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.
