Republican National Committee Research Articles

A Machine of Affirmations: Fascism in the Age of Trump

ABSTRACT Nihilism in its classic Nietzschean sense—the ruins of all values—is the general condition of existence of Trumpism. In contrast to Noam Chomsky’s argument that Trump, while authoritarian, is not a fascist, this article analyzes Trumpism in relation to nihilism and argues that Trump is a machine of affirmations for the collapse of all values—democracy, equality, justice . caused by the profound alienation of labor in contemporary capitalism. The machinic affirmations produced by the Trump administrative apparatuses—Fox News, Republican National Committee, Newsmax, the Justice Department . —are given a political bond and a spiritual coherence by (a nihilistic) fascism. It is a fascism that replaces the “big words” with equally ground-less affirmations (“Make American Great Again”) but, like all fascism, fails to overcome capitalism’s devaluation of all values that has in the words of Marx and Engels, “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”

Bootstrap Liberalism: Texas Political Culture in the Age of FDR by Sean P. Cunningham

Reviewed by: Bootstrap Liberalism: Texas Political Culture in the Age of FDR by Sean P. Cunningham Boris Heersink (bio) Bootstrap Liberalism: Texas Political Culture in the Age of FDR. By Sean P. Cunningham. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2022. Pp. ix, 312. $37.95 cloth; $28.49 ebook) In Bootstrap Liberalism: Texas Political Culture in the Age of FDR, historian Sean P. Cunningham engages with the puzzle of the massive popularity Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal enjoyed in Texas in the context of the long-standing perception of this state as the center of individualism and conservatism. How did voters with [End Page 205] a seemingly genuine belief in “conservative, rugged individualism, self-help, and limited government” end up supporting FDR in landslide numbers in each election between 1932 and 1944 (p. 2)? Conservatism was a major force in the Texas Democratic Party before, during, and after the New Deal. In 1928, Republican nominee Herbert Hoover won Texas by a small margin, as Democratic nominee Al Smith’s Catholicism and opposition to Prohibition resulted in a good number of Democratic politicians in the state bolting the ticket and openly supporting Hoover. But with the economic crash of 1929 and Hoover’s dramatic drop in popularity, these “Hoovercrats” quickly rejoined the Democratic side and fully backed Roosevelt in 1932. Importantly, Cunningham shows that these conservative Democrats generally were enthusiastic supporters of FDR throughout his first term and reelection effort. With the early New Deal benefitting local farmers and steering clear of racial and civil rights issues, conservatives—like Rep. Marvin Jones—were happy to tie themselves to FDR and celebrate the New Deal as “a new day and a new economic order for the American people” (p. 63). After 1936, however, unity dissolved, and the Texas Democratic Party split into roughly two factions. One consisted of true believers in the New Deal (such as Representatives Maury Maverick and Lyndon B. Johnson), who remained supportive of FDR until his death in 1945. The other faction united conservatives of different kinds, who became increasingly (and vocally) critical of the size and role of the federal government and FDR’s role as president and party leader. Cunningham carefully charts how these two camps battled each other in primaries and at state party conventions. In these clashes, both sides saw defeats and victories. Yet, after the conclusion of a nomination fight, Texas voters consistently voted the Democratic nominee—regardless of faction—into office in landslide victories. While much of this may have been the simple consequence of Texas (and the South in general) representing a de-facto single party system, Bootstrap Liberalism argues convincingly that it was also the product of the similar ways in which both conservatives and liberals presented [End Page 206] their politics to voters. Both sides claimed to represent the forgotten workingman in Texas and argued their policies would help voters achieve their goals. This approach may have allowed self-identified conservative voters to embrace the New Deal and incorporate it into their existing individualistic worldview. At the same time, Cunningham’s account also shows how such similar marketing likely confused voters. For example, Cunningham presents reports that some of rural voters in the 1942 senate primary race supported populist conservative W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel—who was increasingly anti-FDR, anti-New Deal, and anti-union—because they believed he would be a pro-labor ally to the president. Bootstrap Liberalism presents a fascinating insight into the workings of Texas politics in the FDR era—charting the clashes between leading Texas politicians of this period such as Maury Maverick, LBJ, “Pappy” O’Daniel, and James “Pa” and Miriam “Ma” Ferguson and spotlighting the importance of how an “individualist” presentation of the New Deal may have played a role in its popularity in Texas and—possibly—other traditionally conservative states as well. Boris Heersink BORIS HEERSINK is an assistant professor in the department of political science at Fordham University. He is the co-author of Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865–1968 and the author of National Party Organizations and Party Brands in American Politics: The Democratic and Republican National Committees, 1912–2016. Copyright © 2022 Kentucky Historical...

