The GOP is more unpopular, more insecure and more uncertain than at any point since the triumph of 1994. Why the GOP fell so far, so fast

The Grand Old Party just ain’t what it used to be.

It is more unpopular, more insecure and more uncertain than at any point since the euphoric triumph of 1994, when the GOP captured both houses of Congress and made political history.


It would be easy to chalk up the current doldrums to an unpopular president who waged an unpopular war — and Republicans surely wish it were that easy. Unfortunately for GOP leadership and the rank and file, the problems run much deeper and could prove more durable.

The GOP is a shell of what it was a decade ago. The party has allowed its infrastructure — think tanks, candidate training programs and activist groups — to atrophy. It lost its decisive fundraising edge. It has been slow to exploit technological advances. And it has struggled to carve out a post-Sept. 11 identity beyond an image of the party best equipped to fight terrorism.

That depressing litany is the general consensus of many of the Republican officials who were once on top: the governors, congressional leaders and big-time activists who ruled in the 1990s with self-confidence and swat. (On Monday, Politico’s Fred Barbash will explore what today’s leading GOP lights think it will take to turn things around in the years ahead.)

Republican can take some solace in the fluidity of modern politics. (Remember, it was only a few years ago that we “smart” political reporters were writing about the possibility of a GOP governing majority that might last for decades.)

The combination of an unsettled electorate, technology and a fast-changing world make it possible to turn things around in a hurry — as Democrats have proven over the past six years or so. They used a huge influx of money from big liberal donors to rebuild their think tanks, turn the Web into a fundraising gold mine and attack machine, and start new training centers for young party activists.

Crumbling Infrastructure

It was not long ago that Republicans were the machine to be admired. They were cranking out ideas, money and activists — all on the backs of hungry conservatives with fresh memories of life in the political no man’s land.

Republicans outthought and outhustled Democrats for much of the 10-year period that began in 1994 — or so it seemed. In retrospect, some Republicans say there were signs that the fire in the belly was starting to cool as early the winter of 1995, when they buckled in the government shutdown showdown with President Bill Clinton.

“They went eyeball to eyeball with Clinton and lost,” said Richard Viguerie, an influential conservative activist. That was the moment, he said, that the GOP started to lose its edge.

Of course, Republicans continued to roll up big policy wins — tax cuts and welfare reform, to name two — but a pattern emerged throughout the 1990s. GOP officials, reckoning with the realities of governing, compromised to get their way. They realized “you could use the levers of powers to secure your majority,” says Michael Franc, a former top GOP leadership aide and now a top official at the Heritage Foundation.

Each time important principles turned into watered-down policy, the conservative faithful grew more exasperated. And it was the party infrastructure that started to suffer.

Programs such as GOPAC (for candidates) and American Campaign Academy (for campaign managers and operatives) were neglected. These programs had once “created a cadre of hundreds of people who knew how to do campaigns,” says Joe Gaylord, a former top adviser to House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). “That stopped in the ’90s.”

Just as importantly, conservative activist groups weakened. The Christian Coalition, a major force in GOP politics in the early 1990s, splintered and eventually, for all practical purposes, faded away. The group spent approximately $6 million to pressure lawmakers in 1998; three years later, it was spending less than one-third that amount.

“It became increasingly difficult to activate the rank and file as they saw the Republicans becoming like their Democratic predecessors,” says Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. “I’m not the only one who got awfully tired when they went into negotiations. It was our issues that got bargained away.”

Many in the evangelical movement grew dispirited — and today this group is without a clear leader and without a clear organization for collectively harnessing its political muscle.

The National Rifle Association lost some of its firepower, too. Not long ago, the group could literally tilt close elections with its massive membership list and political action committee. But in recent years, Democrats in pro-gun areas have embraced the NRA and many pro-gun initiatives. Put bluntly, the NRA does not matter as much as it once did — and that hurts the GOP. In 2000, the group gave nearly $3 million to the party. It gave less than $1 million in 2004 and appears on a similar pace this time around.

The story is the same for many of the conservative think tanks and outside groups that towered a decade ago. They now seem to pump out fewer policy innovations, especially given that when Bush was elected, the GOP held all the real levers of power by controlling the presidency and Congress.

“You take a look at the first four years when the president had both the House [and the] Senate,” says former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge. “There were very few new ideas emerging that embraced historic Republican principles.”

This policy stagnation extended to the states, which were once the real laboratories for innovation, according to Ridge.

It will take time — and inspired leadership — to restore these groups or erect new ones. There are few signs this is taking place right now.

Fundraising Funk

It is hard to overstate how radically things have changed for Republicans when it comes to raising money. In their glory years, they were very good at using direct mail to raise small-dollar donations and even better at working with their rich corporate allies to scare up money for political activities both inside and outside the federally regulated system.

It was a given they would crush Democrats in fundraising for congressional races — and more than hold their own in presidential contests. They were the innovators, whether it was rewarding big donors with better access to party leaders or setting up programs to reward and offer incentives to their most prolific fundraisers.

