Buchanan’s 1992 primary challenge pushed Bush and the GOP platform rightward

Evidence

At the end of the Gulf War, President Bush’s approval rating stood at 89 percent. But with the recession of 1990–91, and with his reneging on his “no new taxes” pledge, his popularity soon plummeted. Sensing the president’s vulnerability, Pat Buchanan—a standard-bearer for the Religious Right who had worked for Nixon, Ford, and Reagan—decided to challenge Bush in the 1992 primaries. Concerned about Buchanan’s level of support, Bush reached out to the National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention and began to more openly champion conservative social values. In this way, Bush ushered in what Reed termed “the most conservative and the most pro-family platform in the history of the party.” It called for a ban on abortion, opposed LGBT rights, and defended school prayer and homeschool rights. Buchanan didn’t unseat Bush, but he did shift the Republican Party farther to the Right. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 323

Categorization

• XREF: Illustrates the mechanism by which religious-right pressure moved the Republican platform — narrative evidence for her anti-hypocrisy continuity thesis, the primary-election pressure channel. — connects to: Goldwater’s defeat shifted GOP dominance from moderates to free-market conservatism — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 506