As I see it, the Tea Party comprises a minority of Republicans. But they’re very well-funded, and they have an advantage in primaries, and they’re using these two factors to bully moderate Republicans into toeing the Tea Party line or else lose office in the primary.
So my question is pretty simple: what viable strategy could moderate Republicans use to wrest control back from the Tea Party fringe?
Note that if you disagree that moderate Republicans are a good thing, you can still answer the question, but if you disagree that there’s a difference between moderate republicans and the Tea Party, don’t bother. I’m also not interested in hearing how terrible all Republicans are; that’s for a different thread.
One thing I’ve wondered about: is there any chance at all that a Republican coup could work, of Republican representatives who want to marginalize the Tea Party and who put forth a Speaker candidate who essentially campaigns on his refusal to give the Tea Party the time of day?
The way I see it, they have to be willing to take some losses and out-stubborn the teabaggers. Refuse to kow-tow to them, and when they try to primary people out of office, out-spend them and launch a concerted, focused attack on the extremist candidates. They won’t win them all, but they can limit the influence of the nutballs and show them that the mainstream GOP won’t roll over and play dead.
For moderate Republicans, having some principles may help. People instinctively have more respect for those that take principled stands, even if they disagree with the principles. “Moderate” Republicans showed themselves to be spineless opportunists for decades.
Realize that his is perhaps a consequence of gerrymandering gone too far. When a congressional district is so conservative that it doesn’t have to elect a candidate with at least some appeal to independents, the consequence appears to be that the candidates will ignore moderate republicans as well.
Ugh. First I think we need to continue to clean-up the gerrymandering. I am going to be interested in watching (and participating) in the California experiment where districts are done by a committee, and where primaries select the top two, and then have a runoff.
In a few cases (I am trying to recall), when the far left Democrat and a medium left Democrat were the top 2, the medium left won as the Republicans chose the lesser of two Democrats. I can only hope we will start to get the same with Republicans here.
However, with strict primaries, the risk of getting primaries, and the gerrymandered districts - those tea partiers sadly represent much of their constituency:
I’ve been wondering that for years. I gave up in fact and have been an independent since 2008.
Though it will be interesting if someone like Chris Christie (NJ Governor) can win through the Primaries despite the Tea-Party types, it might pull the party back more towards the center. Problem is for as outspoken as Christie is still is far more right-winged than what I would consider the old-school moderate Republicans to be. The party has really drifted to the right and the Tea-Party form a strong coalition with the Theocrats from what I see.
Maybe this foolish shut-down will cause enough damage to the Tea Party to weaken them in upcoming primaries but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Between the defeat of a large number of moderate Republicans in '06 and '08, the primarying of the rest in 2010 and the gerrymandering of districts after 2010 I don’t think there are enough moderate Republicans left at even the lower levels of the party to exert any influence. What was left of them either moved sharply to the right in order to survive (Mitt Romney), left the party (Charlie Crist) or retired (Olympia Snowe).
There simply aren’t enough moderate Republican’s left to take much of anything back.
Here’s an article by Ed Kilgore, who assisted the Dems with moving to the center in the 80’s and 90’s when they were facing similar issues on why he doesn’t think a similar move by the GOP is likely.
The country is moderately to the right anyway- if the moderate R’s would pick up the moderate-right D’s, they wouldn’t need the Tea Party or the Sex Patrol either.
Balanced(er) budget, limited(er) overseas involvement, moderate (but not restricted) social spending, would be a platform that 60+% of everybody would love.
Moderate (right wing but not batshit crazy right wing) Republicans have only one option: kick the Tea Party out of the GOP. Tell the Teabaggers that they are a third party and can caucus with either side but they are not Republicans and they will not be running the show. Then show some balls and do it.
I don’t think this is really about gerrymandering. GOP Senators have faced essentially the same pressures from the Tea Party wing in statewide elections, and measures of the GOP’s rightward tilt show it just as strongly in the Senate.
This is about having a particularly active and inflamed part of the base and having a party primary system. When you have those two elements, you get this result. Since I’m assuming the GOP isn’t going to get rid of party primaries, the solution is to either organize a competing segment of the base, or extinguish the flames of Tea Party passion.
This can be done. It is essentially what happened in the 2012 Presidential primary. The establishment managed to both assuage the Tea Party elements a bit and to organize the moderate elements more (though barely!). The main problem is that the state level GOP people who would be doing that kind of work are, in many places, Tea Partiers themselves. That is, they were elected in 2009-2010 by these forces. They are the Mike Lees and Ken Cuccinellis of the world.
So the answer is, in a word, organization. The problem is that the usual powers that would be doing this have been supplanted in many states, so that organization either has to come from the bottom up (which is unlikely for moderates), and from the very top (RNC), which is very hard, though they are trying.
If the Republicans rebuke and renounce the Tea Party, they cannot win. They will be accepting a principled and noble position of Loyal Opposition for the foreseeable future. I would be quick to applaud and approve such a principled move, and in my position as Queen of Romania, would offer them various and sundry titles and honors.
They can join Democrats and abandon their moderate conservative beliefs for a while until their party is back in order.
What I would like to see, and what I believe will work, is if all moderate Republicans in Congress start caucusing with Dems, voting with Dems, and supporting Dems. Overnight, we’d get something like 350+ Dem votes in the House vs. the extreme Tea Baggers and 80+ Dem votes in the Senate. Use that power to utterly crush the Tea Party by eliminating them from positions of influence in committees.
Pool the money resources of both these former Reps and current Dems into races that overwhelm the vastly smaller number of Tea Baggers. Defeat them on the air and in the polls. Once we get the crazies down to a manageable number, shake hands and go back to governing.
Moderate Reps are assailed by those within their party during primaries and Dems. If they can make a deal with the Dems to remove one side where they are attacked, they can focus more on defeating the other. Use this newfound power to make sure that Dems have a say in Rep primaries by making them all open primaries. With the influx of Dem voters and the concession by moderate Reps to support Dem policies, there are more than enough people to primary the Tea Baggers out of office permanently.
Moderate republicans have a huge problem with the current democrats who are planted firmly in the middle on everything but social issues. They are wrongly being accused of being “democrate-lite” when the reality is the democrats have moved to the right and there is very little room for moderate republicans to exist anymore.
Also a good point, helping to explain the dilemma faced by the erstwhile organizers of moderate Republican power. Democrats successfully claimed the middle, which is how they were able to get a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for that brief time. This was partly strategy, doing things like ignoring gun control. It was also partly that the country moved in ways that helped Democrats, both ideologically and demographically.
In some sense, the only option open to Republicans was to win by energizing their base. That’s what Karl Rove concluded in 2004.
So there are definitely wider structural issues at play. The long-term equilibrium is that the GOP will re-capture the middle by selecting some key issues to do it on (drug war? surveillance?). But the short-term fact is that energizing the Tea Party base looks like a more successful strategy than winning the middle.
I don’t think this is true. If the current war of attrition were hurting everyone equally this might make sense. But it’s not. The Democrats don’t really have any interest in sparing particular Republicans from punishment when the electorate can punish all of them. The more the Tea Party discredits itself, the stronger Democratic candidates might do in general elections if the TP primaries out what’s left of the moderates. The moderates really are in a terrible spot right now, and I don’t think they are in any position to take back their party nor do Democrats have any reason to help them.