were not present, Wallace showed negligible strength in either heavily unionized areas—Scranton, Fall River or Duluth—or among poverty-stricken whites (West Virginia). Some of Wallace’s support came from aroused conservative Republicans, but most of it represented Democratic voting streams quitting their party. Among major Democratic electoral groups, only those already in revolt backed Wallace. The Alabaman tapped rather than shaped a protest; his party represents an electorate in motion between major parties rather than a new, permanent entrant into the national presidential arena.

Presumably Wallace’s realization of this failure underlay his post-election comment—recognition of the GOP future was implicit—that he had swung the Republican Party to the right and simultaneously diverted enough votes to make Nixon’s victory possible. But whatever Wallace’s ideological influence, his vote diversions certainly did not help Richard Nixon. On the contrary, Wallace split the conservative electorate, siphoned off a flow of ballots that otherwise would have gone heavily for Nixon, and garnered many of his backers—Northern or Southern, blue-collar or white-collar—from the ranks of supporters of 1964 GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater.

Chart 4. The Inverse Relationship of Democratic Strength and Wallace Support, 1968*

* Humphrey and Wallace shares of the three-party vote.

** Wallace was not on the ballot in the District of Columbia.

As Chart 4 shows, Wallace’s strength proved to be negligible—and he diverted few votes—in the states which found the national Democratic Party most appealing. Of the Alabaman’s nine worst showings, six came in the nine best Humphrey states (including the District of Columbia, where Wallace was not even on the ballot). The best Wallace vote came in states where conservatism was powerfully emergent; states where Wallace lured unhappy Republicans or tapped a trend which otherwise would have aided the GOP. Even in liberal states like New York, the Wallace vote was drawn from a usually Republican—given a conservative nominee—electorate. Four of the five states backing Wallace had been among the six to back Barry Goldwater in 1964, and all across the nation, most Wallace supporters would have chosen Nixon in 1968 over Democratic nominee Hubert H. Humphrey. The probable inability of the Wallaceites to take the field in 1972, given the parochialism of their 1968 popular and electoral vote pattern and their vulnerability to a relatively conservative 1968–72 Republican administration, should add an important national bloc of popular votes and a key Deep Southern group of electoral votes to the barebones Republican triumph of 1968.

Despite his skimpy electoral vote, George Wallace had come tantalizingly close to holding the 1968 balance of power. Throughout election night, an apprehensive nation watched and listened to reports that perhaps neither candidate could command the clear electoral vote majority needed to win the presidency. What only a few weeks earlier had looked to be a Nixon landslide tightened into a close race, as once-dissident liberals rallied behind Humphrey and Democratic union leaders whipped their pro-Wallace rank and file back to the party line. If Humphrey had proved just a little stronger, the election might have been stalemated as the Wallace forces had hoped.

On the other hand, Wallace’s vote would probably have dipped much lower had Richard Nixon chosen to rally aberrant multitudes of 1964 Goldwater backers by sounding the anti-Great Society clarion which had so successfully served as a fulcrum of re-alignment in the 1966 off-year elections. But, reflecting his confidence and a desire to avoid divisiveness, the Republican candidate maintained a mild campaign stance. Nixon, however, cannot be too easily faulted for the course he successfully steered between the Scylla of losing too many moderates to Hubert Humphrey and the Charybdis of leaving too many conservatives in the camp of George Wallace. He won enough moderates to overcome the division in his conservative support base, even as he took a sufficiently conservative stance to minimize the Wallace vote and undermine the third party’s future. Under these circumstances, the vast significance of his victory lay in its occurrence and not in its magnitude. Observations that Nixon won no mandate were at odds with the verdict rendered on the Democratic administration by 57 per cent of the nation’s voters—an obvious inchoate Nixon constituency.

Little credence can be given to the allegation that the Republican failure to make large gains in Congress bespoke public confidence in national Democratic Party programs and policy; nor did these results indicate continuation of the New Deal cycle in the face of a mere fluke on the presidential level. The ideological reaction against Democratic liberalism had come in 1966, so that there were not many Northern constituencies left for the Republicans to gain in 1968. But much more important was the fact that Congress already had a conservative majority—Republicans from all corners of the country and traditional Democrats from the South and Border. All fourteen Southern and Border states—Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Missouri—cast a majority of their vote against the national Democratic Party’s presidential candidate but elected a vast preponderance of conservative Democrats at traditionalist odds with the ideological stance of the national party. Only by this anomaly of nomenclature, which cannot long survive the evolution of the national Democrats into the party of the Establishmentarian Northeast and Negro South, did the Great Society maintain the image of public support. The presidential election of 1968 marked a historic first occasion—the Negrophobe Deep South and modern Outer South simultaneously abandoned the Democratic Party. And before long, the conservative cycle thus begun ought to witness movement of congressional, state and local Southern Democrats into the ascending Republican Party.

Considerable historical and theoretical evidence supports the thesis that a liberal Democratic era has ended and that a new era of consolidationist Republicanism has begun. To begin with, the 1932–68 Democratic reign spanned thirty-six years and a social revolution. History indicates that this is the usual longevity of an American political cycle. For example, the modern American political system dates from the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, which precipitated a Democratic predominance lasting until Lincoln’s triumph in 1860. Contrary to general legend, the Civil War did not seat the Republicans firmly in the national saddle, however effectively it unseated the hitherto predominant Democrats. As a matter of fact, once the Southern states had returned to the Union, things settled into something of a stalemate. No president elected between 1876 and 1892 won a majority of the popular vote. Finally, in 1896, the Bryan-McKinley contest tarred the Democrats with the brush of agrarianism and revivalism, thus cementing Republican rule based on the populous, industrial Northeast and Great Lakes. Thereafter, except for the eight-year Wilson Administration, the GOP held national sway until the advent of the Great Depression and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. Actually, the coming of age of urban America had begun to swing the pendulum