Pathetic Republicans
LINDBERG, TOD
Pathetic Republicans . . . A self-help plan for the GOP. by Tod Llndberg Pathetic Republicans, who can save you now? With all due respect to Ming the Merciless and all due deference to Sen. John...
...Its designers hoped to attract new voters to the GOP by offering a menu of policy proposals that presented a clear alternative to the Democrats and already tested well in polling and focus groups...
...If getting out all your voters doesn't amount to 50 percent or more, there are limits to a strategy based on that premise...
...And unless Republicans are content to be a regionally strong minority party, they need to do something different...
...As the salience of the Contract issues faded, the GOP congressional majority in the House seemed to turn more and more to the largely symbolic politics of the social issues, conservative identity politics, and the culture wars—the ban on "partial-birth" abortion, the intervention on behalf of Terri Schiavo, the Defense of Marriage Act and the attempt to amend the Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman, the limitation of federal funding of stem cell research, and, of course, restrictionist immigration policy...
...To do that, what's required is frank acknowledgment that the national majority that brought them to congressional power in 1994 is a thing of the past—no longer there, or no longer theirs...
...The wave that gave Republicans control of Congress for the first time in 40 years was truly national in reach and scope...
...and a favorable electoral environment featuring numerous open seats, a large freshman class upon which the full advantages of incumbency had yet to settle, and Voting Rights Act-influenced gerrymanders that made suburban districts more GOP-friendly...
...The party has come to be defined as representing the concerns these issues reflect—and little else, or not enough else...
...But her winning opponent this time got 32,000 more votes than the Democrat Johnson beat in 2002...
...In New Mexico, Heather Wilson, whose fate at this writing is undecided, got 10,000 more votes in 2006 than she did in 2002...
...But if the GOP is only a conservative party, in the sense of being no longer able or willing to devise a Contract-With-America-style issue mix whose appeal extends beyond the social conservatism of the South, then it will be a minority party so long as Democrats understand they must appeal to the center...
...As they did this year, and could do again...
...Still, the contract was the unifying document of the early years of GOP majority: where to look for the answer to the question of what to do next...
...Well, the first step is to understand that the issue mix in the Contract With What Republicans need is to be something more than the party of culture war...
...The GOP under the minority leadership of Newt Gingrich and his chief lieutenant, Dick Armey, sought to "nationalize" the '94 election around its Contract With America, a 10-point plan for legislative action in the first 100 days of GOP control of the House...
...Moreover, the cumulative impression of the GOP congressional posturing in the culture war is that that's all there is...
...The American electorate is center-right...
...The GOP stand on these issues is indeed overwhelmingly popular in the South...
...Johnson lost by more in 2006 than she won by in 2002...
...Republicans have now been all but wiped out in the Northeast...
...What is not in doubt is that "your people" weren't there, at least not in sufficient numbers...
...You can tap into your base to deliver victory if your base is big enough...
...The 2004 GOP success with this strategy took Democrats by surprise and delivered George W. Bush a second term...
...That's an indication of a superb turnout operation...
...But the contract was actually a shrewd exercise in coalition politics...
...In the run-up to the 2006 election, by contrast, Rove and other GOP optimists spent a lot of time talking about the importance of the coming get-out-the-vote mobilization...
...This is not a sudden development...
...But her Democratic opponent got about 25,000 more votes this year than her unsuccessful challenger in 2002...
...The South stayed strong, still recording GOP takeaways from Democrats until this year, but the two coasts and the upper Midwest were becoming much more difficult territory for the GOP By now, the de-Republicanization of these regions is about complete, and the problem has spread to the high plains, the Midwest, and the noncoastal West, such as Wilson's district in and around Albuquerque...
...The electoral strategy the 1994 results invited was the one Karl Rove successfully exploited in three elections before stumbling badly in the fourth this year: The way to win elections is to find your people and get them to the polls...
...Nancy Johnson, a 12-term moderate from Connecticut, got about 20,000 fewer votes in 2006 than she did in the previous off-year election...
...The GOP victory in 1994 had other important sources...
...Whether they actually believed it or were just blowing smoke in an attempt to keep "bad" from turning to "worse" is an open question...
...Rather, you focus your efforts on "your people...
...That's an environment in which the revelation of Rep...
...That more or less leaves the GOP with a majority it has the potential to turn out only in the South...
...The premise is that "your people" are out there in sufficient numbers to produce victories, given a technically competent effort to turn them out...
...Which means that the only place to go to enlarge it is in the center...
...Moreover, it was decidedly silent on abortion and offered little to nothing explicitly addressing the concerns of social conservatives in the "culture wars...
...You can tap into your base to deliver victory if your base is big enough...
...Beginning with the 1996 election, the GOP tide, as it receded, did so unevenly...
...hype celebrating a "Republican Revolution...
...America, though it produced an electoral majority in its day, has played itself out...
...That is a problem of which turnout is at most a small part...
...It was a product of the arrogant culture of longtime one-party rule in the House...
...What Republicans need is to be something more than the party of culture war—and tax cutting, of course...
...It gave Republican activists something to be for—in addition to what they were against, a government in which Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House...
...And its right wing is solid...
...What might that be...
...But to take that very issue, if you look at how similar initiatives fared in other states, you see a much more closely divided electorate (and in Arizona, the initiative seems to have failed...
...The ballot initiative banning gay marriage passed with 81 percent of the vote in Tennessee...
...Mark Foley's interest in teenage male pages detonates with maximum impact...
...The expectation was that social conservatives would be satisfied with more space for their private gardens thanks to a less intrusive, less taxing federal government...
...Some of that 1994 agenda has been enacted, such as an end to the welfare entitlement...
...The core supporters of the GOP are conservative, which constitutes an advantage for the party over Democrats, whose core supporters are liberal or progressive...
...The GOP's no longer is...
...There are more conservatives...
...The GOP's no longer is...
...The suddenly embattled Democrats portrayed the Contract With America as a document of political radicalism, and their charge gained plausibility thanks to the GOP's own Contributing editor Tod Lindberg is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor of Policy Review...
...Johnson's defeat and Wilson's cliffhanger are also emblematic of the geography of the GOP loss in 2006...
...You win elections not through conspicuous efforts to reach out to the middle to persuade undecided voters, who probably don't pay much attention to politics anyway...
...Some of it, for example the call for term limits, responds to concerns that are simply dated...
...Some of it has proven impossible to enact even by a GOP-controlled Congress and a Republican president...
...John McCain's pending arrival on a Hawk-man rocket cycle in 2008, the answer is that Republicans can, and are going to have to, save themselves...
...a Democratic administration more interested in tax hikes, a government takeover of health care, and gays in the military than the centrist agenda Bill Clinton had campaigned on...
...Could be a turnout problem, no...
...You could see its effect in every region of the country, though of course it was at its strongest in the South, where the last redoubts of the yellow-dog Democrats were being overrun...
Vol. 12 • November 2006 • No. 10
