That was apparently largely true in the past, but not any more. The present Republican leadership is full of True Believers, not people cynically manipulating True Believers for votes. The Republicans spent decades recruiting racists and religious fanatics and so on, until they have largely become the party, worked their way up the administrative ladder and taken control. And now are putting in quite a bit of effort into driving anyone who isn’t like that out of the party as a “RINO”.
Stalin had a neat trick to take over Communist parties. First with Russia and then with others. Sausage slicing.
It starts with: Hey, those people are a bit too conservative, they’re too friendly with The Bad Guys, they have to go. There’s a purge. But now there’s a new group on the moderate edge of the party. So they gotta go. Repeat until there are only hard line Stalinists left.
The GOP is doing the same thing. The problem is that the purges don’t send people to the Gulags. Plus it’s a democracy. Pushing away voters is a poor strategy in the long term. The game in the US is usually won by going to the middle. Not either extreme.
But the GOP is stuck in the sausage slicing model for now. Embracing group X, Latinos or others, is not part of their mindset.
I think the problem is with the primary system in this country. To vote in the Republican primary, you don’t have to produce a membership card in the Republican Party, you don’t have to pay dues to the party, you don’t have to attend meetings, or do anything else but tell the registrar you’d like to vote in the Republican primary. Even if some faction of the party wanted to drive out the fringe, they can do nothing about the fringe voting in the Republican primary and selecting their candidates for them.
Back around 1977-8 I had a friend who was active in Germany’s Young Socialists, the youth wing of the Social Democratic party. He had a membership card and went to local meetings, where various questions were voted on. I think regional officers and committee members would be chosen this way. Anyone can vote Social Democrat or Christian Democrat or what have you, and the party leaders certainly try to get your vote just as politicians do anywhere. But most people aren’t party members, and don’t participate in the selection of candidates, much less in the formation of party committees.
If you are an active party member of any party, you can be expelled from the party for various reasons, though I don’t think this is usually done for ideological reasons, the way Communist parties have sometimes done this in the past.
That varies from state to state. Some have open primaries and others have closed ones.
You are saying that there are some states that require you to present proof that you are a bona fide member of the Republican Party in order to vote in its primary? Can you give me an example of such a state? Who decides if you are qualified to vote in a given party’s primary?
The way I’ve heard the terms used in the United States is that a “closed primary” means that you must declare your party affiliation in advance when you register to vote. An “open primary” means that you can choose on election day. I’ve never heard of any primary where you must prove your party affiliation or get approval from the party to vote in its primary.
For example, Florida calls itself a closed primary state. To vote in the Republican primary, all you have to do is check the Republican box under Party Affiliation on the voter registration form. If you change your mind, all you have to do is fill out another voter registration form and check a different box. There is no way the Republican Party of Florida can prevent a fringe voter from voting in its primary (as long as they meet the registration deadline).
Many of the “Rich 1% pro business” are not. But they think they have to cater to the Tea Party and the Southerner, and yes, most of them are racists.
So, all the Rabid Teabaggers who win Republican primaries are actually elected by Liberal Democrats, posing as Republicans at the polling place–just to make the Republicans look bad? Somewhere, there’s a sane, moderate Republican majority–consistently outvoted by the evil Democrats (“fringe voters”) pretending to be Republicans…
Do you have any proof?
No I have no proof and that is not what I was saying. I do not think liberal Democrats are voting in Republican primaries.
I was replying to ftg’s comment about Stalin purging the party of his opponents. The more moderate Republican party of old has been invaded by the Rabid Teabaggers (as you call them) as well as religious zealots and others. Any attempt by the old-school Republicans to take back their party by purging the Teabaggers is going to be futile because they can’t stop the Teabaggers from voting in their primaries.
And, getting back to the topic in the OP, if some Republican strategist decided it would help the future of the party to form a coalition with Hispanics that wouldn’t work because any Republican candidate that voted for Hispanic-friendly policies would get primaried. The party can’t dictate that sort of policy to its primary voters. The primary voters don’t care about the future of the party. They care about Teabagger policies.
And by “fringe voters” I meant the radical right wing.
But primaries are meaningless unless you go on to win the general election. The Tea Party can take over the Republican Party and name all the candidates. But if the cost of doing so is driving more than 51% of the voters to the other side then it’s a tactical victory and strategic defeat.
The Republican Party needs to build a coalition that’s big enough to produce 51% of the votes on Election Day. Otherwise they’re just another third party.
I think he’s arguing that the only way out of this dilemma is to find a way to prevent the far right from voting in the primaries.
Mrs Iggy is brown, latina, and Spanish speaking. By all measures she should be rejected wholesale by conservative voters in the US, at least according to the attitudes so far expressed in this thread.
