God, this is stupid.
If demography is destiny, Republicans can’t win the presidency by acting more like Democrats. The GOP’s best shot in 2016 is not to nominate a moderate. They must nominate a conservative who can attract more conservative voters to the polls, just like President Obama built his own coalition and increased the relative electoral power of each constituent part.
Start with the first sentence. The premise here must be true or the conclusion is invalid. Also, the conclusion must follow causally from the premise. If demography is destiny, then the last two elections have proven that the Republicans must appeal to different demographics. It’s not as simple as just getting out a bigger percentage of white married women or evangelical Christians. They must stop losing 97% of the black vote and quit hemorrhaging support among Latinos, Asians, unmarried white women, gays, people under thirty, etc. Demography is only destiny if you don’t change your relative levels of support among different demographic groups.
If the Republicans follow Mark Ambinder’s advice, they’ll lose and lose badly.
His advice is particularly terrible if we assume that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, and that’s an assumption that the Republicans have to make until events give them some rational reason to conclude otherwise.
Look at Ambinder’s checklist:
It is not inconceivable that a GOP nominee can:
(1) Excite the party with the promise of his electability.
(2) Create enough of a contrast with the Democratic nominee to keep the caucus/primary voting base motivated.
(3) Appeal just a bit more to to blue collar white voters and to married women.
Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that this prospective Republican candidate can accomplish the first goal. Ambinder asserts that the Republican base will be self-motivated to go against Hillary Clinton regardless of what the Republican nominee has to say. Yeah, that’s true except for all the people in the Republican base who are married white women or are from states like West Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana that voted for Bill Clinton twice. Clinton will motivate everyone in the Republican base except for the people who were dependable Democrats until that “inadequate black man” stole the nomination from her. I can’t believe how lazy Ambinder is with this analysis. The idea that a Republican candidate will be able to appeal more to blue collar white workers and white married women when going up against Hillary Clinton than McCain and Romney did when going up against Obama is absurd. To rely on that strategy would be insane.
This next bit is 100% wrong.
So to those who say: The GOP will ONLY win the presidency if it moderates its tone on social issues, I say: not with the electorate as currently constituted. It might be useful, but it is neither necessary or sufficient.
If by “social issues,” Ambinder has in mind voting, reproductive and gay rights, immigration reform, and climate change, then the Republicans will absolutely have to moderate their positions or they will discover that demography is truly destiny. That’s because they cannot win over more black, Latino, Asian, gay, young, or white unmarried female voters unless they stop alienating those voters. And they can’t do much more to motivate their own base than they’re already doing without losing even more support from the groups that are already shunning them.
Conservatism is dead. Long live conservatism.
The only thing dumber than Ambinder’s piece is the comment section of said piece.
On the bright side, if the GOP follows the advice of Ambinder and his comment section, Democrats will probably pull supermajorities in both houses of Congress.
The secret of a successful national pundit is to know his/her audience, and to tell them exactly what they want to hear.
The Teahadists have doubled down on the Crazee every. single. time. they’ve had a setback. This is what they want to hear. This is pandering, not advice.
Better repatriate all those “blue collar” jobs that the oligarchs shipped overseas in a hurry then. The ones that are left don’t pay enough for those white guys to have the luxury of voting for Republicans like they did back in 1972. And the retired ones that continued to prop up the GOP ever since then are dying off.
Yes, Marie, but you presuppose that the Dem nominee doesn’t also favor shipping blue collar (and white collar) jobs overseas.
Maybe, just maybe, the colossal healthcare.gov mess will result in people taking a good look at software development and how it has gone wrong in America.
“Good Fast Cheap, pick any two” Sometimes you don’t get any of the three.
Dastardly clever of Democrats to decimate the white blue collar jobs. heh — maybe they’re politically more adept than we give them credit for. Puts them in good shape as long as the GOP continues its assault on women, blacks, latinos, immigrants. and “the poor” (soon to be the majority thanks to austerity and the neo-libs in both parties).
Hey. I live in Seattle. I know a lot of people who work for Microsoft. Some were even born in the USA. And they make fine softwa — Whoops. Sorry about that. Program crashed.
Which is why I have used Linux for years ….
Me too. It’s nice not to worry about viruses, isn’t it?
Shh! As Napoleon said, never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake.
If it’s not inconceivable that a GOP nominee can blah blah blah, what’s his name? We’re talking about 2016 here, so it’s not like the GOP nominee is going to be someone we’ve never heard of. What is the point of talking about hypothetical candidates?
