Could the GOP's general problem be that the ave. American is getting poorer?

[Heimdal]

There might be something to this theory. The periods where the GOP has performed best, are the periods when the American economy performed well.

The period from the end of the civil war to the advent of the great Depression.  In this era the Republican presidents oversaw the industrialization of the US. Most people weren’t wealthy, but they usually had a higher standard of living than their parents (or what they could have expected in Europe). The Republicans were the party of sound money, low taxes and industrial expansion. This appealed to far more people than just Midwestern industrial barons, or New England WASPs. The GOP could rely on a lot of working class voters as well.

The 1950s. At the onset of Eisenhower’s first term, the large and prosperous American middle class had already been created. This basically continued under Eisenhower. They lost control of Congress in 1954, but Eisenhower still crushed Stevenson in two presidential elections. The 1950s were a good time for most Americans. The level of unemployment was low, there was little crime, family life was stable and so forth. The 1950s probably wasn’t the golden age a lot of people remember (African-Americans were still de jure second class citizens in the South, and a lot of women were stuck with abusive husbands), but things were pretty good. Someone has said that conservatives want to go home in the 1950s (stable heterosexual families), and that liberals want to go to work in the 1950s (a high degree of stability, unionization, etc.).

The 1980s. The American economy was rebounding from the Stagflation of the 1970s. Interest rates were low, inflation had been tamed and taxes were going down. The American people rewarded the Repulicans with landslide victories in 1984 and 1988. There were of course dark clouds on the horizon. A lot of industry was either shut down or outsourced to Asia, which meant that a lot pf people lost their jobs. But for most Americans the 1980s were pretty good.

It is difficult to explain the 1960s and 1990s with this model, since the American economy performed well in both decades, without any real gain for the GOP. That might be explained. The Republicans were fighting an intraparty war for a lot of the 1960s. That decreased their ability to win the general elections.  In 1994 the Republicans finally won control of Congress. They were never able to defeat Clinton, but the 1990s was still a pretty conservative decade. The Republican Congress passed a lot of conservative legislation, that the New Democrat Clinton was happy to sign into law.