New Year's Day is a good time to take a long look backward with a cautious eye toward possible futures. My guide here is RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende's 2012 book "The Lost Majority," whose bold thesis was unduly neglected by political scientists spinning tales of a permanent New Deal Democratic majority. Michael Barone Trende's thesis instead was that Democrats' big 1930s majorities were not enduring.
Their 1940s presidential victories owed more to Franklin Roosevelt's wartimes and Harry Truman's Cold War leadership than to big-government domestic policies, which no Congress elected between 1938 and 1958 supported. Instead, the real majority-former from 1950 to 1990 was Dwight Eisenhower. He won twice, as did his vice president, Richard Nixon.
Ronald Reagan, whom Eisenhower admired and regarded as a suitable future president, according to amateur historian Gene Kopelson, in the 1980s carried even more states than Eisenhower had in the 1950s. Eisenhower, who owed his national prominence to Roosevelt, regarded attacks on New Deal programs as imprudent despite the skepticism of big government he expressed after leaving office. Reagan, a four-time Roosevelt voter, coming to office when big government was popular, could oppose its expansion but not its elimination.
Seemingly permanent Republican control of one branch of government and Democratic control of another often led to constructive compromises. The parties' divergent historical heritages -- Democrats split between.
