Part II of the book shifts in focus from primary transformation to party transformation. This chapter tests whether primaries can change parties under the most likely conditions: Republican factional primaries in the Tea Party era. Using a difference-in-differences design, this chapter shows that in this most visible case, pressure from the reactionary Republican faction in primary elections served to reorient the party rightwards. It therefore demonstrates that, under the right circumstances, primaries can contribute to partisan polarization in Congress.

The biggest change in the party coalitions since the 1980s has been the movement of high-education whites into the Democratic Party and the defection of low-education whites to the GOP. Drawing on evidence from opinion surveys, election returns, and demographic data, Chapter 3 documents the parties’ changing voters and geographic constituencies. These trends continued in the 2020 election despite Democratic efforts to reverse the party’s declining popularity among noncollege whites, with some signs educational divides will spread to other racial and ethnic groups. Candidates, activists, political appointees and staffers, judges, party leaders, and campaign workers all demonstrate the same increasing divisions as rank-and-file voters. Democrats may suffer electorally because the Electoral College and apportionment of the Senate grants noncollege whites disproportionate voting power, but college-educated citizens punch above their weight in other forms of influence: as thought leaders, interest group activists, educators, media figures, scientific experts, candidates, political professionals, lawyers, and financial donors.

Scholars often frame Republican supporters in 1860 as the moral center of American politics. The Republicans, after all, were antislavery proponents, at least in a moderate sense. But it is important not to infuse Republican Party morality with a more modern ethic, such as an antiracist or antiviolence stance. Most Republicans focused on White enslavers and the institution of slavery without developing much policy on freed slaves beyond colonization - the removal of African Americans from the United States. Despite the Republican Party’s self-promotion as a coalition committed to peaceful law and order (in contrast to the bullying leadership of slaveholders and Democrats), it was an organization built to resist and fight. In the 1860 election cycle, the Wide Awakes, Abraham Lincoln’s Republican backers, engaged their Democratic counterparts in physical battle across the northern, urban landscape. Shootings, stabbings, chasings, and beatings marked these clashes. Chapter 6 explores how partisan physical and electoral fights would shape questions of violence and the national state in the challenging period between Lincoln’s election and his assumption of office.

It has been widely assumed the Tea Party paved the way for Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2016. Yet, little research has examined the transition from the Tea Party’s takeover of the Republican Party to Trump’s subsequent capture of the GOP. This chapter examines the Tea Party’s engagements with Donald Trump between 2009 and 2018. Tea Party activists initially admired Trump’s amplification of the birther conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that Barack Obama was not a natural born citizen. However, activists dismissed or ridiculed Trump’s political ambitions. By 2013, activists had warmed to Trump’s positions on Islam and immigration, but still did not view him as a viable political candidate. After Trump won the 2016 election, there was a sea shift in tone, as the remaining Tea Party activists enthusiastically embraced his America First agenda. These observations are corroborated by an analysis of the impact that Tea Party activism had on the 2016 Republican primaries for president and the general election. Our analyses shows that Tea Party activism had little impact on helping Trump become President, consistent with the insurgency’s larger ambivalence about Trump’s candidacy.

Wide consensus exists that the Tea Party influenced the Republican Party. Exactly what those effects were, and how they were achieved is less clear. This chapter examines how the Tea Party disrupted the US political process between 2010 and 2018. Using granular spatiotemporal information on Tea Party activism, we analyze the insurgency’s impact on the Republican primaries for the 2010 election, the 2010 general election, and the aftermath. Our results show that the number of Tea Party protests in a congressional district predicted the number of subsequent primary challengers, and that the number of local Tea Party groups in a district predicted who won. We further examine the emergence in 2010 of the Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives, which institutionalized the insurgency’s influence in Congress. Of the 71 politicians who joined the Caucus, just 23 remained in the House by 2018. Despite the declining influence of the Tea Party on the streets and in government, its activism appears to have increased radicalization within the Republican Party. We conclude that the Tea Party served as a congressional watchdog, successfully keeping Republicans acting in line with its goals.

After 2014, the Tea Party began reverting back to its elite origins, as grassroots activism mostly disappeared and politicians aligned with the insurgency left office. This chapter describes the major synthetic conclusions of our book, and the current state of the Tea Party insurgency. Overall, we argue the Tea Party followed a top-down, bottom-up, and then top-down trajectory. Our research underscores the importance of understanding how economic threats motivate conservative activism, as well as the enduring importance of the choices that activists make about mobilizing structures to sustain their activism. The diffuse, decentralized mobilizing structures built by Tea Party activists were similarly selected by progressive movements, such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. As a result, the lessons drawn from the Tea Party may apply to other recent waves of mobilization.

The standard explanation for Trump’s 2016 victory is that it was the culmination of a long-term right-wing capture of the Republican Party. However, in 2016, the most consistently right-wing candidate was Ted Cruz. Trump was unusual in that he was the candidate of no faction. Rather, Trump’s low-cost populist strategy, in which he relied on mass rallies and social media, was effective because the factions who backed his opponents could not coalesce to keep him out. Trump won the GOP primary with an historically low share of the vote. This chapter also shows that Trump was not the first to successfully pursue such a strategy. In the wake of the reforms of the early 1970s, a little-known Jimmy Carter was similarly able to capture the Democratic nomination in 1976 on the basis of a low-cost direct-communication strategy. The Democratic Party adapted then to keep future populists out. Whether the Republican Party will do so after Trump remains unclear.

