After suffering its worst defeat in a presidential election since 1964, the Republican Party has some thinking to do.
If it wants to reassert itself in the Northeast, the Rust Belt, the West Coast, Florida and the half-dozen swing states it ceded to Barack Obama last Tuesday, the GOP will have to decide whether to tilt slightly to the left, lurch farther to the right or chart a course straight down the middle of America’s political consciousness.
Whatever direction it chooses to take will have a profound impact on the electoral landscape here in New Jersey, where the Republican Party is facing an increasingly uphill battle to remain a statewide political force.
Look at the recent record. New Jersey has voted for the Democrat in each of the last five presidential elections — and by ever-widening margins, from Bill Clinton’s two-point win over George H.W. Bush in 1992 to President-elect Obama’s 14-point win over John McCain in 2008.
Even more ominous for the GOP is its showing in U.S. Senate races. New Jersey has not elected a Republican to the Senate in 36 years, choosing the Democratic candidate in the last 12 elections.
It wasn’t always thus. For most of the 20th century, New Jersey was, in fact, a fairly reliable bellwether. Between 1900 and 1996, the Garden State voted for the winning candidate, regardless of party, in 22 of 25 presidential elections. Ironically, the three losing candidates who carried the state during this period were all Republicans — Charles Evans Hughes over favorite-son Woodrow Wilson in 1916, Thomas E. Dewey over Harry Truman in 1948 and Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Likewise, New Jersey was represented by at least one (and sometimes two) Republican senators from 1895 through 1913, and again from 1917 through 1978, when four-term incumbent Clifford Case lost in the GOP primary to right-wing challenger Jeffrey Bell.
That primary contest sums up the disconnection between Republicans in New Jersey — indeed, across the entire Northeast — and the rest of the nation. As the party of Lincoln came to be dominated by neoconservatives and the religious right, their agenda promoting tax cuts for the rich, prayer in schools, denial of women’s reproductive rights, a unilateralist foreign policy and other positions out of step with New Jersey’s more progressive voters, the GOP lost its ability to be competitive in statewide races.
It also marginalized the occasional Republican who managed to win statewide office. Consider the fate of New Jersey’s two most recent Republican governors.
Shortly before he left office in 1990, Thomas H. Kean wrote a book, “The Politics of Inclusion,” whose very title expresses the polar opposite of what his party has come to represent. Years later, Mr. Kean co-chaired the 911 Commission, whose principal recommendations were ignored by the Bush administration.
Following the presidential election of 2000, Christine Todd Whitman left the governorship a year early to become administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She quit a little more than two years later, her efforts to implement and enforce federal clean-air and clean-water laws undermined at every turn by Vice President Dick Cheney.
The challenge to New Jersey Republicans, as their party plots its future course, is to make the GOP what it once was and could be again — an inclusive party that tolerates a wide range of views, including those held by such prominent Northeasterners as Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits of New York, William Scranton and Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Clifford Case of New Jersey. If they fail to do so, the Republican Party runs the very real risk of turning New Jersey, along with its Northeastern neighbors, into one-party states.
