If I had known there was a party here, I'd have live blogged it. I may have even put pants on for the occasion.jcalhoun wrote: Cromrartie, I know you're a liberal (and probably pleased as punch this morning), so asking you a question about the state of American conservatism might be like a lamb consulting a lion, but... the impression I got from the 08 election was that evangelical voters didn't show up to support McCain. I remember there was a lot of talk about that at the time. Did the same thing happen yesterday? I don't really understand the role of religion in US politics, and wonder if you think Romney being a Mormon played a part in the less than enthusiastic embrace he got from right-wing voters. My impression from up here was that Romney was a far stronger candidate than McCain was, but the numbers this morning don't necessarily bear that out.
Cheers,
James
The only point Mormonism rared it's head was very subtle. On more than one occasion, the Obama campaign made it a point to show pictures of the President drinking a beer. In fact, the White House has it's own microbrewery. I don't believe in coincidences.
At the Presidential level, this played out exactly as I thought it would in May. Indiana would revert to the mean and, because the Charlotte area was dependent upon the Financial industry and was hit hard by the recession, that North Carolina would flip. The answer to your Presidential question is this. Romney, both in organization and in fund raising, was a significantly stronger candidate than McCain. That said, he was still a weak speaker, relatively speaking, and the 47% tape, along with his position on the auto bailout (encouraging the automakers to rely on private bankruptcy financing when none was available) left a mark on a subset of blue collar rust belt voters that ultimately made the difference in Ohio. Let's add in a couple of other things as well. The microtargeting of demographic subsets of voters on the part of the Obama campaign is significantly ahead of the Republicans. (Note that this doesn't translate down ballot). I had the luxury of early voting in Ohio. The day after my ballot was received and processed, I stopped getting robocalls and literature drops from every Democratic candidate for office. Republican candidates for office, on the other hand, continued to call and leave literature (despite the fact I'm a registered Democrat) more or less continuously for the month between my absentee drop off and Election Day. Think of the waste of money and campaign resources.
Let's talk about where, at a Senate and Presidential level, the Republicans have problems. 88% of those who voted for Mitt Romney were white. The Republican Party, at this moment, is white, rural, aging and male. This is not demographically sustainable. If you look at the current red/blue map, over the next decade, if they do nothing, Texas, Arizona and Georgia will begin to turn purple. If they turn blue, the Republican Party is finished at the federal level, barring some sort of major screw up.
Thinking strategically, it's significant to note that the Republican Party got it's clock cleaned with Hispanic voters. This was the Hispanic voting bloc coming out party. I've spent a lot of the day reading, and one of the astonishing statistics I saw was that 60% of Hispanic voters either directly or indirectly knew someone who was in the country illegally. With that in mind, the Xenophobia the party stoked with anti-immigration referendums in 2004 and 2006 in order to drive up turnout needs to end. Even George W Bush had the good sense to try and push his party down a path of supporting amnesty. Strategically, it is probably wise of the Republicans in the House to work with the White House and Senate Democrats next year to, at a minimum, pass the Dream Act. Will this benefit Democrats? Yes. But it will take the issue of immigration off the table in time for the midterms and for the 2016 Presidential Election. At the federal level, Republicans have a deep Hispanic bench that the Democrats lack, and running a bilingual Hispanic candidate such as Marco Rubio somewhere on the ticket would help them make considerable in roads very quickly. If the Republicans remain obstructionist, it will harm them at the midterms in some traditionally red territory, particularly the Mountain West which, in the case of Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, has already turned blue.
When we think about Senate races, there appears to be a ceiling on what would be considered "Tea Party" candidates in swing and blue states. Certainly a Pat Toomay can squeeze in in a wave year (He will lose in 2016) but there are three characteristics of swing states to examine: ethnic diversity, degree of urbanization and percentage of evangelicals. If you lose two of these three measures, a Republican candidate pushing a far right message can't win. So the ceiling for these types of candidates that tend to win state level primaries has been established.
Millennials are the next problem. I don't necessarily believe what I read when I read that Millennials are overwhelmingly liberal. (It's also a fallacy that people get more conservative when they age; 80% of people that vote for the same party's Presidential candidate in the first three elections in which they vote, vote that way their entire lives). They tend to be socially liberal, closer to libertarian in some ways, but are open to the cynical Republican fiscal message of "for you but not for them" or are more fatalistic about the availability of entitlements. Part of this libertarian bend manifests itself in the marijuana and gay marriage legalization referendums you saw passed last night. Millennials females, in addition, are strongly pro birth control and identify pretty strongly with the HIllary Clinton "safe, legal and rare" point of view on abortion.
While a center-right economic message may have some appeal, the evangelical based social view that Republican candidates espouse are a significant turn off. It doesn't matter if you speak Spanish if you are trying to negatively impact a woman's right to choose. So the tight rope here is how to appeal to a generation of voters that have a fundamentally different value system than your current core constituents (and largest donors).
Lest you think it's all doom and gloom, the good news is in the House. There are two significant weakness of the currently functioning Democratic Party. The first is that, for as good of a job as the Obama campaign has done in getting elected and re-elected, that success hasn't really trickled down to the house and gubernatorial level. The wave election of 2010 gave state control of Secretary of State offices and State houses to Republicans in many states, and they used it to Gerrymander in as many Republican districts as they could. Aggregate vote counts for House of Representative elections actually favor the Democrats, but you'll note the House remains in Republican control. Barring a wave I can't foresee at this point, it's likely to remain this way until 2020. The second is that the coalition you saw last night doesn't really show up during off year elections. So while Obama the candidate and campaigner has done a great job, the Democratic Party in general hasn't succeeded in the manner one might like.
So yes, I'm quite pleased. I"m pleased because I like the President, but more importantly because the demographic realities of the electorate now dictate that the 44 year ceaseless rightward drift of the federal government is essentially over. The Republican Party now has to move beyond the Southern Strategy or face irrelevance. This is a tough task, because there is a great deal of money being made by a significant number of people off of holding this demographic's attention. It should be interesting to watch.