Examining Democratic and Republican National Committee Party Branding Activity, 1953–2012

Recent scholarship on the role of national party organizations in American politics—specifically, the Democratic and Republican National Committees—has argued that political science research has thus far undervalued the importance of these organizations. These studies have noted the importance that party leaders—including presidents, Congressional leaders, and governors—place on the national committees’ role in shaping a party brand. Notably, these studies are all qualitative historical accounts—perhaps because finding consistent quantitative data from within the DNC and RNC across time is complicated due to limitations in access to archival resources across both parties and time. I present a new quantitative data set measuring DNC and RNC activity on the basis of an external source: New York Times coverage of national committee activity in the period 1953–2012. I use this data to test the claim that, while “party branding” is a core national committee goal, the DNC and RNC do not consistently engage in it. I find that monthly New York Times references of party branding operations decline for parties that hold the White House. Meanwhile, coverage of other service operations does not decline, suggesting committees step back their branding role when their party has control of the executive branch of the federal government.

Thinking politically about scholarly infrastructure: Commit the publishers to 2.5%

Maybe it’s unsurprising that I think about scholarly communication in terms similar to U.S. politics. I originally drafted this article for the Library Publishing Coalition blog before the 2020 election and revised it for C&RL News during the weirdly long interregnum period before the actual inauguration. The 2016 Republican National Committee was the backdrop to my becoming a scholarly communication librarian in February of that year. That’s also when I joined Twitter, to better follow politics and librarianship, and maybe that’s to blame.

