The far right claims there's a 'uniparty' in Washington. Reality suggests otherwise.
Conservative populists in the Republican Party might have you believe that there aren't two major parties in the United States, but one conglomeration of politicians in Washington who are ignoring the desires of the American people. In its latest attacks against members of its own party, this faction has embraced a term that disparagingly links supposedly apostate Republicans to Democrats across the aisle: "uniparty." Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene used this descriptor last week to justify her calls for the GOP to remove Republican Speaker Mike Johnson from office. Greene said that Johnson, arguably the most conservative speaker in modern times, had overseen "a complete and total surrender to" Democrats in the House. Without a change, she continued, "we are a Uniparty that is hell-bent on remaining on the path of self-inflicted destruction."
Greene's castigation of her party's speaker, which came amid bipartisan negotiations over legislation to provide fresh assistance to Ukraine in its war with Russia, is just the latest episode in an ongoing conflict within the GOP between its more populist-insurgent and more traditionally conservative wings. Previous clashes have unfolded over the House speakership as well as spending bills to fund the federal government. Even if Greene insists that these compromises have "angered our Republican base so much and given them very little reason to vote for a Republican House majority," they seem to be more reflective of how out of step her own faction is from the rest of its party than of any moderate shift among Republicans as a whole.
In fact, our current political moment is arguably farther away from having anything resembling a uniparty than at any other time in modern U.S. history. Based on their voting records, Democratic and Republican members of Congress have become increasingly polarized, and both the more moderate and more conservative wings of the congressional GOP have moved to the right at similar rates. Meanwhile, polling suggests that Americans now are more likely to view the parties as distinct from one another than in the past, an indication that the public broadly doesn't see a uniparty in Washington. Although there are areas where the parties are less divided, the broader uniparty claim is at odds with our highly polarized and divided political era.
Congressional parties are farther apart than ever
A first strike against the uniparty claim is the evidence that the parties in Congress have steadily drifted farther apart ideologically over the past 50 years. The first dimension of DW-NOMINATE, a commonly used metric from VoteView.com that measures how liberal or conservative members' voting records are, demonstrates how the gulf between the parties has widened tremendously. On a scale ranging from -1 (most liberal) to 1 (most conservative), the average Democrat and average Republican in the House and Senate were roughly 0.5 units apart in the first couple of decades after World War II. But today, that gap is about 0.9 units — nearly half the scale.
https://abcnews.go.com/538/claims-uniparty-washington-reality-suggests/story
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