Chapter 13 analyses how profound socio-demographic changes in America have contributed to a shift from the faith-driven culture wars of the twentieth century to a more secular identity politics between liberal cosmopolitans and populist communitarians in the twenty-first century. This trend appears closely linked to the rapid decline of American Christianity, which along with globalisation, individualisation and rapid ethnic change has led to an identity crisis in parts of the white working class. Given the relative unresponsiveness of the traditional party system to this development, Donald Trump succeeded in capitalising on this crisis of identity through a ‘hostile takeover’ of the GOP by the alt-right, and a gradual ‘Europeanisation’ of the American right, which shifted from a faith-based social conservativism to a more identitarian and populist white identity politics.

Given the Trump administration’s ambiguous approach to religion discussed in the previous chapter, Chapter 15 explores how American Christians have reacted to it. It finds that although there initially appeared to be a certain level of religious immunity among practicing Christians against Trumpism, this religious ‘vaccination effect’ against national populism has since diminished and even reversed to the extent that, unlike in Europe, American Christians have become one of the populist right’s most loyal constituencies. American Christians’ ‘conversion’ to Trump appears, however, to be less the result of a shift in their attitudes than of supply-side factors. Specifically, a perceived lack of political alternatives as well as the inability and unwillingness of Christian leaders to publicly speak out against Trumpism seem to have contributed to this development.

Chapter 2 presents the federal response to violence against women. We begin the chapter with a brief overview of the history of domestic violence in the United States. We then analyze the response of Congress to the domestic violence epidemic as compared to the Supreme Court’s response. This detailed presentation reveals the gaps that federal laws havr created by leaving states the option to enforce them and relegating nearly all of the enforcement of domestic violence law to local authorities. This chapter underscores the role and limi, of federal policy in remedying the inequities among women in their personal protection from domestic violence. The lack of a cohesive federal response contributes to all four levels of gender inequality in domestic violence policy.

Using quantitative data, we construct an explanation of the adoption of policies that address the intersection of firearms and domestic violence. Removing guns from perpetrators of domestic violence, including domestic violence among unmarried couples, decreases intimate partner deaths. Beyond the very positive effects that laws on DV gun ownership by domestic violence perpetrators can have to make women safer, the sponsorship and passage of these laws over the last thirty years have increased. Using our original dataset of domestic violence firearm law (DVFL) enactments, we analyze the circumstances under which states adopt these laws. We find evidence that state and federal factors that influence policy adoption employ a set of political and demographic indicators as independent variables, particularly, the number of gun-related homicides, legislative partisan control, citizen ideology, federal legislation, and election years influence the likelihood of DVFL enactments. We also find support for the effects of vertical policy diffusion but not for horizontal policy diffusion across states. We found no effects associated with support for gun ownership or the percent of women state legislators.

The central claim of this chapter is that racial politics, stemming from the racial realignment between the Democratic and Republican Parties that began much earlier than many scholars appreciate, has played a critically important and yet undernoticed role in the breakdown of constitutional norms in recent decades. An increasing number of American legal scholars are writing about the importance of constitutional norms, also sometimes called constitutional conventions. Such norms are not legal in status, but they impose obligations of compliance on government officials that can be as great as legal obligations – they guide and constrain how officials “exercise political discretion.” Although constitutional norms are not required by the letter of the US Constitution, they are appropriately denominated “constitutional” because they help vindicate the spirit – or the purposes – of the Constitution. To violate a constitutional norm without sufficient public-regarding justification is not unconstitutional, but it “is anticonstitutional.” Constitutional norms were placed under great pressure during the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

Fierce partisan conflict in the United States is not new. Throughout American history, there have been polarizing struggles over fundamental questions relating to the meaning of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the relationship between the two. These struggles over ideals have become all encompassing when joined to battles over what it means to be an American – conflicts that have become more regular and dangerous with the rise of the administrative state. The idea of a “State” cuts more deeply than suggested by Max Weber’s definition of “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Beyond the powers of government, the State represents a centralizing ambition (at least for progressive reformers) to cultivate, or impose, a vision of citizenship. In Randolph Bourne’s words, the State is a “concept of power” that comes alive in defense of or in conflict with an ideal of how such foundational values of Americanism as “free and enlightened” are to be interpreted and enforced. The ideal is symbolized not by the Declaration and the Constitution but rather in rallying emblems such as the flag and Uncle Sam.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) is good at using democracy to advance its agenda. Over the course of many decades, the United States’ foremost advocate of gun rights has built substantial political power by cultivating a politically unified and engaged base of grassroots supporters. The political intensity of US gun owners – and the NRA’s ability to mobilize them into action – has enabled the organization to consistently defeat proposed gun regulations and is a key reason that it has become a central pillar of the contemporary Republican Party.