The Politics of Prayer

Not since the 1928 elections have the Republicans retained control of both Congress and the White House. Now that 76-year-old record may be about to fall: President Bush is looking stronger with the economy picking up, and Republicans seem likely not only to hold on to control of both houses of Congress but also to increase their numbers.

A GOP gerrymander of Democratic districts in Texas will probably add six to eight Republicans to the House. Every other big state is so heavily gerrymandered that no other major changes are likely. This means the GOP majority in the House is expected to grow by at least half a dozen seats.

The Rothenberg Political Report says that six Democratic Senate seats are in danger of falling to Republicans -- five in the South -- while only three GOP-held seats are similarly vulnerable. The Democratic minority will almost certainly have fewer seats in the next Congress than it has today.

How did we ever get to this: The nation's historic-majority Democratic Party reduced to a declining minority, and the second-banana Republicans suddenly running everything?

A good place to start is 1928, because U.S. politics seems to run in roughly 60-year cycles.

From the Civil War until 1928, Republicans were dominant, building a coalition from Civil War veterans, farm states and the emerging West. From the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 until 1994, Democrats held both houses of Congress for all but four years and the White House for most of that time, especially in the New Deal years. They also held the most governorships and a majority of state legislatures. The New Deal coalition of the Southern poor, ethnic and minority voters and urban liberals held together, more or less, for six decades.

The big change on the national stage occurred in 1994, when the GOP achieved dominance in the South and its border states, and not on traditional economic issues but on cultural ones. While the Democrats have held their own in the industrial North and New England, they have declined in the South and much of the West over the last 40 years to a point of near-extinction. "Angry white males" in their pickups with gun racks have brought about fundamental political change by doing nothing more than shifting their loyalties from Democrats, based on economics, to Republicans, based on culture and values.