Will Trump trigger a lasting GOP fracture?
This week’s cascade of Republican defections from Donald Trump has plunged the GOP into the deepest general-election divide over its presidential nominee in more than 50 years.
The apex of modern GOP general-election conflict came in 1964 when Barry Goldwater, representing an emerging Sun Beltand suburbia-based conservative movement, captured the nomination over resistance from the party’s previously dominant Eastern establishment. But the Republican contortions over Trump are surpassing even the fratricide over Goldwater. The dissent crested this week with a letter from 50 GOP former national security officials denouncing him; Sen. Susan Collins of Maine’s declaration that she would not support him; and Wednesday’s launch of a committee of GOP luminaries, including three former Cabinet officers and six current or former House members, who have endorsed Hillary Clinton.
Now the question facing Republicans is whether the fractures over their blustery nominee will trigger a lasting power shift in the party — just as the divides over Goldwater did, despite his resounding loss to Lyndon Johnson.
From 1940 through 1960, the GOP’s establishment — globalist in foreign affairs, moderate on domestic issues, and centered in Wall Street and the Fortune 500 — reliably picked the nominee. But when Goldwater emerged, championing a more confrontational conservatism rooted in the South and Southwest, that establishment proved ineffective at stopping him, just like today’s party leaders who are dubious of Trump.
The historian Geoffrey Kabaservice, the author of “Rule and Ruin,” a history of moderate Republicans, says the GOP center didn’t feel true urgency about stopping Goldwater until he voted to oppose the landmark Civil Rights Act in June 1964. Like Trump’s critics today, Goldwater’s skeptics worried he was dangerously redefining the GOP as a party of racial backlash. “In a lot of ways it was a fight against Goldwater’s Southern strategy,” Kabaservice said. Once Goldwater was nominated, elected Republicans undertook gyrations Sens. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell would recognize today. Yet very few formally broke from the nominee — almost all who did were in the Northeast. Despite private doubts, former President Dwight Eisenhower, expressed his “full support for the Republican national ticket.” Richard Nixon, the once and future nominee, actively campaigned for Goldwater.
Trump is already facing more defections among elected Republicans than Goldwater did: multiple House members, senators from six states, and at least four governors are withholding their support. And, compared to Goldwater’s relations with Eisenhower, Nixon, and Thomas Dewey, Trump is much more estranged from most other recent GOP presidential nominees. That separation includes open opposition from Mitt Romney, pointed silence from George Bush elder and younger. and chilly detente with John McCain.
Another contrast is the concentrated opposition to Trump from the GOP’s national-security leadership. Several former Eisenhower Cabinet officials endorsed Johnson in 1964, but they came primarily from domestic posts. This week’s anti-Trump letter from former GOP national-security officials declared he “lacks the character, values and experience to be president” — a much sharper attack than any defecting group leveled against Goldwater.
In 1964, the GOP’s deep fissures contributed to Johnson’s crushing victory. But ultimately the moderates who resisted Goldwater lost control of the party to the Sun Belt conservatives who elevated him. Ronald Reagan, softening some key elements, followed a Goldwater-like ideological and geographic path to victory 16 years later — but at the price of defining the GOP in ways that eventually alienated the Northeastern and West Coast states most skeptical of that agenda. Goldwater’s courtship of white Dixie conservatives, later reinforced by Nixon and Reagan, also lastingly alienated African Americans.
The story is similar for the modern Democratic nominee who most divided his party: George McGovern in 1972. McGovern prefigured a culturally liberal Democratic coalition that would mobilize young people, minorities and white professionals — the coalition that, decades later, twice elected President Obama. But the widespread defections McGovern faced in his landslide defeat by Nixon — when the AFL-CIO refused to endorse him and former Texas Gov. John Connally led a robust Democrats for Nixon organization — also foreshadowed his party’s retreat among the white workingclass and in the South.
The GOP’s Trump divide could herald another reconfiguration. Like Goldwater and McGovern, Trump represents a breakthrough victory for a rising party faction, in his case working-class whites drawn to his racially barbed nationalism. And like those predecessors, Trump could also precipitate historic losses among voters his party had previously relied upon (college-educated whites), or hoped to add (Latinos and other minorities). If Goldwater and McGovern are any guide, the aftershocks of Trump’s insurrection will rattle and reshape the GOP long after November — win or lose.