The truth is, real moderates are gone. The media uses the label for people whose voting records would have put them far from the center in Congress even as late as the 1980s and 1990s. Conversely, those considered staunch conservatives in the past would earn the scornful moniker of RINO — Republican in Name Only — today and would struggle to survive.
Consider legendary Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker. In his final Congress (1983-1984), Baker was exactly in the center of his caucus: There were 27 more moderate/liberal GOP senators and 27 more conservative ones. Today, however, Baker would rank as the fourth most liberal Republican senator.
The principle works in the other direction historically as well. In 2024, Mitt Romney is perceived as a total heretic who his party has ostracized for his lack of fealty to Donald Trump and his inclination toward compromise and legislating. He has the 4th most liberal voting record among Republican senators. But in the first Congress of the Reagan Revolution (1981-1983), when Republicans had just gained 12 Senate seats and recaptured the chamber for the first time since 1955, Romney’s record would only have made him the 29th most liberal Republican in the chamber.
The same pattern exists in the House. Newt Gingrich incited a revolution of his own in the 1980s and 1990s and spent two decades prodding House Republicans toward confrontation and political warfare. He did much to help create the polarized, dysfunctional politics of today. Nevertheless, his career still illustrates the dramatic rightward shift among the chamber’s Republicans.
In his first Congress, only 39 House Republicans (and one arch-conservative Democrat) were to the right of Gingrich, though they some big names like future Vice Presidents Dan Quayle and Dick Cheney. By the time he left Congress in 1998, he had 125 more conservative Republican colleagues. In the current Congress? One hundred and seventy-eight Republicans (the scores include members like former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who have left the House) would be to Gingrich’s right and shockingly only 46 would be to his left.
To pick another big name identified with conservatism in the past, Jack Kemp was the man who helped make unyielding fealty to tax cuts GOP orthodoxy. In his first Congress (1971-1973), there were only 60 Republicans to Kemp’s right. By his last Congress, there were 107. And in the current Congress, more than 200 Republicans would be to Kemp’s right, and only 20 would be to his left.
Indeed, what’s most striking is how people who identified with the conservative wing of the GOP in the past would be among the most moderate Republicans in Congress today. Al D’Amato won his Senate seat in 1980 by challenging liberal Republican legend Jacob Javits in a primary in New York. D’Amato upset Javits and went on to win a three-way race against the senator (who ran on the Liberal Party line) and a Democrat. D’Amato ran explicitly as a Reagan conservative. His voting record never quite matched his rhetoric, but in his first Congress, D’Amato was only the 13th most liberal/moderate Republican. Today? He’d be the 2nd most moderate, behind only Maine’s Susan Collins.