The Rise of the “Democrat Party”: Republican Elites, Partisan Slurs, and Linguistic Polarization

Abstract

In a time of heightened affective and negative partisanship, we examine the intra-elite party dynamics underlying insulting partisan rhetoric. Our focus is on Republicans' reference to their partisan opponents as the “Democrat Party,” an ungrammatical mislabeling intended as a slur. We show that this usage, while not new, has exploded in recent years. This increase comes at the same time as significant change within the Republican Party. We argue that the tumultuous changes ushered in by the 2016 election have created fertile ground for factional turnover and enabled the rise of this partisan slur. We further contend that the epithet’s meaning has subtly shifted, suggesting that performatively partisan actors within the party, namely, partisan media, have become centralized actors within the Republican network. Using several corpora of political communication by Republican politicians and conservative media, we document a general rise in mislabelings of the Democrats concentrated in 2018–2019. We further show that the adoption of this insult by notable Republican elites like Donald Trump is due primarily to right-wing media’s influence. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of increasingly partisan media-centric, performative politics within the American right.