RNC chairman Reince Priebus won a lot of applause at the committee’s summer meeting when he announced that NBC and CNN were cut out of any future Republican debates, but the rest of his message fell flat:
In contrast, Priebus won tepid applause after backing into a defense of the party’s “Growth and Opportunity” project to bring in more Latinos, African-Americans, young people, unmarried women — pretty much all the groups that overwhelmingly voted Democratic last November. He refuted the idea that reaching out to these groups is tantamount to compromising the party’s core values in order to win.
“To those who make those accusations, we don’t have time for your divisiveness, either — any more than we have time for the media’s games,” Priebus said. “If you only want to be a voice of dissent, or if you just want to be angry — if you don’t want to be problem solver, then you’re putting yourself ahead of the movement.”
The defensive tone is probably understandable, given the position Priebus finds himself in. The party establishment has concluded that an electoral strategy relying on overwhelming support from white voters to make up for weak performance with minorities is no longer useful.
Yet these leaders are getting strong resistance from much of their own white, disproportionately southern base of support — particularly because the outreach to Latinos has become entwined with the push for an immigration overhaul. The GOP establishment is having to counter a “missing white voters” theory that posits that minority outreach is not necessary (at least not in the next few election cycles) if the party can instead bring disaffected whites back to the polls.
Publicly, Priebus and others at the three-day meeting say the project, while a long-term endeavor, is on track. They showcase their program to train more Republican women candidates. They have started a “GOP Rising Stars” to highlight non-traditional Republicans.
Privately, other Republicans are less sanguine — and already wondering if it will take another White House loss in 2016 for the party base to accept what they are already certain is demographic inevitability.
The simplest way of understanding this is that the interests of the Conservative Movement, on the one hand, and the Republican Party, on the other hand, are beginning to diverge. But the Conservatives still have effective control of the Republican Party, which means that they are winning the argument for the time being. This also means that Reince Priebus only has nominal control. He can propose things, and there are some things that he can implement, but he can’t really steer the kinds of changes that he thinks he needs to make to give the GOP a chance to win in 2016. It’s basically the same problem that John Boehner is experiencing and, to a lesser degree, that Mitch McConnell is facing. No one has enough power to effectively lead the party in a new direction because the conservatives don’t want to give up their power.
When Jim Demint starts running ads against the minority leader in the Senate it becomes increasingly clear that the conservatives are done with the GOP establishment.
And who could blame them? The party has promised a cultural jihad on everything from abortion, school prayer, gay rights, deficit reduction, border security, you name it since Ronald Reagan and hasn’t delivered on any of it. They’ve lowered taxes for rich people, exploded deficit spending, and stacked the courts, while at the same time basically grifting and paying lip service to the conservative movement. This is a monster of their own creation and it’s about to consume them.
I think we are very close to a re-alignment in this country.
What happens after the conservatives consume the GOP establishment?
They become the GOP establishment. The semi-rationals either become Democrats, independents,sit it out, or fall in line. Most will fall in line, some will sit it out, some will self-identify as independents, and some will become Democrats. For a party with demographics trending against it, they can’t afford to lose any of them.
They’re okay as long as they can hold 50%+1 of the House or 41 seats in the (unreformed) Senate, no? How long does that give them?
And not just ‘okay,’ really. The longer they poison the well, the more people hate ‘government.’
A couple of years in the Senate, 4 in the house maybe. If they do something crazy like defaulting on the debt or shutting the government down, perhaps sooner.
Your optimism is beautiful! I hope you’re right, but while I can easily see them losing the House, despite gerrymandering, fairly soon, I don’t how they’ll possibly get down below the Filibuster Line for a decade, and possibly much longer. Which will then fuck up government even with Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate, and a Democratic President … which will give them a majority in the House, because look, the Democrats cant’ get anything done!
There’s a word missing from Amoebus’s description of what’s motivating his base. It never shows up in media accounts like this, and so I can’t quite remember it…I’m pretty sure it begins with an “r”…Reactionary?… Redneck?… Rabid? I know it’s something like that…
The word is hate. Racist is just one form it takes. But they’re very liberal in the application of all the variations: gays, Mooslims, sluts, scientists, Keynesians, blahs, poors, disableds, takers, liberals, urbanites, lawyers, immigrants, non-Christians, women who work, people with funny sounding names.
You need a freaking scorecard to keep up with the groups/classes/categories/races/religions/creeds, etc that make their ‘enemies to hate today’ list.
The thing is that the hate is the thing. It’s certainly not disagreement nor is it dislike. Normal people can disagree. Some people dislike strawberry ice cream. But for these people it’s all about the hate – the intensity and the volume. The existential struggle that requires a loaded gun to take down your enemies, even over trivial things.
It’s good to see that it’s not being rewarded anymore.
There is very little daylight between rabid conservative activists and the Republican Party. There is considerably more between rabid liberal activists and the Democratic Party. That might–and probably will–suck for the Republican Party, eventually (if something can suck for a party, which is ascribing it personhood, CU-style).
