Before the tea party, the GOP was actually getting more moderate

washingtonpost.com ^ | 6/17/14 | Aaron Blake

[cotton1706]

The Republican Party — and both parties, really — have gotten more extreme in recent years. Everyone knows this.

What many people don't know is that, for the GOP, it wasn't a linear move.

As the below chart from the Pew Research Center shows, Republicans in the late 1990s and early 2000s actually appeared to move away from the far right portion of the political spectrum and toward moderation.

While 13 percent of people registered as "consistent conservatives" in 1994 and 20 percent claim that mantle today, the number fitting that description actually dipped down to 6 percent in 2004 — about one-third of where it is today.

And while 45 percent of Republicans were at least "mostly conservative" in 1994 and 53 percent fit that description today, that number dipped down to 31 percent in 2004.

Those are pretty big dips.

So what happened around 2004? Well, for starters, we're guessing a lot of it has to do with the fact that the GOP wasn't the opposition party. At the time, they were in the middle of the George W. Bush presidency and held both the House and Senate as well.

But Democrats don't show any similar differences between when they have been in power and when they haven't. Indeed, their progression toward the political extreme has been very consistent over the past 20 years. (It's also possible that the two parties simply adjust to being out of power in different ways.)

[Cincinatus]

Clinton signed the balanced budgets that the GOP Congress passed. As you will soon see, Obama will not do that with legislation that the new GOP Congress to take office next year will pass.

[Lakeshark]

He only did that after ratcheting spending up to the point he knew would eventually break the agreement.

It did.

He was good at pretending, he just did what was politically expedient to keep up the pretense.

I'm not saying the bamster isn't worse, he's far worse, but he's standing on the Clinton foundation. Clinton moved the debate so far to the left that they can now do almost anything with impunity.

[Mike Darancette]

As the below chart from the Pew Research Center shows, Republicans in the late 1990s and early 2000s actually appeared to move away from the far right portion of the political spectrum and toward moderation.

And that got us Barack Hussein Obama.

[TigersEye]

Before the tea party, the GOP was actually getting more moderate

Well, duh!