Since 1988, the Republicans have won the popular vote exactly once. That was in 2004 when, aided by a deficit of voting machines in Democratic strongholds in Ohio, President Bush was reelected with a three million vote national advantage. In Ohio, he won by 118,000 votes. That’s 60,000 people in one state who could have changed their minds and flipped the election to Kerry. That’s the high-water mark for the GOP in presidential elections since 1988. You could describe it as having no cushion. They stole the 2000 election, which helps to obscure their overall record of failure.
Bush’s Electoral College tally was 271 in 2000 and 285 in 2004. By comparison, Bill Clinton got 370 in 1992, 379 in 1996, and Barack Obama got 365 in 2008. On his site, Nate Silver has a chart that plots the probability of Obama getting any particular number of electoral votes. By far, the highest plot on the chart is 330, which Obama has about an 18% chance of attaining. Most of the rest of that action on that chart lies above 330 votes.
When you look at Romney’s state-by-state strategy, you can see that he is effectively conceding about 247 electoral votes, meaning that his absolute upside is 291 electoral votes. If he actually gets 291 votes, he’ll do better than Bush ever did.
It may seem like this is a conservative country, but it’s actually tilted to the left on the national level. There are areas that are stubbornly supportive of the Republican Party, so we will not see a Democrat win 49 states as both Nixon and Reagan were once able to do. But the Republicans are now at the point where cracking 300 electoral votes is nearly impossible, while the Democrats’ ultimate best case scenario is closer to 400 votes.
What this means is that the Republicans really can’t afford any more slippage. If even one more large state becomes safely blue, their maximum upside will fall below 270 and they won’t be able to compete for the White House at all.
Because the Republicans have decided to brand themselves as the party of white conservative Christians, small business owners, and Wall Street fat cats, they have assured themselves more slippage.
What will be interesting to watch is how fast the big money donors figure out that the modern GOP isn’t worth any investment (at least, in presidential elections) and how quickly the GOP changes in response. Notice that none other than Rupert Murdoch is pleading with Mitt Romney to stop pandering to the religious right and get after the middle. But both Romney and McCain analyzed their situation and decided they needed to stimulate the base more than they needed to pander to the middle. Why did they decide that? What were they seeing that I don’t see and Mr. Murdoch doesn’t see? Why does base turnout always seem to trump persuasion with the GOP presidential candidates?
I don’t know the answer to that question. But, I wish I did, because knowing the answer would help me figure out how the GOP will respond to their coming irrelevancy. Will they listen to the big money folks who don’t give a crap about abortion or will they continue to believe that only an energized army of crazies gives them any hope of success? And, if they get it wrong at first, how long will it take them to figure that out and remake themselves?
