Can The Republican Party Ever Win Another National Electon?

Politics & Elections
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There was an interesting article rolling around the internet that I can’t find right now, that talked about Presidents who were elected “in sync” with the prevailing political winds, and Presidents who were elected “contrary” to those winds. Additionally it identified the “transitional” Presidents and whether someone was a transitional President or a contrarian.

Okay so, generally this theory says that basically from FDR through Johnson, you had this prevailing wind of government getting involved in the economy, creating social welfare etc. A single contrarian President during that period would have been Eisenhower, explained by the fact that he was basically a Washingtonesque figure of massive personal popularity such that he could easily be elected despite being a Republican in a heavily Democratic-leaning time.

With Nixon’s election in 1968, you then either have a transitional President or another contrarian. This theory argues Nixon was transitional. Evidence is the wide support for many of Nixon’s issues in both elections. Carter is seen as a contrarian President elected primarily because of personal malfeasance on Nixon’s behalf and Ford attaching his name to the mud by pardoning Nixon, a deeply unpopular move (Ford still almost won reelection–Ohio was won by carter by under 0.5% which would have given Ford 265 EVs, and then a few other states were very close that could have pushed him over, so Ford came close to holding on in an electoral college victory.) The reason Carter is seen as contrarian is there is a good explanation for his election unrelated to a shifting political wind, but instead related to a specific scandal. The massively supported election of Reagan and Bush for the next 12 years was an indication of the continuing rightward political wind and thus Carter’s Presidency is more easily seen as a contrarian election.

The theory then basically says Clinton is part of that same movement, because Clinton was extremely moderate, he adopted traditional Republican ideas at many points and did not appear in most ways to be changing the prevailing wind. This theory then speculates that Bush himself was the last President in this rightward movement, and that Obama is the transitional President representing a new direction.

While I don’t totally buy into all of these conclusions, I do think there is a core thing to note. The circumstances of an individual election can lead to someone being elected from a party that is long out of favor and/or not particularly aligned with the prevailing political winds. Carter won because of a massive scandal, Clinton won because he grabbed hold of the center as tight as he could, Eisenhower won through massive personal popularity.

So such a thing is possible and could lead to a GOP President sooner than might be suspected. For example Joe Biden is a risky nominee, he’ll be 74 years old, Hillary Clinton will be almost 70. What if one of them is nominated and they drop dead during the campaign or have a heart attack or get cancer? I have serious concerns about any 74 year old person’s long term health prospects, and it’s impossible to say what a strong GOP candidate in 2016 might do if the Democrats flag bearer suffers some medical problem mid-election. Or there could be a Clintonesque Republican, whose massive personal popularity gets him through the primaries despite being out of sync with the party, who has wide appeal and wins. I don’t know of any Republicans who fit that mold at all right now, but I didn’t know who Bill Clinton was until 1992 either. (Chris Christie might be the closest, but I think he’s too grotesquely obese for national politics, and too brash and gaffe prone and far too Jersey, but a guy who is a Republican and is widely popular and willing to swing left is the concept here.)

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Maybe its just me, but I think a Republican will have to distance himself a little from the current Republican nutjobs, and actually take some jabs at them(which Christie has already done), in order to win the middle. He will have to be the maverick that McCain said he was.

And I admit that I am usually wrong at this, but I think Christie is the guy. The right NEEDS a brash guy. I think it will be a fun campaign.

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First, it’s ridiculous to dismiss census data in the out years as statistically reliable. Second, exit polling and census data needn’t match given that not everyone can or does vote. I am not sure why you think they should overlap at all.

Do we only get bend out of shape when people say really condescending things?

Yes, you did use some bad examples.

In today’s climate, policy cannot be dictated top down. This idea that you can say, “hey this is losing us votes, let’s change it”, is not usually possible. Not only because the advocates for those positions are ideologically wedded to the position, but because there is no one person who can make all the politicians stay in line. This is why Todd Akin couldn’t be forced to withdraw, and why Boehner can’t get enough votes for any compromise bill. If it were just as easy as seeing what polls well, doing that, and telling everyone else to fall in line, they would have done it already.

You act as if that GOP is the only entity that controls the narrative. Honestly, if it were that easy why have they not done it? Why do they instead focus on making it harder to vote and gerrymandering districts? Again, I am sure there a few positions the national party can change their position on, but that doesn’t stop the next Todd Akin from throwing them right back in the fire.

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Well, McCain was non-conformist for realz in 2000, and a massive money machine showed him what’s what in South Carolina. But he wasn’t a closet Democrat or anything, he was a Republican who for whatever reason was extremely committed to the idea of campaign finance reform. I think he’s also mostly always been unwavering in condemning torture, but by and large on most other issues he was and always has been firmly Republican.

