The 2012 Nomination and the Future of the Republican Party

The 2012 Nomination and the Future of the Republican Party
Author: William J. Miller
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2013-08-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0739175939

The 2012 Republican nomination process went on longer than most pundits predicted early on. While Mitt Romney began the season as the prohibitive favorite, he was tested repeatedly by what was seemingly the Republican flavor of the week (including Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum). The sheer number of candidates who were viewed as legitimate contenders demonstrate the fundamental concern facing Republicans moving forward: a fractured party. The pro-business, Tea Party, and evangelical Christian wings disagreed in 2010 on who would provide the best alternative to Democratic President Barack Obama and as a result created a crippling nomination period. By the time Romney was able to claim victory, he was severely wounded after countless attacks from his fellow Republicans. To this internal discontent, we can also add the changing national demographics that could lead to electoral problems for Republicans in their own right. Consider that Mitt Romney did better with older, white male voters than John McCain had. Unfortunately, the share of the national vote for this demographic decreased from 2008 to 2012. As Rand Paul stated recently, the time has come for Republicans to reach out to individuals who do not fit the stereotyped Republican image if they have any hope of being successful. In this volume, we assess how the 2012 GOP nomination cycle is indicative of just how the Republican Party has become, in the words of pundit Cuck Warren, a “Mad Men Party in a Modern Family World.”

The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism

The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
Author: Theda Skocpol
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190633662

In this penetrating new study, Skocpol of Harvard University, one of today's leading political scientists, and co-author Williamson go beyond the inevitable photos of protesters in tricorn hats and knee breeches to provide a nuanced portrait of the Tea Party. What they find is sometimes surprising.

The Republican Resistance

The Republican Resistance
Author: Andrew L. Pieper
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2020-10-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 179360746X

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in November 2016 was a political earthquake, one supporters and detractors alike agree has changed the course of history. The policy implications have been stark and will continue well beyond his presidency. The political implications have been perhaps even more drastic—for both political parties. Trump has shaken the 40-year-old coalition of traditional conservatives, orthodox religious voters, and free-market libertarians that has long-composed the Republican Party. The Republican Resistance: #NeverTrump Conservatives and the Future of the GOP explores the members of that coalition, especially traditional, establishment-oriented Republicans and conservative intellectuals who opposed his candidacy, who generally still oppose his presidency, and who represent the elite-in-waiting that believes it will have to rebuild the GOP when the Trump coalition implodes. In the end, The Republican Resistance argues that the Trump presidency and the #NeverTrump countermovement reflect key features of modern American politics which both major political parties must contend: the rise of a populist insurgency intent on overtaking the parties from within and challenges of embracing demographic and structural realities on the one hand while catering to a political base often built to oppose those trends on the other.

Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality

Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality
Author: Jacob S. Hacker
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2020-07-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1631496859

A New York Times Editors’ Choice An “essential” (Jane Mayer) account of the dangerous marriage of plutocratic economic priorities and right-wing populist appeals — and how it threatens the pillars of American democracy. In Let Them Eat Tweets, best-selling political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that despite the rhetoric of Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, and other right-wing “populists,” the Republican Party came to serve its plutocratic masters to a degree without precedent in modern global history. To maintain power while serving the 0.1 percent, the GOP has relied on increasingly incendiary racial and cultural appeals to its almost entirely white base. Calling this dangerous hybrid “plutocratic populism,” Hacker and Pierson show how, over the last forty years, reactionary plutocrats and right-wing populists have become the two faces of a party that now actively undermines democracy to achieve its goals against the will of the majority of Americans. Based on decades of research and featuring a new epilogue about the intensification of GOP radicalism after the 2020 election, Let Them Eat Tweets authoritatively explains the doom loop of tax cutting and fearmongering that defines the Republican Party—and reveals how the rest of us can fight back.

Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?

Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?
Author: Thomas E Patterson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2020-01-24
Genre:
ISBN: 9781658728638

Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself? explores five traps that the Republican Party has set for itself and endanger its future. The traps vary in lethality but, together, they could cripple the party for a generation or more. One trap is its steady movement to the right, which has distanced the party from the moderate voters who hold the balance of power in a two-party system. A second trap is demographic change. Younger adults and minorities vote heavily Democratic, and their numbers increase with each passing election. The older white voters that are the GOP's base of support are shrinking in number. Within two decades, based on demographic change alone, the GOP faces the prospect of being a second-rate party. Right-wing media are the Republicans' third trap. A powerful force within the party, they have tied the GOP to policy positions and versions of reality that are blunting its ability to govern and impeding its efforts to attract new sources of support. A fourth trap is the large tax cuts that the GOP has three times handed to the wealthy. The rich have reaped a windfall but at a high cost to the GOP. It has soiled its image as the party of the middle class and created a split between its working-class supporters and its marketplace conservatives. The fifth trap is the GOP's disregard for democratic norms and institutions, including its effort through voter ID laws to suppress the vote of minorities and lower-income Americans. In the process, it has made lasting enemies and created instruments of power that can be used against it. That Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election says more about the Republican Party than it does about Trump. In the whole of American history, there is only one major party - today's GOP - that would have nominated a Trump-like candidate for president. And he has deepened each of the Republican Party's traps. If the GOP were to become a second-rate party, Trump will have accelerated its downfall rather than being the cause of it. Before he came on the scene, the GOP was already a conservative party in name only. It had become a reactionary party out of step with what America is becoming. Republicans have traded the party's future for yesterday's America.The GOP needs to restore its conservative heritage if it is to remain a competitive party. Our democracy requires a healthy and competitive two-party system and would not benefit from a greatly diminished Republican Party, nor can it flourish from the reactionary course that the GOP has been pursuing.

The Emerging Democratic Majority

The Emerging Democratic Majority
Author: John B. Judis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2004-02-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0743254783

ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR AND A WINNER OF THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY'S ANNUAL POLITICAL BOOK AWARD Political experts John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira convincingly use hard data -- demographic, geographic, economic, and political -- to forecast the dawn of a new progressive era. In the 1960s, Kevin Phillips, battling conventional wisdom, correctly foretold the dawn of a new conservative era. His book, The Emerging Republican Majority, became an indispensable guide for all those attempting to understand political change through the 1970s and 1980s. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the country in Republican hands, The Emerging Democratic Majority is the indispensable guide to this era. In five well-researched chapters and a new afterword covering the 2002 elections, Judis and Teixeira show how the most dynamic and fastest-growing areas of the country are cultivating a new wave of Democratic voters who embrace what the authors call "progressive centrism" and take umbrage at Republican demands to privatize social security, ban abortion, and cut back environmental regulations. As the GOP continues to be dominated by neoconservatives, the religious right, and corporate influence, this is an essential volume for all those discontented with their narrow agenda -- and a clarion call for a new political order.

It Was All a Lie

It Was All a Lie
Author: Stuart Stevens
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0593080971

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the most successful Republican political operative of his generation, a searing, unflinching, and deeply personal exposé of how his party became what it is today “A blistering tell-all history. In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses [that] the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies." —The New York Times Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass. This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else. Stevens shows how Trump is in fact the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Stevens shows how racism has always lurked in the modern GOP's DNA, from Goldwater's opposition to desegregation to Ronald Reagan's welfare queens and states' rights rhetoric. He gives an insider's account of the rank hypocrisy of the party's claims to embody "family values," and shows how the party's vaunted commitment to fiscal responsibility has been a charade since the 1980s. When a party stands for nothing, he argues, it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room.

The Wilderness

The Wilderness
Author: McKay Coppins
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2015-12-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0316327468

The explosive story of the Republican Party's intensely dramatic and fractious efforts to find its way back to unity and national dominance. After the 2012 election, the GOP was in the wilderness. Lost and in disarray. And doggedly determined to do whatever it took to get back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. McKay Coppins has had unparalleled access to Republican presidential candidates, power brokers, lawmakers, and Tea Party leaders. Based on more than 300 interviews, The Wilderness is the book that opens up the party like never before: the deep passions, larger-than-life personalities, and dagger-sharp power plays behind the scenes. In wildly colorful scenes, this exclusive look into the Republican Party at a pivotal moment in its history follows a cast of its rising stars, establishment figures, and loudmouthed insurgents -- Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Bobby Jindal, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Donald Trump, Scott Walker, and dozens of others -- as they battle over the future of the party and its path to the presidency.

White Backlash

White Backlash
Author: Marisa Abrajano
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2017-02-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691176191

White Backlash provides an authoritative assessment of how immigration is reshaping the politics of the nation. Using an array of data and analysis, Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal show that fears about immigration fundamentally influence white Americans' core political identities, policy preferences, and electoral choices, and that these concerns are at the heart of a large-scale defection of whites from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Abrajano and Hajnal demonstrate that this political backlash has disquieting implications for the future of race relations in America. White Americans' concerns about Latinos and immigration have led to support for policies that are less generous and more punitive and that conflict with the preferences of much of the immigrant population. America's growing racial and ethnic diversity is leading to a greater racial divide in politics. As whites move to the right of the political spectrum, racial and ethnic minorities generally support the left. Racial divisions in partisanship and voting, as the authors indicate, now outweigh divisions by class, age, gender, and other demographic measures. White Backlash raises critical questions and concerns about how political beliefs and future elections will change the fate of America's immigrants and minorities, and their relationship with the rest of the nation.