Conclusions

Abstract

Going into the 2016 presidential election, the split in the Republican Party is growing. There is an ideological fissure of serious magnitude, and further the demographics do not support the Republican Party. Whoever secures the Republican nomination in 2016 will have to thread the needle like no other Republican candidate since Richard Nixon in 1968. If the past twenty-five years are any preview, the Republican primary voters will need to be decisive as to what path their party will take. Time is not on their side. The conservative takeover of the Republican Party by Barry Goldwater and his followers in 1964 did not see immediate results. Until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the moderates still maintained strong power within the party. Since the Reagan presidency, the conservative right has not had that true candidate to revere.