When I showed up in Texas in 2001, its popular former governor, George W. Bush, was finishing his first year in the White House. He, just as every other Republican presidential candidate since 1980, had won Texas’s electoral college votes. No Democratic senate candidate had won an election since Lloyd Bentsen’s successful reelection in 1988, which occurred at the same time as the state voted against the presidential ticket that included his name in the second slot. And, yet, in 2001, Texas Democrats sat in 17 seats in the U.S. House compared to only 13 Republican seats. It was not until Tom Delay’s mid-decade redistricting in 2004 that Texans would finally send more Republicans than Democrats to the U.S. House.

Although the word “Texas” does not appear in Marty Cohen’s Moral Victories in the Battle for Congress, his argument surely applies. He documents how voters were more willing to cast Republican presidential ballots than congressional ballots and then shows how the latter caught up to the former. Part of his explanation rests on the transformation of the Republican Party from business interests to the religious right. This transformation changed the contestation of ideas in congressional elections from economics, where Democratic incumbents could more easily show their moderation, to “moral traditionalism,” where they could not.

Too frequently, congressional scholars start their analysis of congressional politics with who shows up to sit in those seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Cohen takes one step back and examines whom the Republicans nominate to stand for those elections. He shows how, in relying on “moral traditionalism,” the party enjoyed majorities in the House for much of the last 25 years.

In the first chapter, Cohen documents the lag of Republican success in congressional races. The Texas pattern was certainly not unique. Cohen shows how Republican presidential candidates did much better among white voters, southern white voters, and southern Protestant white voters than did Republican congressional candidates. It was not until 1992–94 that the separated trends became one. Before that, Republican presidential candidates did more than 30% better than Republican congressional candidates. Cohen’s argument is that the Republican congressional candidates’ focus on moral traditionalism helped pair the votes and that pairing helped Republicans achieve dominance ever since.

Because the critical period was 25 years ago and because some congressional elections already are pretty low-information affairs, documenting this trend across time is no easy feat. Cohen relies on the electoral recaps provided by The Almanac of American Politics to measure the extent to which the election for each particular House seat featured moral issues, which include “abortion, school prayer, censorship of obscene art, gay rights, religion’s role in public life, and women’s issues with a more tinge” (p. 21). Cohen shows how fewer than 10% of Republican congressional candidates stressed conservative moral messages before the Republican takeover in 1994; afterward, that percentage increases more than three times. At the same time, Democratic candidates increasingly took the opposite stand on these issues. Across time, economic issues are indeed more prevalent, although moral issues are featured more than racial issues.

Cohen argues for a nuanced understanding of how this transformation happened. He ultimately wants to argue that “the congressional realignment driven predominately by moral issues was more of a bottom-up story than anything else” (p. 51). Finding data to describe the broad trends was already difficult enough; in lieu of finding systematic data to test this bottom-up proposition, he relies on in-depth case studies that are presented in chapters 4, 5, and 6. Although the names and dates, of course, change, what the examples of Todd Tiahrt (in Kansas), Bob Inglis (in South Carolina), and Zach Wamp (in Tennessee), respectively, show is that the transformation did not occur all at one time or because of one person. In each story, Cohen describes how a Republican Party dominated by business interests would lose to conservative or moderate Democratic incumbents in districts that Republican presidential candidates were winning quite handily at the top of the ticket. In each case, Cohen shows how a divided Republican Party helped hand the seat to Democrats even as Republican presidential candidates were racking up huge wins. It was only after the party was captured by the religious right that the two sides became unified—and only then could they defeat the Democrats. As long as economics was the primary fight, Democrats Dan Glickman (in Kansas), Liz Patterson (in South Carolina), and Marilyn Lloyd (in Tennessee) could portray themselves as conservative enough for those who voted for the Republican presidential candidate to split their ticket. When the issues changed to traditional moralism, the Democratic incumbents either lost or retired. And once the seat flipped to the Republican column, there it has remained.

Having laid out the micro-theory in the three case studies, Cohen ends the book with more big-data analyses. He analyzes the congressional vote in a two-stage model presented in chapter 7 and explicated in chapter 8. Using the first stage to predict the likelihood of the voter receiving the campaign messages from both candidates, he uses the second stage to predict congressional vote choice. In these analyses, he combines his data from The Almanac of American Politics with survey data from the American National Elections Studies. Using a slew of control variables, Cohen shows how his micro-theory is at least consistent with the data: “While incumbency and party identification still dominate House elections as we might expect, there is still room for moral, economic, and racial issues to matter. Moral issues exhibit a large effect on the vote and account for significant levels of polarization across the country” (p. 210).

As in any good conclusion, Cohen speculates about what his analysis suggests for the House of Representatives both today and in the future. The Republicans in the House today are more southern and morally conservative—even more so after the 2018 election, which is not part of his analysis. Although Trump and this transformed Republican House delegation seem to fit hand in glove, the nontraditional candidacy of Donald Trump and his reelection effort make speculation more difficult.

Cohen’s book is an important read for those trying to understand today’s Republican Party. I am not always convinced that the data analyses in the book are as compelling as they should be, but the story that Cohen is trying to tell is sufficiently powerful that quibbling about datasets or models seems superfluous. Having said that, on my reading, the book is a bit underdone at points, and the writing is not as careful or as sharp as it should be in a published manuscript. For example, the last paragraph in chapter 8 argues that the Republican Party is well positioned because of the polarization on abortion and gay rights. Although an argument could be made for the former, I suspect that few public opinion scholars would agree with the latter. Similarly, the axis of figure 7.4, which shows all the years as “1986” and the title of figure 2.2 that indicates that Democratic candidates have become more conservative rather than more liberal over time are two more obvious examples of carelessness in the manuscript’s final preparation. Marty Cohen’s book deserves to be read because of how compelling his narrative is and how it jibes with what is happening today both within the electorate and inside Congress.