Fascinating so Newt Gingrich broke their chokehold on the House at least.
Shame it wasn’t cemented but he can take great credit for it.
Yep. Read about the Contract with America...that was the key element of it.
And the other big thing was the breaking of the media monopoly. Rush Limbaugh and the nationalization of talk radio (which had also been quite local). Conservatives were able to do an end-run around the network news.
Same stuff that is happening today...Dems were panicking that they couldn't control the narrative so they tried to marginalize and then compete with talk radio (Air America). And then Drudge broke the Clinton scandal and voila...enter the Internet. Conservatives were so shut out of mainstream media that we took very readily to any and all forms of alternative communication--and maybe you can argue that's why we continue to dominate those spaces today.
What the GOP actually got accomplished in the 1990s was limited and didn't go as far as many of us wanted. But it was the first meaningful turn rightward since Reagan, and galvanized people like me (a mushy moderate fresh out of college) into fierce conservatives.