Mail-In Voter Fraud: Anatomy of a Disinformation Campaign

The claim that election fraud is a major concern with mail-in ballots has become the central threat to election participation during the COVID-19 pandemic and to the legitimacy of the outcome of the election across the political spectrum. President Trump has repeatedly cited his concerns over voter fraud associated with mail-in ballots as a reason that he may not abide by an adverse electoral outcome. Polling conducted in September 2020 suggests that nearly half of Republicans agree with the president that election fraud is a major concern associated with expanded mail-in voting during the pandemic. Few Democrats share that belief. Despite the consensus among independent academic and journalistic investigations that voter fraud is rare and extremely unlikely to determine a national election, tens of millions of Americans believe the opposite. This is a study of the disinformation campaign that led to widespread acceptance of this apparently false belief and to its partisan distribution pattern. Contrary to the focus of most contemporary work on disinformation, our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects for both participation in and the legitimacy of the 2020 election, was an elite-driven, mass-media led process. Social media played only a secondary and supportive role.Our results are based on analyzing over fifty-five thousand online media stories, five million tweets, and seventy-five thousand posts on public Facebook pages garnering millions of engagements. They are consistent with our findings about the American political media ecosystem from 2015-2018, published in Network Propaganda , in which we found that Fox News and Donald Trump’s own campaign were far more influential in spreading false beliefs than Russian trolls or Facebook clickbait artists. This dynamic appears to be even more pronounced in this election cycle, likely because Donald Trump’s position as president and his leadership of the Republican Party allow him to operate directly through political and media elites, rather than relying on online media as he did when he sought to advance his then-still-insurgent positions in 2015 and the first half of 2016.Our findings here suggest that Donald Trump has perfected the art of harnessing mass media to disseminate and at times reinforce his disinformation campaign by using three core standard practices of professional journalism. These three are: elite institutional focus (if the President says it, it’s news); headline seeking (if it bleeds, it leads); and balance , neutrality, or the avoidance of the appearance of taking a side. He uses the first two in combination to summon coverage at will, and has used them continuously to set the agenda surrounding mail-in voting through a combination of tweets, press conferences, and television interviews on Fox News. He relies on the latter professional practice to keep audiences that are not politically pre-committed and have relatively low political knowledge confused, because it limits the degree to which professional journalists in mass media organizations are willing or able to directly call the voter fraud frame disinformation. The president is, however, not acting alone. Throughout the first six months of the disinformation campaign, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and staff from the Trump campaign appear repeatedly and consistently on message at the same moments, suggesting an institutionalized rather than individual disinformation campaign. The efforts of the president and the Republican Party are supported by the right-wing media ecosystem, primarily Fox News and talk radio functioning in effect as a party press. These reinforce the message, provide the president a platform, and marginalize or attack those Republican leaders or any conservative media personalities who insist that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud associated with mail-in voting.The primary cure for the elite-driven, mass media communicated information disorder we observe here is unlikely to be more fact checking on Facebook. Instead, it is likely to require more aggressive policing by traditional professional media, the Associated Press, the television networks, and local TV news editors of whether and how they cover Trump’s propaganda efforts, and how they educate their audiences about the disinformation campaign the president and the Republican Party have waged.

Direct Democracy Denied: The Right to Initiative in a Pandemic

Putting aside the Supreme Court’s controversial decision in Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, the case over extending the date for receipt of absentee ballots in the April 2020 Wisconsin primary, courts so far have done a fairly good job protecting voting rights during the COVID-19 pandemic. From easing candidate and party signature requirements for ballot access, to temporarily eliminating witness or notarization requirements for casting an absentee ballot, to interpreting the excuse provisions in for-cause absentee ballot laws to cover voters without coronavirus immunity who fear voting in person, courts have recognized that election laws that ordinarily do not burden voters can become burdensome in a pandemic. Courts have interpreted such laws to avoid disenfranchisement, and sometimes temporarily suspended or altered them. That welcome thumb on the scale favoring voters, however, has not extended uniformly to claims for the easing of signature gathering rules by ballot measure proponents. In four cases I examine, courts have rejected the demands of initiative proponents to ease requirements to qualify a measure for the ballot, such as allowing electronic instead of “wet” (in person) signatures, and easing witness requirements, total number of signatures required, or geographic requirements for signature collection. In just one case, Thompson v. DeWine, a federal district court ordered Ohio to alter its procedures for qualifying proposed measures for the ballot, including allowing the acceptance of electronic signatures. The decision, however, was put on hold by the Sixth Circuit in a stay order that was very dismissive of the rights of direct democracy and that portends bad things to come. In this short analysis, I argue that some of the reasons courts and states have offered against easing ballot measure qualification requirements during a pandemic are weak, and that the district court in Thompson was right to see that normal ballot qualification rules can impose a severe First Amendment burden on direct democracy proponents under pandemic conditions. The problem, as illustrated by the Thompson case, is fashioning appropriate relief consistent with principles of federalism and separation of powers. It is difficult to craft a remedy would put the plaintiffs in the position they would have been in had there been no pandemic and that does not usurp the state’s general role in enforcing its election rules or undermine sound principles of election administration and fairness.

