Republican In Name Only

In the 1930s and 1940s, Me-too Republicans described those running on a platform of agreeing with the Democratic Party, proclaiming only minor or moderating philosophical differences.[11][12] An example is two-time presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey, who ran against the popular Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successor Harry Truman. Dewey did not oppose Roosevelt's New Deal programs altogether, but merely campaigned on the promise that Republicans would run them more efficiently and less corruptly.

Let me warn the nation, against the smooth evasion which says, "of course we believe all these things, we believe in social-security, we believe in work for the unemployed, we believe in saving homes—cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things. But we do not like the way the president's administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them—we will do more of them, we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything!

— President and Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, addressing a Democratic audience in New York, September 1936[13][14]

From 1936 to 1976, the more centrist members of the Republican Party frequently won the national nomination with candidates such as Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie, Thomas E. Dewey, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The mainstream of the Republican Party was generally supportive of the New Deal. In the 1950s, conservatives such as Robert A. Taft and Barry Goldwater, who rallied against "me-too Republicans",[15] were considered outside of the mainstream of the then-centrist GOP; serious consideration was given to leaving the GOP and forming a new conservative party in coalition with the "states' rights" Democrats of the South.[16]

In the 1960s and 1970s, Republicans considered liberal on domestic policy but hawkish on foreign policy were sometimes called "Nixonian", or "Rockefeller Republicans".[17] While the term Nixonian took on other meanings after the Watergate scandal, neither expression had always been considered pejorative.

In the 1980s, the term gypsy moth Republican described Republicans from the Northeast and Midwest who voted against the Ronald Reagan administration's proposed cuts in aid to economically distressed people, contrasting with boll weevil Democrats, who voted for these cuts.[18][19] The gypsy moth is an invasive species destructive to trees in the Northeastern United States.[19][20]

In 2015 the term cuckservative, a portmanteau of cuckold and conservative, was popularized on the online forum 4chan, and embraced by both internet trolls and the nativist alt-right.[21][22][23] The metaphorical " cuck" is represented in a genre of interracial pornography as a masochistic white husband who allows his wife to have sex with a stronger black man, thereby participating in his own symbolic emasculation.[24][25][21][26][27] In white supremacist vernacular the term is an accusation of yielding to non-white interests on issues such as immigration or modern display of the Confederate flag;[22][28] however, the term gained use (with some controversy)[21][22][23] by more mainstream conservatives to denounce Republicans whose compromises included vote trading, rhetorical restraint in deference to donors, cooperation with Democrats on any particular initiative, or attempting to court voters by making appeals to supposedly liberal ideals.[23][29]