But isn’t it a good thing for the rabid conservative activists? They are at the wheel. They took over a national party. They do have enough power to lead the party in a new direction; they simply don’t want to. They like this direction. Perhaps they don’t give a shit about the Republican Party–and perhaps there’s no reason they would.
Sometimes I get the sense that you’re waiting for the true owner of the Republican Vehicle to get back into the driver’s seat. But there is no ‘natural’ driver of the Republican Party, except ‘whomever can grab the wheel.’
I also wonder if some of this isn’t an unintended consequence of the rightward widening of the Democratic Party. If you’re a pro-military, pro-corporate, pro-NSA conservative, who pretty much supports the drug war and a fairly status quo foreign policy, wtf are you still doing in the Republican Party? There is another vehicle that offers you heated seats and cup-holders. So in the battle for the steering wheel you’ve got a passionate, extremist faction that has nowhere else to go, and a passive, semi-rational faction that simply lacks imagination.
Corporations and rich folk created this monster to move the GOP farther to the right. They’ve lost control of the monster now. Did anyone see Josh Marshall’s tweets, and pictures, last night about a Mark Levin book event on Long Island yesterday? Mostly older people and all of them were white. 3 blocks long, too!
There’s the problem – he doesn’t understand the party’s core values.
It’s not as simple as a divergence of conservative and Republican party values.
The Republican Party values need to change if they want to remain relevant as an institution. Some Republicans (a tiny minority) want it to remain relevant, most (the Tea Party) are priding themselves on being irrelevant, if that’s the consequence of not changing.
The Democrats did this in the late 60’s, took 20 years before they (Clinton) figured out a way to be relevant. Hopefully, it takes them even longer to figure it out.
The Democrats did this in the late 60’s, took 20 years before they (Clinton) figured out a way to be relevant.
Has anyone actually proved this? Or is this just convenient DLC/New Dem/Blue Dog bullcrap?
The proof is the 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988 elections.
1976 is a Watergate driven aberration:
In these presidential elections Democrats broke triple digits in the Electoral College once with 111, while cumulatively the Republicans took 91% of all votes in the college in those elections.
If that doesn’t make it clear, the raw number of votes in the College for the Democratic candidate were:
1972 – 17
1980 – 49
1984 – 13
1988 – 111
Consider that Romney is a laughing stock and he won more electoral votes than ALL of those Democrats (206 vs 190)
Yup, what a bunch of claptrap.
How can you say 1976 is a Watergate driven abberation when the race was close? You can’t just toss out races haphazard. And as you said below, the Democrats didn’t lose the House till 1994. What does that tell you? Maybe the candidates were crappy, or in the case of McGovern, were undermined from within. Also, you do realize the whole point of the DLC was to move the party and country to the right, right?
As I said, I can only hope the Republicans can stay in the same state of denial you are in for the longest period of time possible.
You’ve missed both points and I hope they do, too.
Point 1 (again) an inability to garner more that 19% of the cumulative electoral vote over 5 presidential cycles is pretty embarrassingly out-of-touch with what the country is looking for.
Point 2 (again) the forward momentum of the dominance from the prior era takes a long time to dissipate. This fact MASKS the trend that your party is in decline. The Democrats lost 5 out of 6 presidential elections and they still controlled both houses of Congress for 6 years after that last loss.
The Republican Party is experiencing the same decline the Democrats did but their Senate and House prospects are masking this from them just like it did the Democrats.
My hope is that they too blame it on poor presidential candidates (McCain/Dole too old, Bush I/Romney too out of touch, not conservative enough), ACORN, poor Senate candidates, etc. In fact, I hope they come up with new excuses as well, anything that is counterproductive and a diversion from their real problems of values (hate) and demographics.
Even throwing in Carter’s victory in 1976 the Democrats collected a cumulative 18.2% of all Electoral College votes.
Nothing says irrelevant like that level of ineffectiveness.
Still it took until 1994 before Republicans could turn the House.
And that’s another lesson for Democrats. They have surpassed the Republicans in popular vote in 5 of the last 6 elections, not to the extent of the Republicans’ earlier domination in terms of victory margin. Yet the Senate remains precarious and the House likely out of reach.
So it’s entirely possible that the Democrats win the presidency in 2016/2020 and still don’t get working Congressional majorities until 2020 or later.
All it shows is that Reince Priebus is not in control of the RNC. Rush Limbaugh is still at the wheel. At least until a series of prominent Republicans can criticize him without having to profusely apologize. And the Koch Brothers are still at the wheel through their control of state parties. And Jim DeMint and thus Heritage is swinging its weight.
All three of them are moving in the same direction. That’s where the Republican Party is going. And they have a lot of money come 2014 to go there.
Instead of cheery forecasts, better start wondering which states are the next targets for legislative takeover like Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina. And which states are likely to extricate themselves from the Kochtopus. That’s where the future is being played out.