85

I think you’re living in a dream world where you think nothing about professional politics is remotely comparable to what it was in the past, that’s absolute hog wash. The number of candidates who succeed with no powerful backers outside their district are vanishingly small. That doesn’t mean they only win with the backing of the national committees or the congressional campaign committees or whatever other official party bodies are out there, but the people who roll money into candidates that hurt the brand aren’t Ma and Pa Kettle, they’re typically billionaires or powerful individuals like Karl Rove who brought large amounts of money under one umbrella (Rove sucked up around a billion dollars and by and large was allowed to do as he pleased with it, creating an effective powerbase for himself in 2012. Didn’t win or pay any returns, but the fact that he could do it in the first place shows the concept in action, try pulling a billion dollars together in 2014 and see how easy it is.) Have you really never read any of the articles about where a lot of these “grassroots” Republican types are getting their money?

There is some legitimate “grassroots” nature to the Tea Party and their ilk, but the “astroturf” insult is highly accurate. The nucleus of these movements and their continued financial support is very much big money funded. What that means is a smart, effective politician like a 2014 version of Newt Gingrich should be able to talk to these powerful figures and explain that they need to cut off the honey or the Democrats are going to keep winning elections and those dividend tax rates are going to some day start to approach a marginal tax rate these guys would be paying.

If it’s so hard for a loser political party to come back why does it happen all the time? There are structural issues that make it very difficult in our system for a single party to rule forever. You can have long periods of power, but it tends to lead to a big tent that eventually becomes too fractured to win elections.

At one point in time, we had some flux in our political parties. The modern day Democrats have mostly always been around, but the Federalists collapsed into the DRs and then later on some Whigs started a party and split off the DRs and then later some Whigs joined together with some dissatisfied DRs and started the GOP and that’s really been fixed for over 150 years now. It’s highly unlikely to change. The Democrats were the party that seceded from the country, and the Northern Democrats were most likely to be Copperheads and advocating for peace with the Confederacy. The 725,000 dead in the Civil War and the hundreds of thousands of wounded veterans who became a massive political force hated these guys with the heat of a star and yet, in twenty years time Samuel Tilden beats Hayes for the election (but is basically robbed of the Presidency in a quid-pro-quo in which Hayes promises to end reconstruction.) By 1884 a Democrat is in the White House again.

There have been many ups and downs since and both parties have kept going, there is just little evidence that a system such as ours, based on international evidence from other FPTP single member district systems that you’re going to have a one party state til the end of time. The only place you could get that is if the one party is the ruling party in a sham democracy that is the cover for a totalitarian state, but that’s not the case in the United States.

What is your actual contention? I’ve seen nothing but inane nitpickery on side issues from you. Do you posit the Republicans are done til the Sun boils off the oceans or do you think they’re going to win in 2016 or do you think something in between? Why and for what reasons?

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I’ve heard Louisiana Gov. Jindal’s name being tossed around a lot lately.

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Considering the totality of Romney’s career, my model is that he’s someone who is easily pressured into seeing five lights, after which he incorporates “2 + 2 = 5” into his world view where it stays until and unless somebody else applies pressure in another direction to reset his operating-system assumptions.

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Firmly traditional Republican is not the same as firmly Tea Party. The claim is not that Republicans have to look like Democrats to win, just that Republicans have to look somewhat rational to win. Which might mean denouncing the nutjobs. And more strongly than saying “I wouldn’t put it that way.”
I might not have agreed with McCain’s positions in 2008, but they weren’t extreme. (Palin was another matter.) Candidates today seem to have to be either extreme or unwilling to criticize the extremists as extreme.
Both McCain and Romney had histories of both very Republican positions and some that Democrats could get behind. This year, unlike 2008, Romney disavowed all of these.

89

I don’t think the GOP can survive the embarrassment of nominating an exorcist. You think Christine O’Donnell had problems!

90

They’re going to have to find a candidate with half a brain and start from scratch…everybody stlll around is damaged goods. Until then…bqhatevwr.

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I think both of the statements about Romney could be true. I think he is almost certainly an elitist, based on everything we know about it. I doubt he hates the poor, but I don’t think he understands the poor or really the middle class. But I also think Romney knew how to win in Massachusetts and doesn’t appear to be an idiot, nor do I really think his life story would suggest extreme Tea Party style conservatism. I suspect whatever his real beliefs, he wanted to run a more moderate campaign against Obama but it was simply not possible because of how far right he had to go to win the primaries and because of who was paying the bills in the general election.

On the personality issue (basically Romney’s unlikability) that was one of the worst aspects of him as a candidate and Romney himself obviously had no ability to fix it, and he didn’t hire anyone who was able to fix it, either. It may not have been possible, some people’s personae can only be polished so much.