Correcting your quote, Boo, to the even worse, more dismissive reality: “inadequate black MALE”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeGPzk8Oca8‎
I have to say, though, so far I’m greatly enjoying Tim Donnelly’s campaign for the opportunity to have his ass handed to him by Jerry Brown next year. He’s only raised $100,000 so far, but don’t worry about that:
Yeah. If.
You can brilliantly organize a “guerrilla grass-roots campaign,” but you’re still going to lose badly when everyone outside your bubble – which is to say, most Californians – despise what you stand for.
How many times do they have to keep rolling “Snake-eyes,” before they realize that the not only the existing, but the coming, dice, are against them?
Yes, “Double-down, GOP! Please proceed. Please, proceed…”
SNAKE-EYES, WIN AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Isn’t this just a variation on the double-down-on-our-message theme?
Look, the reason that Racist Reagan was able to win in 1980 was twofold: first, things were shitty – even shittier than 2008 – and in those circumstances you’ll always find people willing to try someone new. Second, he successfully use race as a wedge issue against unions and the working class. I doubt many of those white union workers who voted for macho, John Wayne-esque Reagan ever realized that the subsequent downfall of unions, union wages, and union job security was directly related to their votes. Those who were still alive in the latter 1990s mostly just started watching Fox to reassure themselves that their troubles were really the fault of someone else.
Those conditions aren’t available to the GOP right now. First, of all, there isn’t a large untapped pool of racial resentment in the electorate. There is racial resentment to be sure, but it is also fully tapped by the GOP and has been for decades. And second, not only are things not horrible but because the GOP holds the House its not clear that the Dems would get the electoral blame if things get worse.
The GOP has no solution except to keep the base angry and block as many Dem voters as possible.
Strikes me as a bit like telling someone who has just lost their job, their car, been foreclosed on and lost everything they hold near and dear, “Hey, solving your problem isn’t very difficult at all. You just need to put more money in your checking account.”
It’s more or less a no-brainer the GOP is going to win in 2016– mainly due to our still crappy economy.
Christie is already talking like grandpa Reagan… it worked for him and it’s going to work for Christie.
A no-brainer? Three years out, and it’s a “no-brainer”? If you’re not snarking me, then I think you need to take a pill.
Nope, not a snark; it’s basic fact: people vote their pocketbooks.
Our economy still sucks, and Obama and the dems in congress have ZERO plan to improve our economy.
“Three years out”. yes, but the campaigns will start early next year. one of the major memes: “the democrats had EIGHT years to fix the economy and they failed.. time for a new GOP POTUS”.
this is totally predictable.
>>it’s basic fact: people vote their pocketbooks.
bullshit. the whole foundation of Republican success since Reagan has been getting working class and middle class white people to vote against their pocketbooks for the sake of god guns gays and racism.
Except they tried that playbook in 2012, and the voters perceived that the Republicans were to blame. Plus the voters know that Republicans shut down the government. Plus Republicans are still backwards on social issues.
But I do thank you for letting me know that I don’t have to take you seriously any more.
LOL.. so you’re saying people don’t care about the fact our economy still sucks?
I know it’s a very popular meme in “progressive” bloggo world, but the majority of voters are not going to care in 2016 about what the GOP did or did not do in 2013. it will be OLD news.
if you’re implying the democrats are not going be blamed for our crappy economy, you’re a naïve sort of rube that obviously hasn’t been studying politics as long as I have.
thus it’s you that needs to be ignored. I have scoreboard, you do not.
Oh yeah, you’ve got some truly awesome scoreboard workin’ for you, pole. It looks like this: http://election.princeton.edu/electoral-college-map/
By 2016 demographic reality will find its way through your thick skull. (note: I still think this guy is snarking us.)
you’re right that voters are not going to care about the government shutdown of 2013 when they go to the polls in 2016. They’re going to care about whatever bug-nuts lunacy the GOP has been pulling in 2015 and 2016. If they don’t change their ways and moderate some of their policies, then people will savage them.
Look, sometimes a bad economy will doom a candidate, as happened in 1980 (along with a lot of other bummers) and in 1992.
But Reagan’s first term was basically one long recession with some improvement in 1984. He won about 49 states that year. In 2000, Gore was pulled into a draw with Bush despite a booming economy that lasted almost right up until election day.
In 2010, the Democrats were punished badly for a terrible economy, but it wasn’t recovered by any means in 2012, when Obama won easily.
All else being equal, a bad economy is a negative that will hurt the party in power, but all else is never equal. The biggest political issue in this country is, and will continue to be, the radicalization of the GOP.
Sorry, but that argument is a mile wide and an inch deep.
