After the 1960s, Republicans sensed that they had lost a large amount of …show more content…
supporters to the newly liberal Democrats, and began quickly attempting changes to supplement their depleted voter base. These efforts can be best outlined through the ideology of 1972’s president, Republican Richard Nixon. Nixon was known for his “Southern Strategy” which was essentially to appeal as much as possible to Southern voters by adopting their anti-Civil Rights views, garnering the vote of any straggling Southern democrats and reinforcing any southern Republicans who held those views. As described by Kevin Phillips, one of Richard Nixon’s aides, “the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote, and they don’t need any more than that.” This was the Republican Party formally abandoning ties that they’d held as far back as the Civil War, and ushering in Southern voters to form a base of the party’s support for the present and future of the party.
After managing to get elected, Richard Nixon began his presidency, one that would be defined by his premature exit.
In July of 1974, less than two years after his inauguration as president, articles of impeachment were drawn up against Richard Nixon. The articles were in response to what came to be known as the Watergate scandal, where Nixon was implicated in ordering the act of breaking into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. and the administration subsequently attempting to cover-up their involvement, as well as their resistance in cooperating the investigation that followed the events. This scandal’s effect on the political parties, was the impact of Nixon’s association with the Republican Party. His shady conduct led to not only a mistrust in Republican’s that resonated with the general public, but also a party divided between the racist south, and moderate north. At this time, the Democrats were coming into their own as a unified liberal
party.
After Richard Nixon’s tenure, the next Republican to be elected into the oval office was Ronald Reagen. Reagan was known for Reaganomics, a free market concept in which he claimed that money from the rich would trickle down to the poor as they redistributed the money into the economy. This caught on within the party, and to this day tax breaks for the wealthy are major talking points of Republican candidates. On the social issues, Reagan also held many views that are consistent with the modern conservative. He was vehemently pro-life, stating ''We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life -- the unborn -- without diminishing the value of all human life.” He also was in favor of drug control, famously declaring a war on drugs in 1982, and being quoted as saying, “Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.”