The Moderate Republican’s Response to Specter
Arlen Specter’s jump to the Democratic Party has generated an intense amount of discussion from Republicans and conservatives about what it means when one of the three remaining Republican moderates in the Senate leaves the Party. The spectrum of responses has been predictable–many conservatives have simply resorted to attacking Specter and suggesting he had always been a closet Democrat (for 29 years? really?).
The most thoughtful response from conservatives and Republicans has been Sen. Olympia Snowe, Republican from Maine and self-proclaimed moderate. She penned an op-ed in the NYT recently about Specter’s switch to the Democratic Party, entitled “We Didn’t Have to Lose Arlen Specter.” Her op-ed is the most accurate portrayal of the Republican Party’s current state I have seen.
She writes, “Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities — indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash”
Snowe seems somewhat optimistic that the Republican Party will be able to escape its exclusionary tendencies that have emerged over the past few years. James Carville, famed Democratic political consultant, is more sanguine. He says, promoting his new book in an interview with the Huffington Post:
“I don’t think they can do that because their party would crumble,” said Carville. “It would be like at a time when people were saying you have to move away from African-American voters or something, right? Their party would crumble. That is not an option really available to them. They can talk about other issues and do other things, but once you have a Republican nominee, or serious Republican leaders who are pro-choice or pro-gay marriage, they are going to lose a lot of their voting base. These people will break off. And I don’t think that’s a real open discussion among people that really know what is going on in the Republican Party.”
Besides Carville’s analysis, there are two striking statistics in the Huffington Post article. First, the oft-repeated statistic that Obama won the 18-24 vote 68-30 over McCain. 68-30. That’s devastating. But the most interesting data point is this: “In the 1950s, about four in five voters were married white Christians. Now only two in five voters are married, white, and Christian.” Of course, this looks like a doomsday scenario for Democrats, and Carville doesn’t define “Christian” (although I presume he does in his book, and it is probably “regular churchgoers). So while Republican ID with white-married-Christian voters increased to about 90% over the past few decades, Republicans have probably reached a maximum with that group, which seems to be declining in percentage of the American voter base overall. And certainly, pandering to the social authoritarian tendencies of that group put off others.
Exit polls indicate that Republicans had real trouble with voters outside of that group, and have been sliding. Unmarried women with no children, for example, went for Obama 71-29. (Married women went for McCain 51-49). That is an enormous gap. The Democratic share of unmarried voters has risen from 57% in 200o to 65% in 2008.
Republicans ignore Specter at their own peril.
Well, I’m a nonwhite, unmarried, and atheist Republican. Go figure.
Two serious notes:
- There is a saying, often falsely attributed to Churchill: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” The numbers may vary with the retelling, but they reflect a real pattern. In the short term, the 68-30 figure needs to be reconciled with expected liberal bias among young voters; compare it to George W. Bush’s numbers, rather than implicitly to 50-50.
In the longer term, Republicans need a better electoral strategy that’ll increase their share of young voters without harming the national interest. It’s unfashionable to say this in elite circles, but strong enforcement of immigration law is probably the lowest hanging bit of fruit here; even John McCain has realized that there’s nothing to gain from pandering to illegal immigration advocates. It’s more fashionable to say that we need to put more priority, as a country, on assimilation, so we should certainly be vocal about that. At least if we want to continue current legal immigration levels (and, as a second-generation legal immigrant, Kant’s categorical imperative makes me reluctant to advocate a 1924-1965 style near-closing of the borders).
(Incidentally, I was quite happy to hear Meg Whitman talk about a technocratic immigration policy at the California College Republican convention 10 days ago; she spoke of somehow computing our demand for additional low- and high-skill labor and frequently adapting various immigration quotas to best meet that demand. It would, of course, be very difficult to stop such a computation from becoming too politicized to be very accurate. And I also think we need to take social and cultural factors into account when setting immigration policy; I doubt it’s a good idea to hire immigrant workers if we can’t effectively educate or culturally assimilate their children. But her heart appears to be in a good place.)
- I’m a lot more concerned about married women only going for McCain 51-49 than the lopsided unmarried numbers. Well, okay, unmarried women who still have children deeply concern me. But most other men and women who actually stay unmarried are both a genetic and memetic dead end.
Married women with children tend to have a lot more interest in this country’s future — they’ve consciously committed two decades or more of their life to raising kid(s) who’ll have to live in it! — than unmarried women (even the ones with children). Whenever we aren’t winning big with them, we are doing something very, very wrong. I am totally fine with our political opponents contrasting themselves from us by going for the permanently unmarried folks; to throw in another gratuitous quotation, this time from Napoleon and not falsely attributed, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” After all, who has more influence on what the electorate looks like 18-24 years down the line, married or permanently unmarried women? (Yes, this ties in with my first note.)
Stuart, as someone who likes to consider myself a really thoughtful, pragmatic Republican, your argument is pointless. Maybe I’m just resigned for a while, but just look at electoral trends – we’re talking about Republicans losing constituencies for good, but after 1936 Republicans had only 17 seats to Democrats’ 76 in the Senate, and 88 to Democrats’ 334 in the House. After Democrats gained a cloture-proof majority in the Senate in 1976, by 1980 Republicans had a 55-45 majority.
Basically, we just have to wait until Democrats screw up enough to make people want to vote for an alternative, and then America will move to the Republican Party, electing more moderates frustrated with the Democrats as Republicans, and leaving the Democrats a carcass of liberals with apparently no future. And then the cycle will start over again. Just in 2002/2004, everyone was talking about how disorganized the Democrats were and how it seemed so unimaginable for them to take back the majority. By 2006, there they were! And think of all the conservative Democrats elected with that new majority in 2006, all moderates frustrated with Republicans.
This discussion of the place of moderates within the GOP reminds me of a a quote from Sam Tanenhaus in his New Republic essay. He quotes William Kristol at length, arguably one of the key visionaries behind Bush’s particular strain of conservatism:
“American conservatism is a movement,” Kristol wrote in 1995, “A popular movement, not a faction within any political party. Though, inevitably, most conservatives vote Republican, they are not party loyalists and the party has to woo them to win votes. This movement is issue oriented. It will happily meld with the GOP if the party is right on the issues, if not it will walk away.” By this calculus, all the obligations only flow in one direction. Parties are accountable to movement purists, while purists incur no reciprocal debt. They determine the “right” position and the party’s job is to advance it.
This, in my view, is a particularly shrewd observation. Since 2006, confronted with an increasingly unpopular party agenda, many GOP-ers have pushed for increased party purity, to simply reclaim the vision that had launched Reagan into office and to leave moderates and independents’ immediate needs by the wayside.
What these Reagan-worshipers conveniently forgot, however, is that the Goldwater-Reagan vision was in the national political wilderness for over a generation.
If the GOP doesn’t begin crafting a more inclusive party vision that tolerates and accepts moderates, like Reagan’s eventually successful formula, then they may find themselves ideological pure but in the political wilderness. again.
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