The current economy was already good enough to re-elect Obama. It’s likely to get better, not worse, over the next few years as the Republicans have pretty much reached the limit of what the can sabotage. The next Democratic candidate gets a boost of about 2% from demographic changes and 3% from not setting off the racists. The Republicans will be in a huge hole in 2016 and it would take something like a depression, a war disaster, or a Edwards-esque scandal for them to win.
If you were right, Obama would have lost in 2012.
it’s best not to feed the troll
If I had any confidence you’d be around to pay up, I would bet you any amount of money you could prove you had on this proposition.
Me too lol.
Chris Christie;
You mean Bernie Madoff’s personal lobbyist??????
http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/the-chris-christie-madoff-attack-ad-that-writes-itself
Money quote;
As a lobbyist, Chris Christie worked to remove securities fraud from a consumer fraud act on behalf of an organization run by Bernie Madoff.
One reason even R-money wouldn’t touch him …..
Christie cannot make it past the extreme right wing teatard clown show in 2016 any more than he could make it to second banana in 2012 ….
That’s odd since democrats acting like conservative repuglicans is exactly how they’ve won three POTUS elections. (the second Clinton win and both of Obama’s wins)
Fixed.
Stupidity is dead. Long live even greater stupidity.
Peak wingnut was a lie,
Astrophysicists have been working years to try to identify Peak Wingnut. It keeps eluding them, sort of like Einstein’s Unified Theory.
Out in the desert in Arizona (it’s only appropriate) they’ve built a mile-long super-collider that fires electrons at a Teahadist brain cell. Turns out that because the mass of the electron is larger, they can’t get a proper reading, but the mathematicians say Peak Wingnut approaches infinity. Something to do with String Theory and thousands of alternate universes.
My (admittedly limited) understanding of Peak Wingnut theory made it seem more like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, or Schrodinger’s Cat. Once Peak Wingnut is observed and quantified in the lab, it shifts and spikes even higher, making the previous results obsolete.
Physicists have been referring to this as the ‘moving goalposts’ phenomenon.
And don’t forget the Moebius Corollary: Peak Wingnut, according to the Wiki definition, is “a surface with only one side and only one boundary component. The Möbius [wingnut] has the mathematical property of being non-orientable…. Its boundary is a simple closed curve.”
“If the Republicans follow Mark Ambinder’s advice, they’ll lose and lose badly.”
Then please, by all means, let them follow it.
President always looking for Country’s best, and people best interest, so what’s in it for him, why he want to help for god sake..
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dubaileadingtech
Turnout is destiny. Period.
Demography affects turnout.
PVI affects turnout.
GOTV activities affect turnout.
But the name of the game is getting people out of their houses, registered to vote, and voting for your candidates.
How effing difficult is that to grasp? Apparently the Democratic establishment doesn’t understand that no candidate, no presence, no effort results in no turnout and no victory. Too busy keeping the powder dry.
Yes, Ambinder is a fool. Victories don’t happen without effort.
For whom? Democrats and liberals have latched onto this mantra as if the higher the turnout, the greater the success for Democratic candidates. But it’s not that simple.
Case in point. The 2001 turnout in the NYC mayoral election was considerably higher — close to 50% higher — and Bloomberg won 50.3% to 47.9% for Mark Green. In 2013 de Blasio won with 73.7%.
Turnout…of the most people who vote for your candidate. If you turn out 175,000 people to vote in a Congressional District, you will probably win. If you turn out 175,000 people in the Wyoming US Senate race, you likely will win. For the California US Senate race you better turn out 7 million plus. And Presidential races are approaching the 70 million mark.
It takes turning out 1 million votes or so to win the US Senate race in South Carolina. It takes 800,000 votes to win the US Senate race in Tennessee.
Figuring out the strategy for where those votes come from and conducting the campaign to actually get those votes to the polling place generally means overperforming the general turnout. That is what Mark Green failed to do in 2001. And what Bill de Blasio did in 2013.
5.2 million voted for Boxer in 2010 and she still won by a million votes.
It’s not that de Blasio turned out some large number of voters more than Green, it’s that two-thirds of Bloomberg’s 2001 didn’t vote at all.
Not that turn-out is irrelevant but it’s more complex than just to say that turn-out is everything. Eligible voters make their own calculation on whether or not to spend the time to vote. (The retired population show up in greater numbers because they have more free time.) Factors are partisan commitment, passion for or against a candidate, and the pre-election poll numbers. Moderately partisan, not passionate for or against, and dismal poll numbers for one’s preferred candidate, and one is less likely to bother.
Hix! It As Napoleon said, never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake.
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noi that, cua go, tu bep