There’s an amusing front-page story in Sunday’s Washington Post, by Michael Shear and David Broder. The headline and first two sentences say it all. The headline: “Splintered GOP Seeks Unifying Presence; Dispirited Party’s Harmony Elusive.” The lede: “For three decades, the Republican presidential nominating contest has served to unify the national party’s coalition of social, economic, and foreign policy conservatives in advance of a general election fight with Democrats. This year, it is ripping that coalition apart.” Perhaps this year’s contest is less harmonious than others in the last three decades (though does anyone remember Pat Buchanan wounding George H. W. Bush in 1992, or the bitterness of Bush-McCain in 2000?). Perhaps Republicans today are more dispirited than usual (though does anyone remember Bush trailing Dukakis by 17 points in 1988?). But notice the first words of the article: “For three decades…” That would bring us back to…1980. That year featured a truly divisive primary fight, with one of the candidates, John Anderson, leaving the party to run as an independent, Bush attacking Reagan’s “voodoo economics”, desperate attempts to save the party with a proposed Reagan-Ford ticket at the Detroit convention, etc. But gee–didn’t Republicans win that election, defeating an incumbent Democratic president for the first time in a century? Is there in fact any correlation between wide-open and vigorously contested primaries, and general election outcomes? And how many similar articles lamenting the GOP’s dire fate did the Post publish in 1979 and 1980?
