In general, the Republican Party gets between 5 and 10 percent of the Black vote and less than a third of the Hispanic vote nationally. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Clare Malone discusses the series of choices the GOP made, spanning decades, that made it an overwhelmingly […] Read more »
Republicans Need to Get Ready for the Trump Aftershock
This week’s cascade of Republican defections from Donald Trump has plunged the GOP into the deepest general-election divide over its presidential nominee in more than 50 years. The apex of modern GOP general-election conflict came in 1964 when Barry Goldwater, as the tribune of an emerging Sunbelt- and suburbia-based conservative […] Read more »
Goldwater and Trump: Not Two Peas in a Pod
Have you noticed all the comparisons on TV and in print between the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964 and the Donald Trump campaign of 2016? It’s true both Goldwater was, and Trump is, the Republican nominee for president. And both could be fairly termed insurgent winners and highly controversial candidates. […] Read more »
Politics and Polls: Goldwater, Brexit, and The Party Decides
In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in the presidential election. Could we see another landslide like this in 2016? Or does today’s political environment make that impossible? Tune in to the first episode of “Politics and Polls” as Professors Julian E. Zelizer and Sam Wang debate this issue […] Read more »
Comparing the GOP Divides, 1964 and 2016
With the GOP national convention still almost two months away and Donald Trump already wooing skeptical Republicans, it’s too early to know how divided the Republican Party will be in November. But minimizing that divide is critical to Trump’s prospects. The party’s last serious fracture occurred in 1964, when a […] Read more »
A Party Divided Is a Party Defeated — Usually
The question is no longer whether the GOP will be torn apart by the 2016 nominating process but how badly hurt its presidential nominee will be and whether defeat in November will be inevitable. The answer depends on the nominee and on the ultimate extent of the divide. But there […] Read more »