Republican Party

The Republican Party enters Andy Warhol’s diary less as an account of policy than as a presence in campaign talk, Washington ceremony, and elite social life. Warhol could be drawn briefly toward its pageantry and company, yet he also described himself as a Democrat and registered a sharp contrast between the excitement of a Republican inauguration and the people gathered around it.

Campaigns and Political Associations

Warhol’s political associations could turn casual remarks into potential work. When Bob called California and said Warhol had agreed to make a poster of Ronald Reagan, Warhol worried that an offhand joke had become a commitment and that he might be pushed into producing it. He described Bob as eager to become an insider Republican, while the prospect left Warhol having nightmares about being drawn into a project he had not firmly agreed to undertake.

In October 1980, Warhol recorded that he had turned down a Ronald Reagan cover for New York. Newspapers nevertheless labeled him a “One-Night Republican.” The episode captures how quickly a public association could be inferred from a single opportunity, even when his action was refusal rather than endorsement.

Social Networks and Public Image

The Republican connection also ran through Warhol’s social circle. Before the 1981 inauguration, Bob was described as delighted by his Republican acquaintances, including Doria and Jerry Zipkin, and as no longer interested in discoing. In Warhol’s account, political affiliation overlapped with access and social excitement: Republican company formed part of the world around Bob, even as the diary’s attention remained on personal loyalties and changing enthusiasms rather than party organization.

The public image of Warhol as politically available could coexist with a more complicated personal stance. His reported refusal of the Reagan cover, the newspaper’s “One-Night Republican” label, and his description of himself as a liberal Democrat do not resolve into a sustained partisan conversion. Instead, the diary shows the instability of political labels when celebrity, work, and social access meet.

The Inauguration and Partisan Feeling

At the inauguration, Warhol encountered Republican politics as spectacle and atmosphere. During the swearing-in, a Marine passed along the news that the hostages had left Tehran; helicopters patrolled overhead, and bulletproof glass surrounded the podium. The ceremony joined national security and political theater in a setting where even the announcement of the hostages’ departure became part of the scene.

Listening to the inaugural address briefly fired Warhol up enough to feel like a Republican. Once it ended, however, he looked at the faces around him and felt glad to be a Democrat, concluding that there was a real difference. The reversal is the diary’s clearest statement of his political identification: the ceremony could momentarily draw him toward the party’s energy, but the people in the room returned him to his own affiliation.

Political Identity in Everyday Life

Warhol’s stated identity as a liberal Democrat was qualified by his refusal to vote: he said he avoided voting because he did not want to be called for jury duty. At the same time, he offered employees Election Day off if they promised to vote Democratic. The combination makes his politics practical and personal rather than programmatic—an expressed preference, a workplace inducement, and an avoidance of the ballot itself.

Across these episodes, the Republican Party functions as both a social network and a public label, and as the focus of a brief, reversible response to political spectacle. The diary preserves that ambivalence without turning it into a conversion story: Warhol could joke about a campaign, decline a cover, enjoy Republican company, and still identify himself as a Democrat.