The Republican National Convention That Changed the GOP

As the Republican Party gathers for its convention this year in Milwaukee, it is emrbacing its most combative partisan voices and adopting a far-right platform. Nearly 50 years ago, another convention set the party on this path.

The 1976 Republican National Convention was the culmination of a six-month struggle for what one national TV news reporter deemed “the soul of the Republican Party.” Primary by primary, President Gerald Ford had clawed for his party’s nomination against a conservative challenger, California Gov. Ronald Reagan. The fight had come down to the convention, where neither candidate arrived with the majority of delegates needed to win.

At the time, ideology did not primarily define either major political party. Democrats and Republicans both contained a spectrum of conservatives and liberals. They focused on winning overlapping pools of voters near the center. Recent history seemed to prove that candidates on the far left or right would only experience embarrassing, landslide losses.

President Ford subscribed to this conventional wisdom. A tight-fisted fiscal conservative himself, Ford wanted the Republican Party—struggling in the polls after Watergate—to rebuild itself with a broad appeal, by eschewing “wedge” issues, culture war, and Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”

To that effect, Ford announced a clemency program for Vietnam War deserters and draft evaders, invited prominent feminists and Black lawmakers to personal meetings in the White House, and appointed as his vice president the standard bearer for liberal Republicans, Nelson Rockefeller. He called for party leaders in 1975 to create a “tent big enough for all that care about this great country.”

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Reagan had a different approach. The former actor belonged to a growing bloc of conservatives in the GOP, who wanted something new: a party that prioritized right-wing ideology, rather than shied away from it. “A Republican Party, raising a banner of bold colors, no pale pastels,” Reagan said at the outset of his campaign against Ford. “A banner instantly recognizable as standing for certain values which will not be compromised.”

Ford and his supporters saw Reagan as a radical conservative, far outside the mainstream. He had opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, won his first campaign for governor through what a pollster dubbed “white backlash,” and had a history of bizarre statements. That included predicting the imminent totalitarian takeover of the U.S., declaring the nation simply had not fought hard enough in the Vietnam War, and defending President Nixon for Watergate up until the week he resigned.

The top political columnist for the New York Times wrote: “The notion that Ronald Reagan can get the Republican nomination away from Ford … is patently ridiculous unless you suspect the Republicans of suicidal tendencies.”

Reagan quickly appeared to prove the doubters right. He lost the first five primaries against Ford, before a dramatic turnaround in the South. Building on the Southern Strategy, he assembled a coalition of primary voters by combining conservative Republicans with crossover votes from white Democrats upset by civil rights and social movements. He tapped not just Cold War anxieties and populist anti-tax fervor, but also social and cultural backlash.

A blitz of outside spending from new right-wing groups bolstered him. A frantic, unsigned memo from the Ford campaign read: “We are in real danger of being out-organized by a small number of highly motivated right-wing nuts.”

It came to a head at the 1976 convention.

Reagan’s primary wins flooded the Republican Party with new delegates. Movement conservatives who had been outsiders—earlier deemed “nuts”—became official decision-makers within the party. They gained not only a voice in the nomination, but leverage to steer its rules and its platform into a new direction, away from the center.

As delegates arrived to Kemper Arena in Kansas City, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite commented, “We’re all standing by here for the shootout in the K.C. Stockyards.”

Cheers and boos competed in the 18,000-seat arena as Reagan and Ford’s supporters traded off giving speeches on the dais.

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Conservatives, such as former Texas governor John Connally, echoed Reagan’s most hard-right rhetoric. “There are those who would nationalize our economy and reduce all of us to a mass of mediocrity,” he declared from the dais. “Smothering vitality from all our people and reducing life to hopeless despair.”

Reagan’s allies pushed for changes to the party’s platform, adding language about “social issues” the party had largely shied away from: support for constitutional amendments against abortion and in favor of school prayer, opposition to gun registration, and support for states to enact the death penalty.

Ford dismissed the importance of the platform, as candidates often do.

“I was looking at winning,” Ford later recalled to his biographer, James Cannon. “And my view was, ‘Who the hell is going to worry about that platform?’ I'm not going to go by it. I'm not going to be bound by it.”

He instructed his allies to let the conservative platform proposals pass—and they did.

When the moment for the presidential nomination arrived, Ford won. He outlasted Reagan in a scathing, personal battle, delivering the future president the only electoral defeat of his career. But, the newly nominated Ford no longer presided over a big tent party. The Republican Party had gone on the record as a conservative party. It had planted its flag in the emerging culture wars. These represented fundamental changes in American politics.

At the end of the convention, struggling to unify fractious Republicans behind his candidacy, Ford invited his defeated opponent to the dais to speak.

After congratulating Ford, Reagan triumphantly announced he had achieved the goal of his candidacy.

“I believe the Republican Party has a platform that is a banner of bold, unmistakable colors with no pale pastel shades,” he said, as his delegates, the movement conservatives who had been outsiders, filled the arena with raucous cheers.

Ben Bradford is an award-winning public radio journalist and the creator and host of the political history podcast series Landslide, part of the NPR Network.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.