When ‘base’ of Republican Party shifted

Lamar Alexander.

Photo by Knoxville News Sentinel via Imagn Images

Nation & World
When ‘base’ of Republican Party shifted

In new memoir, Lamar Alexander says it used to be just elected officials, voters. Then came rise of more extreme activist groups, worsening polarization.

June 22, 2026 long read

Excerpted from “The Education of a Senator: From JFK to Trump” by Lamar Alexander, former Roy M. and Barbara Goodman Family Visiting Professor of Practice in Public Service, 2001-2002, published by Post Hill Press.

The Democratic sweep in 2008 did not interfere with my re-election to a second term in the Senate.

I had no opposition in the August primary. In November, I won 65 percent of the vote. Despite Obama’s carrying majority African American Shelby County (Memphis) by 2 to 1, I carried it too. My winning Shelby County for the sixth time in over 40 years showed that friendships among Black, as well as white, constituents can pay dividends for Republicans too.

The Tennessee election results seemed uneventful, but they marked the end of four decades of two-party competition in our state. McCain won Tennessee handily. Obama lost traditionally Democrat white voters in rural Middle and West Tennessee counties that African American Democrat Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr. had won just two years earlier.

Counties named for Democrat heroes Sam Houston and Andrew Jackson began switching from solid Democrat to solid Republican. Democrats dropped the names of Jefferson and Jackson from their annual dinners. Republican Lincoln Day dinners became Reagan Day dinners. A new polarization was underway.

“You need to know that some of us believe we’re losing our country,” a rural voter whispered.

The Great Recession, wealth disparities, community and family disintegration, exhausting wars on terror, and Obama’s liberalism were prime sources of the anxiety. So was race, fueling feelings that had been stirring since the 1960s Great Society and civil rights laws. While for many, Obama’s victory was an atonement for slavery, for others it stirred animosity.

Fueling the ire, iPhone and Facebook made their debut, launching a “Digital Democracy” that allowed citizens to express their anxieties publicly, and with an immediacy and harshness that proved hard to absorb.

Beginning in 2008, Tennessee became as much a Republican one-party state as it had been a Democrat one-party state before the 1960s.

A restructuring of the political phenomenon known as “the base” helped produce this polarization.

When I began in politics in 1966, the East Tennessee Republican base was composed of voters who were patriotic, churchgoing, and leery of the federal government. Because most were descended from Civil War Lincolnites, they were generally pro-civil rights. The state party organization was the custodian of “the base.” There were not many other intermediaries between an elected official and the voters. To stay in touch with “the base,” candidates visited county Republican chairmen, commiserated with other “rats in the barn,” attended Lincoln Day dinners, or went directly to the voters, as I had when I walked across the state.

During the 1970s and 1980s, new organizations inserted themselves between the elected official and the voter. They became the “new base.” The state party was reduced to being a fundraising machine and producer of operatives who consumed most of the money raised.

This new Republican base grew up at first in Washington, D.C., in reaction to a left-wing coalition of civil rights, anti-war, anti-gun, pro-choice, feminist, and environmental groups, as well as publications like Mother Jones that influenced the Democrat Party. The right countered with The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform, and political action groups like the Christian Coalition of America, the National Right to Life Committee, and the NRA. Neo-conservatives championed extending freedom through wars. Radio talk show hosts — and even an entire TV network, Fox News — spread the gospel.

This Washington, D.C., “new base” did not affect me when I was first elected to office in 1978. I was a small-town, culturally conservative, anti-gambling, prayer-breakfast-sponsoring governor who twice vetoed requiring photos on driver’s licenses because it smacked of too much government, fought the teachers’ unions, and supported Second Amendment rights, even though I didn’t hunt much. The issue of abortion rarely came up.

Then, “base” restructuring spread outside Washington, D.C. Seen from Nashville, where I was working with a Democrat legislature on better schools and roads, clean water, and healthy children, Republican House Leader Newt Gingrich’s confrontational politics made it look like activist Republican governors and nay-saying Republican members of Congress were not on the same team. Another difference was that congressional Republicans were winning elections, and Republican governors and legislators were not.

To discuss what, if anything, we still had in common, I invited Gingrich and two other House Republicans to join me and three other governors for a weekend at Blackberry Farm in July 1985. As the weekend began, I told the group, “Washington issues are tremendously important and fascinating, but when we get together, that’s all Republicans talk about. Democrat governors are running up and down the street proposing programs to improve schools, pick up the garbage, fix roads, and make children healthier — and they are getting elected.”

When the session ended, we concluded that we, indeed, were on the same team.

“If I were in Congress, I would be voting ‘no’ to more federal control as Newt is doing. And if he were governor, he would be hard at work fixing schools and roads and health care — as I’m doing,” I said. Gingrich agreed.

We called that division of responsibility “The New Federalism” — resist federal control and solve problems locally. On “Firing Line,” William F. Buckley Jr. said the meeting was “a historic way station in Republican politics in the South.” Alabama Republican Party executive director Marty Conners and I started the Southern Republican Exchange, where Republican legislators, local officials, and campaign managers addressed bread-and-butter issues. They began winning elections.

In Washington, D.C., Gingrich kept winning too. His “Contract with America” helped Republicans capture both houses of Congress in 1994. Running for president, I watched the “new base” spread as I drove to towns like Ottumwa, Iowa, trying to persuade Republicans that I was Christian enough, pro-life enough, and Second Amendment enough. In 2002, when I announced for the Senate, I said, “I have conservative principles and an independent attitude.” That suited enough voters to elect me.

Once in the Senate, I found that many of my Republican colleagues were beginning their political conversations with issues that thrilled the “new base” — guns, prayer, abortion, marriage, and taxes. Others of us still went to church, preferred traditional marriage, were pro-life, and supported the Second Amendment, but didn’t start our politics there.