Defending Democracy: Taking Stock of the Global Fight Against Digital Repression, Disinformation, and Election Insecurity

Amidst the regular drumbeat of reports about Russian attempts to undermine U.S. democratic institutions from Twitter bots to cyber-attacks on Congressional candidates, it is easy to forget that the problem of election security is not isolated to the United States and extends far beyond safeguarding insecure voting machines. Consider Australia, which has long been grappling with repeated Chinese attempts to interfere with its political system. Yet Australia has taken a distinct approach in how it has sought to protect its democratic institutions, including reclassifying its political parties as “critical infrastructure,” a step that the U.S. government has yet to take despite repeated breaches at both the Democratic and Republican National Committees. This Article analyzes the Australian approach to protecting its democratic institutions from Chinese influence operations and compares it to the U.S. response to Russian efforts. It then moves on to discuss how other cyber powers, including the European Union, have taken on the fight against digital repression and disinformation, and then compares these practices to the particular vulnerabilities of Small Pacific Island Nations. Such a comparative study is vital to help build resilience, and trust, in democratic systems on both sides of the Pacific. We argue that a multifaceted approach is needed to build more resilient and sustainable democratic systems. This should encompass both targeted reforms focusing on election infrastructure security — such as requiring paper ballots and risk-limiting audits — with deeper structural interventions to limit the spread of misinformation and combat digital repression.

Willis Van Devanter: Chancellor of the Taft Court

Willis Van Devanter: Chancellor of the Taft Court ROBERT POST Although William H. Taft was president for only four years, he appointed a remark­ able five justices to the Supreme Court.1 But only two of these appointments remained on the Court when Taft became chief justiceMahlon Pitney and Willis Van Devanter. Pit­ ney would be gone within eighteen months, but Van Devanter would remain as “one of the most enduring achievements of the Taft Administration, and very possibly its greatest.”2 Early Life Willis Van Devanter was born on April 17, 1859, in Marion, Indiana. He was about eighteen months younger than Taft. Van Devanter’s father was a successful local lawyer. Although Van Devanter wanted to go into farming, his father prevailed upon him to attend Indiana Asbury University (now DePauw University) and then Cincinnati Law School, where Van Devanter was a year behind but nevertheless acquainted with Taft himself.3 Unlike both Taft and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who followed well-worn career paths, Van Devanter elected to move as a young man to the distant and lawless West. In 1884, within a week of President Chester A. Arthur’s appointment of Van Devanter’s brother-in-law (John W. Lacey) as Chief Justice of the Territorial Court for Wyoming Territory, Van Devanter relocated to the frontier town of Cheyenne. In 1885, he offered his services to the new territorial governor, the loyal, shrewd, and astute Fran­ cis E. Warren, stalwart Republican, wealthy rancher, and Civil War recipient of the Medal of Honor. Van Devanter’s rise in the new territory was “little short of sensational.”4 He became a commissioner tasked with revising the laws and statutes of Wyoming Territory in 1886;5 the city attorney of Cheyenne in 1887;6 a member of the Territorial House of Repre­ sentatives in 1888;7 and, in 1889, at the age of thirty, the Chief Justice of the Territorial Supreme Court.8 When Wyoming became a state 1890, Van Devanter was elected to its new Supreme Court and became its first Chief Justice.9 Advising a friend to try his luck in the western territories, Van Devanter 288 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY At age 25, Willis Van Devanter moved from Indiana to Cheyenne, WY (pictured in 1890) and became a successful lawyer representing the Union Pacific Railroad and large cattle ranchers. He also became active in the Wyoming Republican Party. wrote, “A man grows fourfold more than he would under other conditions.”10 Within four days of his election as Chief Justice, Van Devanter suddenly and unexpectedly resigned,11 returning to the suc­ cessful law practice that he had maintained throughout his time in Wyoming. He traveled the state in stagecoaches and on horseback. In 1890 he formed with his brother-in-law the firm of Lacey and Van Devanter. It quickly became “Wyoming’s most prominent law firm,”12 representing the most important economic interests in the state, including cattlemen’s associations and the state’s most significant railroad, the Union Pacific. Most memorably, Van Devanter defended the cat­ tlemen who, along with a contingent ofTexas gunman, had traveled to the northern reaches of the state to exterminate the “rustlers” who they claimed were stealing cattle.13 After murdering two suspected rustlers, the excur­ sion was itself surrounded by angry residents and survived only after extraction by federal troops. The invasion was the outgrowth of ongoing disputes between southern Republi­ can cattle interests and northern settlers. Van Devanter conducted a masterful and effective defense of the gunmen in what later became known as the Johnson County War.14 From the moment he arrived in the territory, Van Devanter sought to become an important player in Wyoming Republican politics. Largely because ofhis close connec­ tion to Warren, he “served as Chairman of the Republican State Committee from 1892 to 1895, as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in St. Louis in 1896, and as a member of the Republican National Committee from 1896 to 1900.”15 After Warren became a powerful United States Senator,16 Van Devanter became “Senator Warren’s man in Wyoming, his confidant, counsel, and political manager.”17 Van De­ vanter subsidized Republican newspapers...

