Commentary on the GOP, its future, and the turn around

Since the meteoric rise and successful presidential campaign of President Barack H. Obama, coupled along with two consecutive midterm losses in the House and Senate, the Republican Party has had no shortage of diagnosis from political scientist and pundits. There have been various theories presented on why such a complete fall from power happened to such a once dominant majority party. There are those who simply say it is part of the vicious cycle of politics. One party’s stock rises with the circumstances as the other falls to them. Others have said it was Bush “fatigue.” Still, others, including conservatives, say the Republican Party was a victim of its own greed and power. They conclude that the GOP is a good reform party with sound governing principles, but showed that they were a lousy party when given power and control for too long a period. 

Governor Haley Barbour is one of two individuals who recently commented on the affairs of the Republican Party and the future of American Politics. The other included is from Ronald Brownstein who had a completely different take with different reasons. 

 

 

Gov. Barbour is an insider, a political operative, and some even say a miracle worker with a nation wide organization. What would one suspect as a former RNC chairman? In other words, he knows his business and business has always been politics. 

Gov. Barbour appears in a Wall Street Journal article “The Republican Revival Will Start in the States.” He sat down with Steve Moore to offer his insight and share his experience and thoughts on the Republican Party. (All are just excerpts from the original).

Haley Barbour has a message for Republicans still dispirited by the November elections: “We’ve been in a lot worse shape than this. . . . When I first started working in politics during the Watergate era only 16% of Americans identified themselves as Republicans.” He recalls one incident in the mid 1970s when “Mary Louise Smith, the chairman of the party, appointed a committee to change the name of the party. You can’t get much lower than that.”

 He took over the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee in 1993 during another one of those low points. George H.W. Bush had just mustered 38% of the vote and lost the White House to Bill Clinton. Mr. Barbour recounts that the political wise men all agreed that 1992 was a realigning election, that the GOP had become a regional party of the South, that the conservatives were devoid of ideas, and that the era of Reaganism was over.

Not quite. Two years later the GOP stormed back and Mr. Barbour was one of the unsung masterminds of the 1994 Republican revolution.

He then offers a sobering fact of political history: “We need to understand that only once since 1896 has a party that took the White House not held on for at least two terms, and that was when Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. So the odds are stacked against us.” Message: Brace yourself for eight years of President Barack Obama.

Perhaps the toughest question of all was when he addressed the voters confidence in the party and Reagan’s legacy of principles on government and economics. 

One of his biggest worries is that voters have lost confidence in Reaganite free-market principles. “The last few times that we’ve lost elections, it has not been because voters changed their mind about our policies, it’s been because they changed their mind about us,” he explains. “They decided that we hadn’t adhered to the policies and principles that they had thought they were voting for during that election.”

Now the problem may be deeper: “Right now a lot of people that have voted for us repeatedly are not so sure about free-market capitalism. They’re scared. They don’t know if they’re going to have to work until they’re 80, they don’t know if they’re going to send their children to college, they don’t know if they’re going to lose their business or job.” So he fears that “right now the only answer they know is government. The only place they know to turn that can help them is government.”

He hinted that a rebuilding and reorganizing stage was probably in the works. A few he hit on were to find new and creative ways to capture some of the youth vote, expand the party’s message to more voters by not turning on moderate Republicans and alienating the New England GOPers. Gov. Barbour even said that foreign policy may revert back towards a peace through strength, open market power, instead of nation building through through military action. He says the source of this change and new direction will come from within the states. 

What should a post-Bush Republican foreign policy look like? I ask, because the party now seems incoherent on what it believes in with respect to America’s position in the world. “I think, more and more, we’re going to decide that there are very, very, strong limits to nation-building. But I think we’ll also be for open markets. It’s easy to be isolationist in bad economic times, but it’s terrible policy. So I see our policy as open markets, internationalist, peace through strength, but caution about interventionism.”

In the end, he advises, Republicans can only win if they rediscover the power and voter appeal of innovative and reform-minded solutions to the nation’s ills. “If we’re going to have a party that gets the White House back before we fall totally into socialism, we need to persuade voters that our market-based solutions work, and government mostly doesn’t. And we’re going to have to apply these principles to a whole new set of policy challenges.”

The best people to do that, he insists, are the governors. He reminds me that in the 1990s it was governors like John Engler of Michigan, Fife Symington of Arizona, and Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin who led the way on supply-side tax cutting, welfare reform and economic development. I ask him if there are any future Ronald Reagans out there in the states. He mentions Bobby Jindal, Mark Sanford, Jim Douglas and, of course, Sarah Palin. “This has to be a bottom-up rebuilding process,” he says. “Republican solutions are going to flow from the states, not from Washington.”

 

Ronald Brownstein from the National Journal argues that the GOP may be powerless to overcome the setbacks the party is experiencing. His reasoning is solely on the changing demography in America. His article “Demography And Destiny” paints a bleak picture for the Republican party and a rosy one for the Democrat party. To understand just how much is changing in terms of voters and emerging demographics:

Start by considering the electorate’s six broadest demographic groups — white voters with at least a four-year college degree; white voters without a college degree; African-Americans; Hispanics; Asians; and other minorities.

Now posit that each of those groups voted for Barack Obama or John McCain in exactly the same proportions as it actually did. Then imagine that each group represented the share of the electorate that it did in 1992. If each of these groups voted as it did in 2008 but constituted the same share of the electorate as in 1992, McCain would have won. Comfortably.

That’s because Obama’s best groups are much larger today than in 1992. From 1992 to 2008, the share of the vote cast by African-Americans jumped from 8 percent to 13 percent. For Hispanics the share soared from 2 percent to 9 percent; for Asians and other minorities combined, from 2 percent to 5 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of the vote cast by well-educated whites remained unchanged at 35 percent. The big losers were blue-collar whites — those without college degrees — whose share plummeted from 53 percent in 1992 to just 39 percent now.

 

 

 

 

 

He concludes that these changes from immigration and children born by immigrants will continue to happen and may reshape America’s political demography. 

These trends point toward trouble for the GOP if it cannot attract more minorities, especially Hispanics, and reverse the recent Democratic inroads among well-educated whites.

The best way to illustrate that prospect is to pitch the thought experiment forward 12 years. Imagine that the major demographic groups voted as they did in 2008, but cast a share of the vote equal to their expected share of the population in 2020. (For argument’s sake, let’s divide whites among college and noncollege voters in the same proportions as today.) In that scenario, Obama beats McCain by nearly 14 points — almost twice as much as in 2008. Demography will indeed be destiny if Republicans can’t broaden their reach.