I know we are all concerned, to varying degrees, about the Republicans making large gains in the midterm elections, but demographers will tell you that, in the long term, the GOP is in really bad shape. The age and race demographics are working against them. And, so, thoughtful people on both the left and the right are offering them advice about how to adapt their strategies to meet the future.
I don’t find Ruy Teixeira’s (pdf) advice to be very compelling, however. Ruy advises the party to move to the center on social issues. I’d agree with that on some issues. Tolerance of homosexuality would get them in line with the younger generations. I don’t think Republicans get any bang for the buck by opposing contraception or hinting that woman belong back in the kitchen. So, yes, they need to lighten up a little and get with the times. But I can’t honestly say that they’d benefit from any slackening in their anti-choice position. In fact, their anti-choice position probably explains why three out of every hundred blacks votes for them instead of zero out of a hundred. And their anti-choice position actually aligns quite well with both Latino and Muslim immigrants. Taking the Pope’s side on the reproductive choice issue actually helps Republicans a lot in many heavily Catholic districts all throughout the country. And the passion the issue arouses provides the foot soldiers the party needs for campaigns. If the Republicans got squishy on banning abortion, they’d have next to nothing to appeal to new immigrants or to rally their base. I wish I could advise differently, because I am so tired of the GOP’s assault on women’s rights, but I call them like I see them.
Ruy also recommends that Republicans focus on white voters who are either working class, or have no more than an undergraduate degree. Frankly, they are already doing that, so I don’t really see this as very constructive advice. I guess the question is how the GOP can appeal to these voters without alienating non-white voters. What kind of messages resonate with modestly educated white voters that aren’t based in resentment and racial animus? My advice would be more along the lines of trying to appeal to recent graduates and young people without respect to their race.
Finally, Ruy says that Republicans have to move beyond anti-tax and antigovernment rhetoric. I think this last part is probably the key that can unlock the other doors.
But, as Tom Schaller notes, the GOP is currently following none of this advice.
What’s interesting to me about most of Teixeira’s suggested changes is that the GOP is either not doing them, or doing something close to the opposite. If anything, the opposite is happening. Indeed, the single biggest storyline of the past year for conservatives and the Republican Party is the rise of the tea party protest movement.
On immigration, if anything the GOP has taken a turn toward anti-amnesty, fence-building xenophobia. The Republicans may have eased off the gas pedal somewhat on tax-cutting, but the conversational shift to deficit reduction and fears of growing government size still carries strong and familiar anti-government overtones. There seems to be less Republican focus on hot-button issues like evolution/creationism or global warming–which presumably turn off many college-educated whites by dint of their anti-empirical and anti-intellectual content–but that is a matter of salience and decibel level rather than a transformation in the party’s issue positions or platforms.
Now, the reason I say that the key is to drop the anti-tax and antigovernment rhetoric is because it leads to the Tea Party worldview. And there is a very basic problem with the Tea Party worldview. When you run for federal office on a platform that the federal government is bad, and good for nothing, and shouldn’t be doing most of what it is doing let alone anything new, then you have a problem when you win. If you actually start legislating and passing new laws, then you’re a hypocrite. And if you refuse to legislate, you’re just a crank and your constituents will think you’re a bum. A party can afford to have a few cranks, but it cannot allow itself to become defined by them.
Now, I understand that conservatives have different ideas about what the government should and should not do, and how to go about it. But they would be so much better off if they developed a positive vision of how the federal government, as opposed to the states and local communities, can tackle some of the pressing issues of the day. And the starting point is to acknowledge real problems (other than taxation and regulation) facing ordinary Americans. If you want to get blacks and Latinos to vote for you, you have to do more than stop blaming them for all of society’s ills. You have to tell them how you’d behave as a federal legislator to address issues that come up in their communities. If you want to appeal to lower class, educated whites without appealing to race-based emotions, you need to talk about making college affordable and improving the entry-level jobs market.
What’s killing the Republicans is the ascendent view in their ranks that the federal government really ought not be doing virtually anything to benefit anyone for any reason. Maybe Joe Barton’s apology to BP kind of clarified this for some people, but it’s been a problem for a long time. They send a pretty consistent message that there is something wrong with someone who needs help from the federal government. And it’s hard, as the people’s representative, to tell your constituents that your job is to tell them they’re deficient if they need you to stick up for them.
And the truth is that this message is really a message of a minority party. A politician who is actually in a position to help his constituents will do so (they call it ‘pork’). So, the Republicans will always betray their principles once the pendulum swings their way. They’ll spend freely while refusing to tax, and run up huge deficits. Then they’ll get voted out and tell us that “Washington changed them” so please send them back and they’ll do better the third, forth, or fifth time.
If the Republicans could define what the federal government should do in a way that allowed them the freedom to appeal to some of the people that need the federal government, then they wouldn’t be locked in a hypocrite’s loop and they’d have a chance of competing in a changing demographic world.
Eventually, they will learn that appealing to white fear and resentment is a losing political position and give it up. But I don’t know if they will ever shake this anti-tax, anti-government spiel. If they don’t, then they’ll never be a fact-based party that can pursue sensible economic policies. And they’ll never be able to expand their base or prevent its contraction.
I don’t think they have to give up all of their social conservatism to compete, just most of it. But the Tea Party movement is moving them in precisely the wrong directions at the wrong time.
