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.
