chAPTeR seven • InTeResT GRouPs AnD PolITIcAl PARTIes 161
more success than the Democrats. Until the 1990s, Congress remained Democratic, but
official party labels can be misleading. Some of the Democrats were southern conserva-
tives who normally voted with the Republicans on issues. As these conservative Democrats
retired, they were largely replaced by Republicans. In 1994, Republicans were able to take
control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in many years.Red state, Blue state. Nothing demonstrated the nation’s close political divisions more
clearly than the 2000 presidential elections. Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore
won the popular vote, but lost the Electoral College by a narrow margin to Republican
George W. Bush. The closeness of the vote in the Electoral College led the press to repeat-
edly publish maps showing state-by-state results. Commentators discussed at length the
supposed differences between the Republican “red states” and the Democratic “blue
states.”
An interesting characteristic of the red state–blue state division is that it is an almost
exact reversal of the results of the presidential elections of 1896, which established the
Republican ascendancy that lasted until the Great Depression. Except for the state of
Washington, every state that supported Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896 sup-
ported Republican George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. This reversal parallels the trans-
formation of the Democrats from an anti–civil rights to a pro–civil rights party and from
a party that supported limited government to a party that favors positive government
action.The Parties Today
Not only was the presidential election of 2000 very close, but the partisan balance in the
U.S. Congress was also very close in the opening years of the twenty-first century. It is true
that from 1995 until the elections of 2006, the Republicans generally controlled Congress.
Their margins of control, however, were very narrow.
From time to time, voters demonstrate that they are relatively dissatisfied with the
performance of one or another of the major parties. This dissatisfaction can produce a
“wave” of support for the other party. Unlike realignments, the effects of wave elections
are temporary. The first decade of the twenty-first century was marked by a series of wave
elections, in which the voters punished first one party and then the other.wave elections sweep out the Republicans. By 2006, an ever-larger number of
voters came to believe that U.S. intervention in Iraq had been a mistake. In the 2006
midterm elections, the Democrats took control of the U.S. House and Senate in a wave
election. In September 2008, a worldwide financial panic turned what had been a
modest recession into the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression
of the 1930s. The political consequences were inevitable. In November, Democratic
presidential candidate Barack Obama was elected with one of the largest margins in
recent years.Democrats in Trouble. By 2010, the Democrats had lost popularity. In the midterm
elections of 2010, the Republicans benefited from one of the strongest wave elections in
decades and took control of the House. The Democrats retained control of the Senate.
It is likely that some voters now blamed the Democrats for the state of the economy.
Many observers, however, argued that independents turned away from the Democrats in
the belief that the party was expanding the scope of the federal government to an unac-
ceptable degree. In particular, the Democratic health-care reform package was crucial in
fostering the perception of the party as being committed to “big government.”Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
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