When thinking about the Republican Party's political problems, I tend to come to the fairly common conclusion that the lack of ideological diversity within the caucus means that Republicans should be more strategic about reaching out to moderates and offering more responsible policy, as well as fixing some of their more superficial messaging problems. This tends to stray a little close to the idea that conservatives would be more successful if they just weren't conservative, which of course is not on the menu.
But, after reading Jay Newton-Small's article about a recent Republican effort to come up with a more effective message, I've disabused myself of the idea that I'm just being a concern troll. Though the not-rebranding effort is led by well-credentialed Republicans including House Minority Whip Eric Cantor and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, conservatives still turned up to protest "Republicans in Name Only." Here's Laura Ingraham's take:
"Democrats gained power by going to the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate and they ran him for the presidency and they won," Laura Ingraham, a conservative talk-radio host said on Fox News Sunday. "They were relentlessly attacking George Bush for several years from the left. They didn't move to the middle and the idea that Republicans now have to move to the middle – what, beyond John McCain's middle?"
Aside from the weird attempt to recast McCain -- he of the spending freeze, the hundred years in Iraq, the massive tax cuts -- as a moderate, it also doesn't get at what Democrats have done in the last four years. That whole most-liberal-senator canard is just that -- Democrats have been winning by expanding their coalition. In 2006, Heath Shuler was wooed by both Democrats and Republicans; he chose to run as a Democrat (see also: Specter, Arlen). That means liberals get frustrated with Shuler's positions fairly often, but it also means they control the House of Representatives. And while some of the attacks on Bush were nominally from the left, in so far as something like S-CHIP is a "left" issue, most of the attacks centered on corruption and incompetence, not to mention a war whose unpopularity put it squarely in the middle of most political debates. One GOP poller looks at the demographics:
For Republicans, this data reinforces the need to put aside the outdated targeting recipe for victory (95% of R's, 55% of I's, 10% of D's) and replace it with one that calls for more cross-party partisan support in order to achieve victory (95% of R's, 60% of I's, 15%-20% of D's). The current partisan affiliation data is the clear death knell for the “base-style” campaigns favored by some in the early part of this decade.
While Obama is a liberal, albeit a pragmatic one, his political strategy has been to seize the center, which requires patience from the left. It's a tough balance -- eventually someone will go too far within the party and the whole project will fall to divisive infighting -- but for as long as the Democrats can hold together liberals and moderates, and the GOP doesn't make a credible attempt to expand their own coalition, nothing is going to change.
-- Tim Fernholz
