The Republican Party
What does the Republican Party stand for?
The three main pillars of the Republican Party is, it's a party of national security, so this goes in terms of more of an aggressive United States interest stance in terms of foreign policy but also you could see this in it's policy on immigration, more being for border enforcement, that sort of thing. Another pillar of the Republican Party is the free market. People call this the party of big business however I think it's more accurate to term it the party of the free market, less government intrusion into their free market. Of course that means that big business likes that and they tend to have more winners in that situation but it is a party of less government intrusion into the free market. And it's the party of social conservatism or one aspect of that is traditional values. Those tend to be the three main pillars of the Republican Party.
How did the Republican Party start?
The Republican Party started in 1854, as a reaction to the Democratic Party becoming like a slave state party. It was started, in a large sense, by the Abolitionists who, as western states started to come into the Union, didn't want those states coming in as slave states. The Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed some of the western states to come in as slave states, and the Republican Party started in opposition to that. It started in 1854. Its first state-wide convention was in Michigan. It really came into its own in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln, who was the first Republican President. That is why the Republican Party called itself the Party of Lincoln.
How is the Republican Party changing?
The National Conservative Coalition that Regan really laid the ground work for at Gold water came into power in 1994 with Newt Gingrich and The Republican Revolution and they had the House and the Senate but then when George Bush came in as a Social Conservative also he brought in the idea of compassionate conservatism. So his critics on the right deride as Gritz called big government conservatism, which means we're going to use the government just like the Democrats did to push a conservative agenda. And that has actually caused some tension within the Republican Party that has some potential to cause the Party to change. Now again we're kind of at a turning point minor or major we won't know until history tells us in the Republican Party as to how much that coalition can keep itself together and the social conservative versus the more business orientated and libertarian aspects of the Republican Party. And right now you see that different candidates for the Republican nomination kind of take on different aspects of the Republican Party but no one embodies it the same way that Ronald Regan did. And so the party is at kind of that turning point either that coalition is going to start to fracture and a new coalition is going to have form later on or we'll see if that coalition can continue to hold on.
Who votes for the Republican Party?
Obviously, one of it's biggest strengths, its strongest constituency are white evangelicals. Broadening that out a little bit, we find that the more religious you are, the more likely you are to vote Republican. The less you go to church, the less religious you are, the more likely you are to vote for Democrats. And so that religious coalition, be that Catholics, even Orthodox Jews, Evangelicals, they tend to vote more for the Republican Party, and that's been a large part of its coalition. Also, obviously southern whites, the South, and really kind of rural whites. Working class whites tend to be part of that coalition, even though they tend to be in unions, they also tend to vote for that social conservativism. And then with that, you've got the Libertarians, who have their own thing of more small government, and the Wall Street, or the business crowd. And obviously, some of those aspects are in tension with each other. But those tend to be the people who we can clearly identify with tending to vote for the Republican Party.
What are the strongest Republican states?
Obviously the South and the Midwest and kind of the Southwest to a certain extent, that's the big Republican block. Texas, Utah voted George Bush in 2004 like seventy something percent. And then the rest of the south is there too, Mississippi, all those places. And then as you start going North the support starts to wane. But also in the Midwest, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska that whole sort of thing, that book came out, "What's The Matter With Kansas?" That's all about Kansas being such a staunch Republican state. So that would tend to be, kind of the middle of the country tends to be the Republican stronghold.
