Jonathan Chait thinks I'm wrong, and the GOP is gonna tone it down in 2012:
Basically, I don't see how an electorate tilting leftward, and more heavily minority, shows that the GOP is going to delve further into right-wing culture war politics. That's how Republicans might respond to an electorate with a rising proportion of white working class voters, but these circumstances are just the opposite.
In the abstract, I think that's exactly right. But in practice, the last two years have been filled with crank stuff like birtherism, the Ground Zero mosque, the New Black Panther case, and on and on and on. I understand that Republicans knew the 2010 electorate was going to be demographically very different from the 2012 electorate. But having whipped their own base up over stuff like this, how do they even put on the brakes even if, as Chait suggests, they want to? Particularly when one of the most influential entities in the party, Fox News, has a more direct interest in drawing ratings rather than winning elections? Wouldn't we have seen a glimpse of this non-culture war GOP by now instead of the Title X-defunding, NPR-obsessed party we've seen so far?
I also don't think it necessarily follows that the white voters who went for Obama in 2008 necessarily find him less "other" now. That's possible, but it's also possible that the last two years of race-baiting pseudoscandals have affected them as well. None of this is to suggest race is some kind of silver bullet -- if unemployment is under 8 percent, Marvin the Martian would have a good chance of winning, even without a birth certificate.