Rethinking Active Defense: A Comparative Analysis of Proactive Cybersecurity Policymaking

Although one segment of the proactive cybersecurity debate—e.g., hack back—has long been derided as a policy option carrying with it great risks of escalation, among other concerns, elements within the U.S. Congress and abroad are actively pushing to give companies a freer hand at defending themselves against cyber attackers. This Article compares several of these efforts, focusing on the so-called Graves bill in the United States with the experiences of China, Singapore, Thailand, Australia, and the G7. Given the Republican National Committee’s 2016 embrace of active defense principles, even as some firms like FireEye have begun to publicly admit to hacking back, the time has come to take a fresh look at the implications of this regulatory trend for both business integrity and international security.

HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship by Nadine Strossen

Reviewed by: HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship by Nadine Strossen Richard Ashby Wilson (bio) Nadine Strossen, HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press 2018), ISBN: 9780190859121, 232 pages. Hate is trending. The sitting president of the United States regularly mobilizes his political constituency by vilifying Mexican immigrants as “criminals and rapists” who “infest” America, and by promoting a “zero tolerance” policy at the border that punitively separates children from their parents, including persons applying for asylum. There has been a resurgence in white nationalist ideology globally both in mainstream electoral politics and in ugly scenes on the streets of Charlottesville, Dresden, and Warsaw. In the United Kingdom, hate crimes spiked after the Brexit referendum and in the USA, there has been a steady rise in hate crimes against African-Americans, Muslims, immigrants and members of the LGBT community. Given this current paroxysm of populism, isn’t it high time we re-evaluated our commitment to freedom of expression and start contemplating new legislation to regulate discriminatory speech that targets vulnerable minorities? In HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship, Nadine Strossen, former national President of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), offers a resounding defense of free speech and rejects attempts to suppress or ban speech that is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment. Free speech is the lifeblood of democratic deliberation, argues Strossen, and much hate speech in the United States, while offensive, is protected speech and should remain so. Current US law only suppresses speech that intentionally advocates imminent lawless action that is likely to occur, and even then, the regulation of speech must occur in a way that is consistent with the viewpoint (or content) neutrality principle which inhibits the state from disfavoring some opinions simply because they are disagreeable. Strossen starts with the observation that there is no clear and consistent definition of “hate speech,” which she puts in scare quotations throughout the book. Hate speech is not a term of legal art and it is simply wrong to assert, as some liberal politicians have, that “hate speech is not free speech.” In Strossen’s view, “the terms ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crimes’ are simply deployed to demonize views people find offensive and to call for punishing a broad swathe of expression, including political discourse that is integral to our democracy.”1 Reviewing hate speech laws in the US and globally, Strossen concludes that it is simply not possible to draft hate speech laws that are not unduly vague, overbroad and counter-productive.2 Germany, France, and other European countries convict hundreds of defendants a year for offences as capacious as “incitement to hatred,” and Strossen documents a number of cases that seem disproportionately chilling of political [End Page 213] speech. They include the 2014 arrest of a British politician for publicly reading a Winston Churchill quote from 1899 that denounced the treatment of women in Muslim countries, and the conviction of a Danish man in 2016 who criticized “the ideology of Islam” on Facebook, and posted the statement, “Islam wants to abuse democracy in order to get rid of democracy.”3 She reminds us also of the long and repressive history of government censorship in the United States, including how, in the 1830s, Southern states banned abolitionist speech on the grounds that it had the potential to incite violence and rebellion. She observes that the Republican National Committee and some state legislatures have included the Black Lives Matter movement in resolutions condemning hate speech. HATE addresses the lively and fairly acrimonious campus hate speech debate currently taking place in the United States, and Strossen counsels faculty and students to confront provocative speakers at universities with “counterspeech” and vigorous opposing arguments, rather than to silence them with heckling and censorious campus hate speech codes.4 She points out that all the campus speech codes challenged in the courts by the ACLU have been struck down on First Amendment grounds and recommends that universities permit all speech that the government does not itself censor.5 Strossen does not countenance the view that merely being exposed to denigrating speech is in...

