The majority of Romney supporters say they picked Romeny primarily because he was the most electable. Many of these folks are self identified conservatives. In other words, they, much like Romney are willing to put aside their principles to try and win an election because they don’t think a condidate that believes as they do can actually win an election.
I don’t think there has been an opportunity like this for conservatives in the last 35 years. Economy in the toilet, the entire country talking about fiscal discipline, taxes are such anathema that even Republicans are balking at the tax cuts the public is demanding. If they can’t nominate a conservative this year, they simply don’t think a conservative can get elected.
I saw Santorum speaking at a retirement center last night and I don’t agree with everythiong he says but at least HE seems to agree with everything he says.
If conservatives really believed their own bullshit they would nominate someone like Santorum, instead they are setlling for Romney because they think he can get elected.
Then they’re just being realistic. Look at the Pew Political Typology – Staunch Conservatives are only 9% of the population, 11% of registered voters. Outside the solid-red counties they can’t win nuttin’ without the alliance of the more moderate Main Street Republicans (11%/14%) – and, at that, they still need some Independent (Libertarians, Disaffecteds, Postmoderns) votes to win. America does not have a conservative majority no matter what definition of “conservative” you use. Wise conservatives know that, that’s why they concentrate their efforts on voter suppression.
But America is a center-right country! Everybody knows that! Go ahead, ask everybody, they’ll tell you, America is a center-right country. Well, real Americans, anyway…
oops no I intended to say that Conservatives don’t think they can win.
I would like a conservative to explain to me why self identified conservatives are voting for Mitt Romney rather than Santorum or Perry or even Newt. These are the best that the conservative wing of the Republican party had to offer this year and they don’t think that they can win. If they can’t win this year then when the fuck CAN they win?
I wish they would just admit it that they know they can never win the white house so they coopt the Republican party at the local level and rely on the party line Republican voter to get their whacko candidate into congress and then bitch about how liberal the president is.
What are you defining as conservative? People that act like Rick Perry? I’m a life long conservative and I wouldn’t vote for Rick Perry because he’s a crazy Christian fundamentalist idiot. If that is how you define “conservative” then I think you’re coming from the wrong premise in the first place.
According to that 40% of the electorate is mostly democratic vs 25% who are mostly republican. I’ve heard people say demographics are changing to benefit the democratic party, but even that sounds a little too one sided.
Also I thought libertarians were considered mostly republican rather than independents. That may have changed since the 90s, the GOP has moved away from its more libertarian roots. Plus the issues aren’t as clear cut anymore. The democratic party is more socially liberal, but the GOP is more fiscally conservative. However GOP foreign policy is very neoconservative now. etc.
Historically the Democrats have enjoyed a 60/40 advantage, but Republicans obviously still won a lot of elections. They didn’t often have control of the House, though.
In the modern era I think party affiliation is becoming very amorphous, and the swing voters are basically governed by flights of fancy governed by random fluctuations in various measures that they don’t understand and that pundits scream about.
I think there’s a lot of this. A lot of the lack of strict party affiliation has to do with some of this blending. Some of the blending comes from quickly changing platforms, long term compromises, and stuff like that.
You mean 25% of them are settling for Romney. The conservative vote was badly split before, it will be interesting to see how things turn out now that the two wings (social and libertarian) have one candidate each.
This is where I am, too. I consider myself conservative, but I’m not entirely socially conservative. Perry and his ilk spend way, way too much time and effort preaching their social conservatism and religion. There is a small but very vocal base of conservative supporters who eat that up, but I don’t think it’s popular enough to win a general election.
Yeah, well they seem to win elections despite their numbers. They’re not suppressing the vote THAT much.
I think your party might be leaving you behind, they left me behind about ten years ago. The Rick Perry crowd is calling the shots these days in the Republican primary and frankly if Rick Perry hadn’t turned out to be such a dud, Mitt Romney would be crying into his beer. So now Republicans are searching for another Rick Perry but smarter not less religious. Its not his fundamentalism that is disqualifying him nor is it his policy positions generally.
This is the deal Republican struck decades ago. Reagan traded the hard core racists for the hard core Christians and it has been a politically good trade. You started winning elections and your new political partners were happy to assimilate elements of your faith (low taxes, loose regulations, free markets) into theirs. Stalwart political allies indeed. They reliably vote for you as long as you pretend social issues are the most important political issues.
Very small? Excuse me but you wouldn’t win elections without the evnagelicals.
We been talking about this for years, how the corporatist Republicans kept stringing along the Troglodyte Right by promising them things they couldn’t deliver, and then saying “Well, just one more election, and you can have it! Once more into the breach, dear friends…” When, in actual fact, they shared very little in the way of a common agenda.
That can actually hurt more than help. Personally, I think Howard Dean would’ve been a much more interesting candidate in 2004 than the Democrats’ “realistic” choice of John Kerry. And since the election was close, maybe Dean’s energy and enthusiasm would’ve won out.
No, you can’t win the Republican primary without evangelicals. In a general election, they can be beaten. Even a Pub could win without the evangelicals, if the Dem were unpopular enough. After all, they’re not gonna cross over, are they?
Your conclusions aren’t accurate. The party isn’t “leaving me behind” just because it has changed in the past 10 years. Firstly, and as I’ve said before, I think SDMB types overstate the importance of the fundamentalist wing of the Republican party. For all the bluster, how many nominees have they had, ever? Reagan wasn’t, Bush I wasn’t, Dole wasn’t, McCain wasn’t. Throughout this election cycle Romney has been the presumptive nominee for a long time, and while we all are entertained by the “not-Romney” cycling of alternate candidates, the only real fundamentalist candidates have been Rick Perry and Santorum. Cain and Gingrich don’t really count. Perry is already done, and unless Santorum proves he’s in for the long ride he’ll amount to nothing more than a Huckabee (who I think isn’t necessarily fairly lumped in with guys like Falwell and the Moral Majority just because he’s a devout Christian.)
Note I didn’t mention George W. Bush; he was an evangelical but I don’t consider him to have been a Christian fundamentalist President or candidate. He was essentially everyone’s choice, and aside from a little blip on the radar in New Hampshire his nomination wasn’t seriously contested.
That being said, where exactly is the GOP going such that I’d become a Democrat? The Democratic party is not getting an inch closer to being the party most closely aligned to my political preferences. I think most people should be aware by now both parties are big tent parties with conflicting stances on many different issues, you either go independent or pick whichever party you feel comes the closest to being a fit, you’re not going to find an exact match.
Finally, ever since I’ve been a Republican we’ve always had the real conservatives like myself, who know that since our politics are mostly favorable to the wealthy (who are a minority), we have to pair with varying breeds of ignorant white trash types to win elections.
No. They don’t think any of the conservatives who are running, aside from Romney, can win. That is not to say that no conservative can win. That’s why they have been courting folks like Chris Christie. Conservatives who can actually campaign and not make fools of themselves.
You are right, but I believe it’s due more to the noise they make, the money they spend and the fact that every single one of them will turn up on election day. I do not believe that evengelicals outnumber the rest of the population of conservatives and I think they turn a lot of people off of conservatism, too. If they truly had the numbers, we would not see “moderate” conservatives, McCain in '08 and now Romney in '12, at the forefront of the party.