To cut off any disdain I advised her to approach the immigration issue with a simple straightforward attitude, “It is taking a long time to go through the immigration process but I wanted to do it legally. I just want the opportunity to find a job and work to support my daughter. And I am willing to learn what I need to make that happen.”
I think a large problem the Republican party is experiencing is a disdain for illegal immigration and they have been guilty of discrimination, assuming all Spanish speak brown people are in the country illegally.
This pretty much sums the problem up in one sentence.
The problem is in the contemporary GOP only cynical manipulators and true believers can rise to the top. And the cynical manipulators end up being so transparently dishonest that people don’t trust them (Romney, Guiliani, Gingrich, Pawlenty, Cheney, etc) or they are adults who sincerely believe in all the conspiracy theories (science is a global anti-christian conspiracy, evolution is made up) that they end up self destructing because anyone who believes those kinds of things is guaranteed to believe a lot of other stupid things that makes them seem too unprepared or extreme to be trusted with power. Huckabee, Bachmann, Cain, Paul, Perry, Palin, etc.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if they win. No matter how extreme they get they can gather up 40% of the vote. All it takes is democrats staying home combined with some independent voters siding with the GOP for another sweep for them to win.
I guess in the long run that is good, the GOP when it does win (like it did in 2010) assumes it wins because they are rabidly conservatives, not because their opposition stayed home. This speeds up the downward spiral and hopefully some party restructuring someday.
I’d like to believe by the 2020s the GOP will be a regional party that can only win 45% of the vote at most in national elections, but who knows.
In New Jersey you declare your party which puts you on a list the Poll Workers have in front of them. When you go to vote you go to the table for your party and they confirm you are on the list and you then vote for only that Party’s Candidates in a completely separate booth. I suppose you can declare as the other party or flip back and forth but in NJ this is how it works.
FWIW I think if we are going with our current two party system, every primary should be closed. Open Primaries are how Jim DeMint ended up running against a possibly mentally challenged man no one had ever heard of.
I don’t see how you could do that without a pretty radical change in the primary process. You’d have to go back to the old smoked-filled-room system.
But even if you don’t kick the extremists out of the system, you can mute the influence. If more moderate Republicans (like myself) got involved, we might be able to outvote the extremists in the primaries and choose more moderate candidates.
Well the Republicans can take hope in that the Republican-lite Democrats who now control the Democratic Party are driving away progressive Democrats in droves because they completely ignore progressive interests. I don’t know how many are as discouraged as me, but I bet it’s a lot them. I’m voting Green for the foreseeable future … because I don’t think the Dems are going to pay attention until they start losing elections because of progressive defections, sadly. How many are just staying away from the polls? Can’t say, but I bet it’s part of the low voter turnout problem.
Well, that has already happened a couple of times. We get to thank the morons who voted for Nader in 200) for eight years of the worst president in Modern times. Boy they really showed us, didn’t they?
What fringe voters have to understand is that spite voting hurt them as well of the rest of the nation. And that a move to the left for the DEMs will allow the GOP to snag more centrist votes- and there are more of them.
Voting Green does nothing but hurt America- well, unless you know the Dems are gonna win anyway, in which case, it’s a fair gesture made.
Voting Green cost us a hugely expensive war and eight fucking years of that fucking war criminal GWB.
I think this is way off the mark. The Reps embrace Blacks as part of the party as much as they can. They even made Michael Steele Chairman of the Republican National Committee. He was also the Republican nominee for the Maryland Senate seat. (During the campaign he was vilified by other Blacks as “oreo”, et.)
The problem is that there is a relatively tiny pool from which to draw talent. When you have 95% of Blacks voting Dem, you’re not going to have a large pool. The problem isn’t so much a lack of desire from the Rep establishment, its the success of the Dem part in brainwashing Blacks that the Reps want them held down, if not lynched.
The really odd thing is that if you look at the unemployment rate among Blacks, you would think that the party that is supposedly looking out for them would want to help them. But more liberal immigration policies just mean that lower-skilled workers (which make up a disproportionate percent of Blacks) will have a harder time of it. How the Dems have been able to pull this off is truly astonishing. Talk about opting against your own self interest! Charter schools is another important issue. You’d think the Dems would be championing them, but they’re not. The Reps are. The Mayor of NYC is getting a lot of blowback for having taking a stance that is largely anti-Charter. And that is coming predominantly from the Black community.
As far as your points about Hispanics, you make good ones. And I think you’re right that many of the values that the Rep part espouses can be found thriving in the Hispanic community. I think the problem here is again the successful efforts of the Dems to demonize the Reps as being “anti-Brown people”. The immigration debate is often framed this way. But as time goes on and we see more instances of Reps championing Hispanic candidates (and Black ones) the Dems hold on them will loosen.
I’d argue the the Dems are doing that.