Trump and the Party-in-Organization: Presidential Control of National Party Organizations

The election of Donald Trump not only placed a political outsider in the center of power in America’s federal government, it also put him in a dominant position within the Republican Party as a national organization. While political scientists have traditionally described the parties’ national committees as inconsequential but impartial service providers, scholars have also long argued that incumbent presidents have considerable control over their party’s national committee. In this article, I explore the nature of presidential power over the party-in-organization and whether Trump can take advantage of his control over the Republican National Committee (RNC). I show that presidential domination over the party-in-organization is based on the president’s ability to nominate and replace the national committee’s chair and that presidents have used this power to push their committees to promote both their preferred policy positions and themselves. I argue this means Trump has the ability to use the RNC to promote the GOP as “his” party, including during a potential primary challenge for his renomination in 2020.

Party Brands and the Democratic and Republican National Committees, 1952–1976

Political scientists have traditionally dismissed the Democratic and Republican National Committees as “service providers”—organizations that provide assistance to candidates in the form of campaign funding and expertise but otherwise lack political power. I argue this perspective has missed a crucial role national committees play in American politics, namely that national party organizations publicize their party's policy positions and, in doing so, attempt to create national party brands. These brands are important to party leaders—especially when the party is in the national minority—since they are fundamental to mobilizing voters in elections. In case studies covering the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Republican National Committee (RNC) in the period 1952–1976, I show that minority party committees prioritize their branding role and invest considerably in their publicity divisions, inaugurate new publicity programs, and create new communication tools to reach out to voting groups. Additionally, I show that in cases where the party is out of the White House, the national committees have considerable leeway in deciding what party image to publicize. Rather than being mere powerless service providers, I show that party committees have played crucial roles in debates concerning questions of ideology and issue positioning in both parties.

Elders Need Thorough Screening for Alcohol Abuse

Elders Need Thorough Screening for Alcohol Abuse

Can Republican African Americans Win African American Votes? A Field Experiment

In the face of its 2012 defeat and looming demographic trends that did not bode well for the party’s future presidential candidates, the Republican National Committee officially declared its intention to recruit more African American candidates for office. But will fielding more African American candidates likely attract more African American votes for Republicans? Here, I employ a field experiment using real candidates and real votes cast in two down-ballot races featuring African American Republican candidates. Among voters who received mailings highlighting both race and party, African American voters responded primarily to party, in the process largely rejecting these two candidates. By contrast, African American voters responded more favorably when they learned the race, but not the party, of these candidates. The results here suggest something of a self-affirming political preference order in which African Americans felt affirmed by voting for a fellow African American, but only when they did not see that candidate as conflicting with a more central aspect of their political identity.

Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy by Daniel Kreiss

Reviewed by: Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracyby Daniel Kreiss Eitan D. Hersh (bio) Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy. by Daniel Kreiss. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 306. $99/ $27.95. For a political party or campaign, figuring out what makes 200 million voters tick has always been a monumental task. The task is made easier—or maybe just made different—by the dramatic advances in technology in the last fifteen years. As Daniel Kreiss tells us in his new book, Prototype Politics, campaigns leverage technology "to define what twenty-first-century citizenship looks like." In this masterfully written work, a mix of history, sociology, journalism, and political science, Professor Kreiss walks the reader through how Democratic and Republican campaigns from 2000 to 2014 leveraged technology to connect with voters. The narrative is told, in large part, through the lens of some fifty-five key players interviewed by the author. The story of the Obama years is one of uneven embrace of technology on the Democratic and Republican sides. Both parties, of course, are confronted with the same shifting media landscape. But in Kreiss's account, the Democrats were much more invested in technology than the Republicans. They hired more staff and built an extended network of organizations and companies that together worked on developing campaign tools. Meanwhile, the Republican Party, in part hampered by changing leadership at the Republican National Committee, did not embrace a tech-centered perspective between 2000 and 2012. Kreiss not only charts this difference between the two parties with a compelling writing style reminiscent of an investigative journalist, he offers an explanation of why it happened, building on a vast and diverse scholarly literature, which he takes in new directions. Key to his explanation is the narrative that parties themselves create about why they win or lose. The 2004 election was a defining moment for Democrats. Not only did John Kerry lose narrowly in the general election, but the Democratic primary featured Howard Dean, whose pioneering embrace of technology was a major story. After Kerry's loss, the Democrats' narrative was that they could have won if they had run a campaign built around technology. Accordingly, between 2004 and 2008, the Democrats made big investments in technology. Having built the infrastructure, they determined in 2008 that these investments paid off. From the Democrats' view, the Obama campaign became a prototypefor how to win campaigns. The Republicans did not create a parallel narrative around technology in 2004, when they won, or in 2008, when it was easy for them to attribute their loss to a bad economy or a demand for change after eight years of President Bush. No amount of technology would have saved the Republicans [End Page 608]from their landslide loss in 2008. So they did not focus on building technological infrastructure. However, in 2012, after a narrower Republican loss, the party started to tell a story about how technology could get them an extra percentage point or two in a close election. Kreiss's argument is important in explaining that there is not a steady march of technology and adoption by political actors. Rather, political actors tell themselves a story that they could win if they adopted this or that approach. Prototype Politicscontributes to our understanding of organizations and how they develop. It builds on research about the role of a political party and its relationship to candidates and voters. It offers a new explanation to a long-held question in political science about the nature of incumbency. Embracing technology requires constant attention and investment. This makes it hard for new entrants to compete against incumbent regimes. Prototype Politicswent to press before Donald Trump won the 2016 Republican primary. Nevertheless, the book holds lessons for the future of campaigning. For one, the Republican Party did have a technology wake-up call after the 2012 election and began investing in data-centric campaigning. Future research will tell us how much of that investment found its way into the Trump campaign. But the other big lesson is that Donald Trump's 2016 campaign might become a prototype for future candidates...

Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy. By Adam Sheingate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

<i>Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy</i>. By Adam Sheingate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP by Joshua D. Farrington