From the 1994 election cycle through the 2002 cycle, Republican Party committees raised approximately $1.85 billion, compared with $1 billion raised by Democratic Party committees — an 85 percent advantage for the GOP.

But two things changed that have hurt the GOP badly in this fundraising arena. First, the low-dollar donors, mostly conservative activists, turned cool to the party leadership in Washington.

In the 2000 election cycle, Republican House candidates raised 16 percent of their campaign cash in donations of $200 or less, according to the Campaign Finance Institute. By 2006 that share had dropped to 8 percent. In the Senate, the decline was even steeper, with low-dollar donations going from a 41 percent share of campaign cash in 2000 to 15 percent in 2006.

The second factor can be blamed — at least in part — on John McCain. His campaign finance reform push resulted in the end of those big, unlimited soft money donations to the party.

At the time, it was assumed that money would simply be channeled through outside groups that are subjected to less disclosure. That never really materialized because many corporate donors are risk averse.

Democrats, it turned out, were much more willing to fund these outside groups — and in 2004 easily outspent the GOP. According to the tracking service now known as CQ Money Line, outside groups aligned with Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry outspent those aligned with President Bush by $266 million to $144 million.

Money isn’t everything in politics — but it sure does help.

Technology Glitches

One of the biggest reasons that it may take years for Republicans to steady their ship is that they have fallen way behind Democrats when it comes to exploiting new technologies to raise cash, especially online.

It is the Democrats who now are the innovators in this area. First Howard Dean and now Barack Obama have built massive programs for raising money, usually in small chunks, online. They have bigger e-mail lists and many times more donors familiar with sending money over the Web. They also have generally shown more sophistication in their online approach.

ActBlue, a Web hub for Democratic fundraising, has directed more than $60 million to candidates since 2004. Republicans don’t even have an equivalent.

The technology gap transcends fundraising, however. Democrats, in general, are embracing the Web more eagerly as a way to communicate — and gather — information. Daily Kos, a popular stop for Democratic officials and activists, has registered more than 1 billion page views in six years. Redstate.com, a similar kind of Web community for Republicans, has recorded fewer than 50 million.

Republicans often seem kind of retro. Talk radio remains a more powerful communications device for conservatives, with Rush Limbaugh maintaining a weekly audience of as many as 20 million. But the talk radio audience has slowed in growth over the past 15 years, and no one thinks it will be the dominant medium of the future.

The Sept. 11 Deficit

It wasn’t long ago that the conventional wisdom was that tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, represented a golden political opportunity for Republicans to lock in a durable governing majority. The thinking seemed smart at the time: The GOP, with its tough-guy image on national security, would capitalize on pervasive voter fear to pummel soft-on-security Democrats.

The 2002 congressional elections seemed to validate this theory. Republicans campaigned on security — and picked up seats in the process. They did it again in 2004 — and Bush won.

But leading Republicans said that the power of the anti-terrorism message lulled the idea-generators of the party to sleep. “After that had run its course, the gas tank was empty,” says Gaylord.

Lost in the hoopla over terrorism in war was the GOP’s unmistakable — and now, many in the party say misguided — march toward big-government conservatism.

The terrorist attacks happened, “and all the attention moved to the federal level,” says former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating. “It became much more of a Washington-knows-best environment.”

Republicans created a new federal department and a new entitlement program, and they drove up the federal deficit. The spending spree blurred their long-term edge with voters in holding down spending and has made it virtually impossible for them to advocate big tax cuts now because of the huge deficit.

This might not have mattered if the Iraq war were a success. But it has not been, especially when viewed as a political proposition.

Voters are opposed to the war. And the mismanagement of the initial invasion, reconstruction and the political process in Baghdad has eroded the GOP’s advantage on broader national security matters.

Polls show that voters still trust the GOP more to fight terrorism. But there is no doubt that the execution of the post-Sept. 11 strategy has raised serious doubts about GOP competence. The response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 didn’t help much either. It takes time to change perceptions like these.

Scandalous Hubris

It’s also hard to rebuild a brand when your pitchmen are wearing stripes.

Sure, most Republican scandals have not resulted in jail time. But there has been an astonishingly large number of humiliating sex, money and influence sagas over the past few years.

Sen. Larry Craig allegedly flirting in the men’s room; Sen. Ted Stevens allegedly hiding $250,000 in gifts from an oil company; Sen. David Vitter’s name ending up on a hooker’s phone list; former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham sitting on a yacht paid for with bribe money; former Rep. Bob Ney serving time in prison.

It’s enough to make any Republican blush. Or leave the party. The nonpartisan Pew Research Center has reported a big drop in the number of people who consider themselves Republicans. In 2002, the country was split evenly, based on Pew data. Five years later, Democrats held a 15-point edge.

In 2006, this disparity cost the GOP more than voters. Republicans lost 30 House seats, many in districts in which ethics and scandal were top issues. They suffered down-ballot losses, too.

This might prove to be the easiest problem of all to fix — most of the obvious bad apples have fallen.

Editor's Note: The Center for Responsive Politics provided the financial data for this story, unless otherwise attributed.