Shift of Power May Steer the GOP in Wrong Direction

WASHINGTON —  From his post on the front line of the drive to oust President Clinton, Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) may have been more profound than he realized last week when he summed up the GOP’s divisions over impeachment this way: “It’s the Civil War all over again.”

In fact, the fierce debate is crystallizing a shift in the GOP’s center of gravity--one that inverts the political realignment that created the party just before the Civil War, almost 145 years ago.

In the 1850s, a shift toward the South in the Democratic Party’s center of power eventually undermined its ability to compete in the North and allowed the new Republican Party to control the levers of government for most of the next 50 years. Today, Republicans face much the reverse: a shift in the party’s core to the South, and to a lesser extent the Mountain West, that is creating systematic political problems for Republicans from more moderate regions, particularly the Northeast, portions of the Midwest and the Pacific Coast.

In the battle over impeachment, these interwoven geographic and ideological tensions inside the GOP are reaching a crescendo. While some moderate Republicans from regions where Clinton is popular demand a vote on censure as an alternative to impeachment, they lack the numbers and influence to force the party’s dominant conservative wing to provide that option. Yet, if there is a voter backlash against impeachment, it is the Republicans from these moderate regions--and not the conservative South or Mountain West--who will likely suffer the most politically.

“It is a perfect paradigm of the moderates’ problem,” says Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at UC San Diego. “It is a lose-lose situation for them.”

The historical irony is that this shift of power in the GOP reverses the process that led to the party’s formation in the 1850s.

In the years before the Civil War, the dominant parties in U.S. politics were the Democrats and the Whigs. Two factors allowed the Republicans to emerge. One was the collapse of the Whigs, who dissolved after 1852 in the wake of irreconcilable differences between their Northern and Southern wings over slavery. The other was the destabilizing of the Democratic Party by forces that look very much like the pressures confronting the GOP today.

For much of the period before the Civil War, the Democrats were the only national institution with roughly equal strength in the North and South. But that equilibrium was fatally disrupted in 1854 when Southern Democrats, with a few Northern allies, pushed through a bill that eased the expansion of slavery into the territories: the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

The backlash against that bill led to huge losses for congressional Democrats in the North, and shifted the balance of power in the party toward the South. As David M. Potter writes in his classic history of the period, “The Impending Crisis,” Southern Democrats proceeded to push the party to endorse more pro-slavery measures that, “in a vicious circle,” further undermined support in the North for Democrats.

That cycle allowed the new Republican Party, which was formed in the backlash against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to rapidly emerge as the dominant party in the North--and indeed the nation until early in the 20th century.

GOP Feels Weight of Political Strain

In contemporary times, a similar process undermined the position of Democrats in the South, who found it increasingly difficult to survive after the 1960s, when (mostly Northern) liberals controlling their party pushed policies that constantly forced the Southerners to choose between deserting their party in Congress and alienating their voters at home. Now the same kind of geographical imbalance is straining the GOP.

The moderates’ position in the GOP has eroded since the 1960s as the party’s political strength has migrated toward the more conservative South and Mountain West. Once the cornerstone of the Democratic majority, the South today provides the largest single bloc of Republican House members (82 out of 228).

Even more important, the 27-seat advantage Republicans hold in the South after last month’s election, supplemented by the party’s 14-seat advantage in the Mountain States, provides the GOP’s margin of majority in the House. In the rest of the country, the Democrats hold a 29-seat advantage.

As power within the GOP has moved South and West, the party’s program has moved to the right on issues such as gun control, abortion and the role of the federal government in education. Since the 1994 congressional takeover solidified the GOP’s identification with that agenda, the party has slowly lost ground in more moderate regions.

Strengh of South, Mountain West Grows

Earl Black, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston, points out that after the 1994 election, Republicans held a majority of House seats from both the South and the rest of the country for the first time since Reconstruction. But the two elections since then have seen them steadily lose ground outside the South. “Their current House majority is unsustainable unless they can reverse that trend,” says Black.

The paradox is that those very losses in moderate regions have increased the relative strength of the South and Mountain West inside the GOP caucus--and reduced the moderates’ ability to steer the party away from policies that further alienate their voters. That’s exactly what happened to Northern Democrats in the 1850s and Southern Democrats after the 1960s.

That process is dramatically evident again on impeachment. While there is support for impeachment among GOP officials from all regions, resistance to it is confined almost entirely to those from the Pacific Coast (where California Gov. Pete Wilson has warned against it), parts of the Midwest and especially the Northeast.

Both of the leading congressional Republican opponents of impeachment come from the Northeast: Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut and Peter T. King of New York. All three of New York state’s leading Republicans have now warned against impeachment: New York Gov. George Pataki, New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and outgoing Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato.

Their skepticism reflects a stark political reality. In 1996, Clinton carried each of the 13 New York congressional districts represented by Republicans; indeed, Clinton carried all but two of the 24 congressional districts held by Republicans throughout the Northeast.

Much like Ronald Reagan’s success in carrying Southern congressional districts held by Democrats in the 1980s presaged the eventual Republican capture of those seats in the 1990s, Clinton’s success could mean future problems for the GOP in these Northeastern seats, especially as the party’s face and priorities are increasingly defined by Southern conservatives.

The question now is how much, if at all, a vote to impeach Clinton could increase that danger. Like most GOP strategists around the country, New York consultant Kieran Mahoney believes that even anti-impeachment voters will not specifically punish Republicans in 2000 for supporting removal of the president--a view sharply disputed by Democrats.

But Mahoney, an advisor to both D’Amato and Pataki, still worries that the impeachment effort could damage the party’s overall image. “The symbolism is of a party driven to use the federal government to impose a moral standard on America. If we focus on issues of morality, the Republican Party is going to wind up being a minority party.”

Impeachment Drive Hurting Republicans

In fact, some evidence indicates that the impeachment drive is already exacerbating the GOP’s problems in the Northeast.

In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll last week, just 33% of Americans expressed a favorable view of the party, while 39% said they were unfavorable--the worst showing for the Republicans since just before President Bush’s reelection defeat in 1992. In the Northeast, the poll found the GOP in a far more ominous position, with just 28% expressing a favorable view and 47% an unfavorable one.

“This is a bigger defining issue than some people understand,” argues former GOP Rep. Steve Gunderson, executive director of the Republican Main Street Alliance, a moderate group centered in the Northeast, West Coast and upper Midwest. “Just like the Vietnam War, just like Watergate, I think impeachment will become a defining issue for political allegiance.”