The Rise of the Right

As a Canadian, my understanding of the G.O.P. has always been through a game of proxy, the vague outline of an idea once removed. Through friends I’d hear stories about separatists in Alberta, or the lone student who showed up to their small-town Ontario lecture with a “Make American Great Again” cap. Their stories, to me, verged on lore. Growing up as a teenager in one of only two Green Party-voting municipalities in all of Canada, I was used to a very different sort of “fringe” politics: cycling lane protests and organic farm co-ops.

Then 2017 happened, and Donald Trump started his first term in office. Then 2024 happened, and Trump was elected to his second term. For the second time in less than a decade, publishers and writers and editors everywhere have found themselves asking: what was America really, and how many Americans had been living with blinders on?

I’d like to pose a variation of this question. What is America—and how much of it can be found through looking at a history of the Republican Party?

Here is a short exploration of that question through several visualizations. I mostly made these using D3 and a little bit of Datawrapper:

There have been more Republican-learning presidencies than any other in American history.

By and large, the history of the United States is a history of Republican triumph. Even when adjusted to match today’s ideological baselines, about 2 in 5 presidents line up more with today’s Republicans compared to the 1 in 5 that reflects today’s Democratic agenda. (The rest fall into mixed or transitional presidencies.)

Even when looking at official party lines, there have been three more Republican presidencies in America’s history than Democratic presidencies—the margin is slim but the G.O.P. triumphs by official counts.

George W. Bush, a Republican, is the only U.S. president to have graduated from both Harvard and Yale.

The most common alma mater for an America president is Harvard University, followed by Yale University. George W. Bush is the only American president to have graduated from both; he graduated from Harvard Law School after his undergraduate studies at Yale.

Though not a Republican, Andrew Johnson is the only American president to never had received formal education. He served from 1865 to 1869. Wow!

Ohio has produced more Republican presidents than any other state.

Overwhelmingly, most Republican presidents have hailed from Ohio—a total of seven. In fact, Ohio is the single biggest “presidential factory” in U.S. history, though it only narrowly edges out the seven presidents that the state of Virginia produced.

The data speaks for itself. Historically, this country has belonged to the Republicans.