In 2006, I was elected Republican Conference chairman, Capitol Hill newspapers said I had become a “partisan attack dog.” Most of my Republican colleagues laughed at that characterization. They viewed me more like columnist George Will did in 2009 when he wrote, “[Alexander is] a Tennessee Republican of mild mien … in the Senate, he has been a model of the moderate Republicanism … as valuable as it is scarce.”

I detested being described as “moderate,” a lazy adjective typically applied to those who speak without shouting, work across the aisle to achieve results, and don’t always toe the party line. This label describes style more than philosophy. Bill Bennett, the Reagan education secretary and conservative talk show host who chaired my 1996 presidential campaign, once told me, “You and I basically believe the same things and could make speeches saying the same things, and after the speeches, someone would say of me, ‘What a good fire-breathing conservative.’ And after you speak, the same people would say, ‘What a nice, friendly fellow,’” Bennett said.

I especially resented self-righteous political pharisees who claimed to be a better Republican than I was, in the way someone might wander into Sunday school and claim to be a better Christian. I am a very Republican Republican, a bona fide Abraham Lincoln mount in Republican descended from Union soldiers who voted like they shot and who made certain that our congressional district had not elected a Democrat to Congress since Lincoln was president.

In the Senate, I learned pretty quickly that the division among Republicans was not one of moderates versus conservatives, but between conservatives who think their job is finished when they make a speech and conservatives who want to govern.

My priority of governing didn’t suit the Washington, D.C., political pharisees who had begun to infiltrate Tennessee Republicans. It didn’t help that I had always worked with Democrats and tried to represent all Tennesseans. During 2009, I provided more ammunition by voting to support Obama 10 percent of the time, according to Congressional Quarterly.

There was a ready explanation for most of those votes “supporting Obama.” I voted for appropriations bills since, as a committee member, I had helped write them. Forty percent of my votes in support of the president were to confirm his nominations. I believe that a president, having been elected by the people, is entitled to choose members of his administration, absent extraordinary circumstances.

But in politics, explanations rarely explain.

“There was a time when you could cast a difficult vote and go home and explain it to your constituents,” New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman told me. “Nowadays, TV talkers and the special interest groups have already explained your vote before you have a chance to get home and explain it yourself.”

I had won six statewide Republican primaries, more than any other Tennessean, but still some pharisees were calling me a RINO, a Republican In Name Only. And soon, I would find out that social media influencers would be replacing “rats in the barn” as the preferred medium for political persuasion.

“Why is it that Tennessee has been producing more talented national leaders of both political parties than perhaps any other state?” New York Times correspondent Jonathan Martin asked me in 2015.

Martin was referring to the last half-century, when Tennessee politics churned out a stream of nationally prominent senators, governors, ambassadors, Cabinet officials, presidential candidates, two Senate majority leaders, and a vice president of the United States.

My answer was simple — two-party competition. The emergence of a strong Tennessee Republican Party during the 1960s had produced four decades of vigorous party competition. Just as talented athletes are drawn to the Southeastern Conference to compete against the best athletes, talented Republicans are attracted to two-party politics to compete with talented Democrats, and vice versa. Both want to be where the action is.

At least for a few years, these talented competitors chose public service over law, medicine, business, or other pursuits. As a result, they were usually propelled by purpose as well as ambition. When the election was over, two-party competition among such able and purposeful candidates produced better government.

This had happened before. During the first half of the 19th century, contests between Democrats and Whigs sent a stream of Tennesseans to national prominence, including three presidents (Jackson, Polk, Johnson), a presidential candidate who had been governor of two states (Sam Houston), and a congressman who made a name for himself bear hunting in Tennessee and dying at the Alamo (Davy Crockett).

After the Civil War, Democrats ruled Tennessee, except in Lincolnite East Tennessee. One-party government mostly produced mediocre leadership, humdrum politics, backscratching, unaccountability, and occasional corruption. A century of mediocre leadership is one reason why, in the 1960s, Tennessee had the third lowest family incomes of any state, its textile jobs were fleeing overseas, and it rarely ranked first in anything to brag about. Voter dissatisfaction with this state of affairs — especially among East and West Tennesseans who felt left out — fueled the rise of the statewide Republican Party.

With two political parties competing, Tennessee’s economy became the fastest-growing in the South. Ken Burns celebrated our country music. Instead of companies struggling to persuade employees to move to Tennessee, many came on their own, looking for jobs in the state’s “It” cities. Improving self-esteem pervaded the state. Two-party political competition had done its job, producing elective leaders who kept competing to create this success once they got into office.

The year 2008 ended four decades of vigorous two-party competition. Tennessee soon became one of 40 states in which one political party controlled the governorship and both houses of the legislature or had enough power to block vetoes from the governor of the other party. In other words, Tennesseans are among the 80 percent of Americans who live in a state where the minority party does not have a meaningful voice in government, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In his memoir, Senator Everett Dirksen wrote that his practice was to adopt a “tentative position” on an issue from which he would then proceed to find a solution among competing views. That skill made Dirksen the most powerful legislator of his time — although it attracted criticism for being unprincipled.

“One of my principles is flexibility,” Dirksen would reply.

Dirksen might not survive in today’s “Digital Democracy,” which rewards politicians who stick to extreme positions to raise money and win primaries. There is not much reward for those who work in the problem-solving center, adjusting their initial positions until they agree. It should come as no surprise, then, that there is not much market for consensus.

“Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome,” Berkshire- Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger said.

Will Tennessee’s new Republican one-party era provide incentives to attract candidates who will continue the progress of the last four decades, or will it encourage the kind of lackluster leadership, unaccountable government, occasional scandal, and economic stagnation that flourished during the Democrat one-party century before the 1960s?

It is too soon to know.