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I find it interesting that libertarians are being blamed for ruining the party when the party elites hate libertarians and do not support free markets in any meaningful way. Then GWB is being called a moderate? Interesting since he campaigned on some fairly libertarian positions the first go around and appointed long-time libertarian activists and ex Libertarian Party officials after his first election. I also recall Cato influencing more mainstream Republican positions during that era than they have since. It seems like Republicans just might be doomed if they think their problem is not being neo-conservative enough and/or completely ignore their focus on emphasizing and doubling down on terrible policy.
I realize the assertion was more about an-caps than libertarians generally, which makes it even more absurd. Republicans have avoided completely common-sense (nonradical) libertarian positions. The idea that they’ve been infiltrated by radical anarchists is just laughable. If that were the case why have the party leaders and big time candidates made zero proposals that aren’t centrist? There have been no radical spending or tax proposals, not even cutting obvious waste, avoiding military cuts for no good reason, avoiding cutting redundant departments. There’s just nothing there. Some guys read a couple Ayn Rand books just like millions of teenagers Whoahhh

93

What are an-caps?

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Short for anarcho-capitalist I believe.

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Of course they can.

Just ten years ago after the 2002 mid-term elections people were talking about a “permanent Republican majority” and talking about the Democrats never winning another election.

Things change and the Republicans will obviously adapt.

Hell, they barely lost this election. Yes it was an electoral blowout, but the popular vote was only something like 51-49.

If in 2016, the economy is still terrible and the Democrats are going to have a much tougher time, particularly if they run someone who doesn’t get young people and minorities(particularly African-Americans) to turn out the way Obama did.

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“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

– Napoleon Bonaparte

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Regarding all of that, see here.

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Come on, Clothy. Jindal’s a joke, and you know it. The only reason Jindal is on anyone’s radar is because the Republican party thinks it needs an ethnic counter to Obama. If Jindal were white he’d be as invisible as any other marginally accomplished Republican governor.

The GOP keeps names like Jindal, Haley, and Rubio in the spotlight because, it seems, they honestly believe that putting a new, brown wrapper on the same old, tired product will fool the plebs into believing they’ve changed. Not only is that insulting, It simply won’t work. By and large, the nation’s Hispanics, with the exception of Cubans, are either afraid of or horrified by the GOP and won’t switch to the Republican party just Because Rubio is on the ticket. It’s almost comical to hear political pundits say “Hispanics are a natural constituent for the Republican party; they’re pro-life and pro-family values.” Yeah, keep believing that being the anti abortion party is in any way attractive to most Hispanic voters.

Also, Republicans actually believe (at least they say they believe) that blacks voted in such high percentages for Obama because Obama is black, when the fact is blacks have have voted for Democrats in near similar percentages for at least the last 6 elections. To think that Bobby Jindal, Nikki Haley, Mia Love, or any other face the party perceives as appropriately brown enough will cause more than a handful of black Democrats to switch parties is beyond ludicrous.

To answer the OP, sure, the Republicans can win the White House again, and probably will. I don’t think, however, that this will occur in 2016. Like it or not, the Republicans have to change, if only for their continued viability as a national party, and not simply cosmetically. 3 years is not enough time for the GOP to make the changes necessary to appeal to an electorate growing increasingly weary of a party that has become anti-just about everything except God, war, and tax cuts. So they’ll probably lose the next Presidential election, and if Hillary runs, I’d wager this to be an almost certainty.

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Well, change how? That presents the problem. See the Pew Political Typology – at present, the GOP has two reliable bases – “Staunch Conservatives” (think Tea Partiers) and “Main Street Republicans” (think your grandfather’s GOP, or RINOs if you prefer). It can’t please both, and it can’t win without both, and, as we’ve seen the past three years, the SC/TP won’t just go along and play nice any more, but will actually mount primary-challenges against insufficiently hard-RW Pubs.

And, one not-so-reliable base – the “Libertarians.” Most of these are moderate libertarians, not the radical sort you’ll find in the LP – still, they likely will be displeased by most things that please the SC/TP, and vice-versa.

Ever since the 1970s, Republican success has been based on burying the differences between factions in a “no enemies to the right” coalition. It now appears that coalition is no longer viable.

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Two election years in a row the republican who won the nomination was an overall moderate who tacked hard right during the primaries then went center again in the general election.

I expect fully in 2016 that the republicans won’t do this again (and frankly I’m surprised they did it at all in 2012). I think in 2016 we are going to see a hard right-wing candidate win the nomination and be thoroughly destroyed by the Democrat.

But until a really thoroughly right-wing candidate gets to run in the general and then loses, the GOP will just keep spouting the old line, “Well if we had just run a true conservative, we would have won!” And they will never have the impetus to change their platform, message, or candidates.