Reviewed by: Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP by Joshua D. Farrington Erica L. Metcalfe Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. By Joshua D. Farrington. Politics and Culture in Modern America. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 311. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-4852-4.) While most scholarship on African American political thought has focused on the black Left, studies examining the African American conservative perspective have more recently emerged. Joshua D. Farrington's latest study, Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP, offers an examination of black Republicans from the New Deal era to the Richard M. Nixon administration and explores how their goals within the party changed over time. Throughout the twentieth century, many middle-class African Americans remained in the Republican Party, where they sought to carve out a place for the black community and their socioeconomic needs. However, as the title suggests, this book is about more than black Republicans and their political agendas. It also explores the transformation of the Republican Party and how its interactions with African Americans changed throughout the twentieth century. While New Deal benefits were luring the black working class to the Democratic Party, notable black Republicans such as Archibald Carey Jr. and Robert Church Jr. occupied leadership positions in the South's Black-and-Tan organizations. They were elected to powerful positions at the local and state levels and lobbied for civil rights. Black Republican politicians were successful at getting meaningful civil rights legislation passed. Furthermore, on the national level, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, although a gradualist with civil rights, made judicial appointments that led to significant civil rights victories in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the rising tide of conservatism within the GOP in the 1950s, black Republicans remained a visible presence in the party. Many received highranking federal appointments and maintained influential local and state positions. However, during the 1960s black Republicans and black issues were becoming less of a priority within the party. There were cuts to the Republican National Committee's Minorities Division, fewer black delegates attended Republican conventions, Black-and-Tan organizations were disregarded, and GOP resources were put into Operation Dixie—a plan to court southern white voters. The 1964 presidential nomination of notoriously conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater marked a low point for the GOP's relationship with black voters and black Republicans. Despite their marginalization within the [End Page 1011] party, black Republicans maintained their belief in using the two-party system to make both parties address black issues. Ideologically, many black Republicans had also shifted their focus from civil rights to economic self-help. Nixon's black capitalism initiatives had goals of promoting entrepreneurship within the African American community and elicited support from black Republicans. Nevertheless, as the GOP grew more conservative into the 1970s, black support for the Republican Party declined significantly on the national level and has not recovered. Farrington weaves his chronological narrative together with a wealth of archival sources. Using diverse manuscript collections from around the United States, he attempts to fill a vacuum in the current scholarship. However, the book is not without its shortcomings. There is only a brief mention of the work and experiences of African American women in the Republican Party, such as Nannie Burroughs, Daisy Lampkin, and Jewel Lafontant-Mankarious. Indeed, this study would have been further enriched by a discussion of black Republican women's perspectives. Nevertheless, unlike previous studies on black Republicans, the book takes a close look at the changes within the GOP and how the party managed to gradually alienate African American voters throughout the twentieth century. Ultimately, Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP is a welcome addition to African American political history and will appeal to those interested in politics, history, and civil rights. Erica L. Metcalfe Texas Southern University Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

Competing for the platform

What explains which groups are included in a party coalition in any given election cycle? Recent advances in political party theory suggest that policy demanders comprise parties, and that the composition of a party coalition varies from election to election. We theorize three conditions under which parties articulate an interest group’s preferred positions in its quadrennial platform: when groups are ideologically proximate to the party median, when groups display party loyalty, and when groups are flush with resources. Using computer-assisted content analysis on a unique and rich data source, we examine three cycles of testimony that 80 organized groups provided to the Democratic Party. The analysis compares group requests with the content of Democratic and Republican National Committee platforms in 1996, 2000, and 2004. Results show that parties reward loyal groups and those that are ideologically proximate to the party but offer no confirmation of a resource effect.

The RNC's California Experiment: State and National Party Collaboration in Reforms to Minority Outreach

Neither the Republican National Committee nor the Republican Party can continue to rely primarily on white voters to win elections. Leadership at both levels of the party has acknowledged the power of demograohic changes that favor the the Democratic opposition. Shortly after the 2012 general election CRP chairman and former California state senator Jim Brulty spoke to the racial demographic changes, recognizing the implications for state and national Repulican candidates.The electorate has changed, Republicans have not reacted to that change, and California is dominated by Democrats because Republicans can't figure out how to get votes form anybody who is not white.

'Any Good Hunting?': When a Justice's Impartiality Might Reasonably Be Questioned

'Any Good Hunting?': When a Justice's Impartiality Might Reasonably Be Questioned