Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party: Responses to Realignment

The results of the 1980 elections encouraged high hopes among Republicans that their party’s long period of minority status was at last reaching a close. This minority status dated back to the Great Depression and the New Deal; on the campaign trail Ronald Reagan invoked positive recollections of Franklin D. Roosevelt, in part to develop the theme that his goal was to overturn finally the Democratic coalition that first emerged under Roosevelt and then to replace it with a similarly durable Republican alternative—to achieve an electoral realignment in his party’s favor. 1 During the many decades since the party’s Depression-era decline, Democratic shortcomings had sometimes helped Republicans to achieve electoral success, notably for the presidency. But data on party identification showed that consistently more Americans saw themselves as Democratic rather than Republican sup-porters, and Republicans only secured control of Congress for two years after the 1946 elections and for another two years after the 1952 elections. It was this lengthy record of electoral failure that Republicans hoped to transcend. The belief in the possibility of a realignment helped to inform the political ideas and initiatives of Republicans during the Reagan era. When Reagan made a campaign appearance at Ohio State University in 1984, a sign in the crowd captured the mood of the moment. “You are witnessing the great realignment,” it read. 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.