Although Buchanan doesn’t mention it here (due to space constraints), no one is more than aware than he (and Paul Gottfried) is that the Democrats have a built-in advantage in being the party that guarantees ever-expanding entitlements, as opposed to the Republicans, who are supposedly the party of limited government.
Last Hurrah of Nixon's “New Majority”?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
August 27, 2012, at 9:40 p.m.
VDARE
Looking back all the way to America's Civil War, there have been three dominant presidential coalitions.
The first was Abraham Lincoln's. With his war to restore the Union and his martyrdom, Lincoln inaugurated an era of Republican dominance that lasted more than seven decades and saw only two Democratic presidents: Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson.
The second coalition was FDR's, where he and his vice president Harry Truman won five consecutive presidential elections. Only Gen. Eisenhower could break that streak.
The third was Richard Nixon's New Majority, cobbled together after his narrow 1968 victory, where he annexed the Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Christian conservatives of FDR's coalition to win 49 states in 1972. Ronald Reagan would follow up with 44- and 49-state landslides and see his vice president win 40 states in 1988.
That New Majority is now history. In the five elections since 1992, Republicans have won the popular vote once—in 2004. And while Mitt Romney is slightly ahead in polls today, reaching 270 electoral votes will be no easy task. The electoral map is becoming problematic….
[Read the whole thing here.]
I've been telling people that Romney could win the popular vote by 3-4 points and lose the election in the electoral college.
ReplyDeleteDavid In TN