As the battle for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination gets underway, candidates and potential candidates are focused solely on appealing to the GOP’s populist conservative base, from repeated attacks on “wokeness” to backing severe restrictions on access to abortion.
But trying to win a GOP primary didn’t always mean pandering to the right. As late as 1988, the main challengers to succeed conservative icon Ronald Reagan — Vice President George H.W. Bush and Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) — worked hard to garner the support of more moderate voters and did more than just deliver red meat to activists. But the lessons of that campaign set the GOP on the path to today’s scorched-earth, right-wing, populist politics.
Reagan’s nomination and election in 1980 signaled that both the Republican Party and the general electorate had moved significantly to the right since the mid-1960s peak of American liberalism. By the end of Reagan’s presidency, however, there were signs that the conservative tide was ebbing.
The stagflation — double-digit inflation and high unemployment — that had plagued the country when Reagan entered office was gone, the economy had recovered from a recession in his first term and the stock market was booming. This refocused the attention of many voters on issues traditionally more associated with the Democratic Party, such as education, the environment and those who hadn’t shared in the 1980s economic expansion.
Given these dynamics, Bush’s brain trust believed the vice president needed to pivot for the 1988 cycle. Shortly after the GOP lost the Senate in the 1986 midterm elections, his advisers suggested that Bush break with Reaganism to a small degree. They instructed him that the nation was moving slowly to the left and questioned whether anyone thought voters would “vote for even lower taxes, even less government, and even more defense” in 1988 after Reagan had already delivered on all three promises during his two terms. They called for Bush to offer proposals that would break with the stereotype of an uncaring Republican Party.