Letter from a Whig
Slemp, C. Bascom
"Letter from a Whig" (Washington)—According to a recent press report GOP Mayor Jack Hunter of Youngstown, Ohio, asked his congressman, Democrat Charles J. Carney, to introduce legislation adding Republican office...
...Even without Watergate and the dismal state of the economy political stategists and commentators would have expected the GOP to lose Congressional seats—political wisdom holds that the party in the White House will lose substantially in a midterm election...
...it included victories in every region of the country (reversing the Republican gains in the South in recent years...
...Despite the Nixon landslide in 1972 there had been no coattail effect for the Republicans...
...While Democrats seek to build on the substantial political advantages they accrued in the elections the Republicans are faced with rebuilding their own party...
...The foreboding prophecies which political pundits cast for the Republicans turned out to be well-founded, as the Democrats recorded a net gain of some forty-three seats in the House, three in the Senate, and five in the Governors' mansions...
...The Democrats now won in rural areas as well as the wealthy suburbs, a traditional GOP stronghold...
...Jim Buckley, M. Stanton Evans, Howard Phillips, and other leading conservatives are calling on the GOP to embrace conservative principles...
...After the November elections it is going to take more than a citation on an endangered species list to save the Grand Old Party...
...The 1974 election, as Feulner stated, was a defeat for Republicans, and since conservatives are the Republican mainstream they had their share of the losses...
...In response to the sniping from the Republican Left, and the widespread press coverage their charges received, Ed Feulner, the Executive Director of the Steering Committee dashed off his own clarifying memo, and was able to halt any erosion in the Committee's ranks...
...Dennis, Ind...
...Particularly damaging for the GOP was the loss of fifteen seats in the Republican Midwest (Indiana, once the Heartland for the Iron Guard, alone lost five Republican Congressmen) and the loss of nine seats in the South, where the GOP had been making inroads since 1952...
...Voter figures for the Congressional races alone were even lower than for the Senate and Gubernatorial races...
...But 1974 was no more a normal political year than was 1972...
...Columnists Evans and Novak, who are well known for writing planted columns, spoke of the devastating defeat suffered by -stone age" Republicans, and the new found strength of the "courageous feisty moderate" Republicans...
...In the last off-year elections approximately 48 per cent of the voting population had voted...
...As part of a power play Anderson staffers charged that the conservative House Republican Steering Committee had lost thirty of its seventy mernbers...
...The GOP picked up only twelve seats in the House and, in fact, even lost two Senate seats...
...It has been speculated that the GOP was particularly hurt because it was the Republican voters (who normally come out to vote in droves) who stayed home, but the RNC has yet to analyze sample precincts to see whether in fact this was the case...
...In the Senate there are 61 Democrats (six votes short of a two-thirds majority) and 39 Republicans...
...John Anderson (Ill...
...Democratic gains also included an expansion upon the old New Deal coalition (low-income, blue-collar, Catholics, blacks, and ethnics...
...Washington)—According to a recent press report GOP Mayor Jack Hunter of Youngstown, Ohio, asked his congressman, Democrat Charles J. Carney, to introduce legislation adding Republican office holders to the list of endangered species...
...Sen...
...In fact, of the ninety-five Steering Committee members sixteen lost their reelection bids, and six retired...
...Approximately 43,000,000 Americans voted in the Congressional races, or about 30 percent...
...With a voting age population of approximately 145,000,000 and a turnout of only about 53,000,000 (roughly 38 percent) voter apathy was clearly rampant...
...Furthermore, of the seventeen newly elected GOP House members at least six are expected to become dues-paying members of the Steering Committee...
...Initial election returns revealed further that Republicans were saved from losing seven additional congressional seats in four states by less than 5,000 votes...
...Preliminary figures from the Republican National Committee revealed thatabout 23,000,000 Republicans voted (16 percent of the voting age population), and 30,000,000 Democrats (21 percent of the voting age population...
...If the problems before the nation were not so serious the extravaganza about to unfold could make an enjoyable tragicomedy, for neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party received a vote of much confidence from the American electorate...
...In the recent elections, then, the GOP did not losewhat are normally considered marginal seats...
...Not too surprising, but perhaps of far reaching consequences, some 64 percent of the votes by those younger than thirty-four went to Democratic candidates...
...Under the...
...and Huber, Mich...
...Many GOP conservatives believe that their party can no longer merely shadow the goals of the Democratic Party, but instead must establish clear-cut alternatives...
...guidance of Rep...
...The American Conservative Union and Young Americans for Freedom are co-sponsoring a political action conference to be held in Washington in February, and this promises to bring more leading conservatives to the Federal enclave than the city has experienced in recent years...
...The new party line-ups in Congress give the Democrats 291 seats in the House (slightly over the two-thirds figure needed for a veto) as compared with 144 Republicans...
...but the GOP defeat was not a defeat for conservative Republicans only...
...While American parliamentarians have traditionally voted less on straight party lines than their European counterparts, there can be no doubt that the Ninety-fourth Congress will experience a shift to the Left...
...liberal Republicans sent out trial balloons challenging the more conservative Republican leadership...
...Liberal Democrats, under the influence of the Democrat Study Group, have been wresting control of their party in Congress away from the Southern conservatives...
...A power struggle on the Republican side of the aisle has also been underway...
...thelosses for the Steering Committee are approximately equal to those for the GOP as a whole...
...as well as three Vice Chairmen (Blackburn, Ga...
...The political future promises to be interesting...
...Instead, the Democrats made strong inroads into traditional Republican districts...
...If the GOP fails many leading conservatives see a third party move as imminent (despite Reagan's personal disavowal...
...The Democratic win was a clear across-the-boards victory...
...However, while there can be no doubt that important conservative losses resulted from the election, including Republican Steering Committee Chairman Lamar Baker (Tenn...
...If Democrats outnumber Republicans by two to one, liberals will probably outnumber conservatives (including Louisiana Democrat Joe Wag-goner's Conservative Southern Caucus) by nearly three to one...
Vol. 8 • February 1975 • No. 5
