Newt Gingrich left office more than 20 years ago. Possibly taking longer than you expected?
I don’t know if it’s necessarily Democratic votes they’d win as opposed to persuadable independents, but really the GOP should embrace some sort of national health insurance plan. In other countries, the conservative/nationalist parties manage to support it somehow (at least as long as the Right Sorts get it), the Republicans could manage it if they tried.
Do you think Trump would have won if he’d run outright on a plan of destroying the ACA while putting nothing in its place? No, he won because he claimed he had a better plan that would cheaply provide coverage for everyone. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about and is a liar, but it proves a point.
I have been of the opinion that conservatives could get aboard with single-payer healthcare big time if someone managed to successfully convince them that it is efficient and saves money - rather than appealing to something like “compassion” or “think of the undocumented immigrants who need healthcare” which just drives them away from the idea. Point out that we could save many trillions of dollars in the long run. Also, make it a matter of national pride - how can we let Canada have a better system than us, etc.
I’d narrow it down to governors, since representatives caucus with gerrymanderers, deniers of various flavors, and anti-healthists. For me to reconsider my vote, not only does there need to be massive reform, new blood needs to come in that is not so tainted by association with the literally insane, and I might vote for them.
Um… this is pretty much the entire Fox news playbook laid out in convenient tweet-sized format.
What they really need to do is convince centrists that the “far left” is real and influential, and that they’re trying to loot grandma’s piggy bank rather than bilionaires and huge multinationals. But again, Fox News is doing a full-court press on this as well.
I guess it’s a good sign that this is all you’ve got.
“They could stop being…” – waste of time trying to imagine that this is even a possibility. They’ve invested heavily in white anxieties and cynicism, and there’s no way they can turn back now without sowing confusion and disillusionment among their “base”.
What they are most likely to attempt to do to win Democratic votes is to try to steal away white Democratic moderates or centrists. They’ll try to do this with hyper-polarizing the electorate to the point where non-white outrage rises to an extreme level that white moderates feel threatened and/or rejected by the Democratic party. If nothing else, the aim is that they either don’t vote or vote 3rd party while their base bigoted base remains intact.
They’ll convince the centrists and moderates that the party has been taken over by Blacks, Latinos, Feminists, and Socialists, to the point where there is no more room for white moderate voters.
To get people to switch from voting for Democrats to voting for Republicans, Republicans need to stop doing the bad things that make people not vote for them and then start doing some good things that the Democrats aren’t doing.
For starters, a lot less of this:
Start by not nominating Trump.
After that, I think their best approach is go back to the good ol’ “Main Street Republican.” Pro-business, but suspicious of Big Business. Not really in favor of unions, but too polite to try to destroy them entirely. Thrifty with spending, they were more likely to want to root out bloated government budgets than gut social programs. They were mainline Christian, but not particularly anti-anybody when it came to race, religion, gender, gender identity or much else.
In the 1960s there were people like Gov. William Scranton and Senator Birch Bayh. Bayh even wrote Title IX of the Civil Rights Act and opposed two of Nixon’s most whackadoodle Supreme Court nominees.
In the 1970s there were Gerald Ford and Bob Dole (that was the Dole who pushed the Americans with Disabilities Act and special education, not the old and cranky Dole.)
Throw in a dash of Jack Kemp’s “we can revitalize the inner city” ideas and there’s a Republican who could beat a Democrat in the bluest of blue areas.
I think they’d have to reverse their views/stance on a lot of that stuff.
Someone I know once asked me why I wasn’t a republican. I have no idea why he thought I should be, but he tends to be an IRL troll/instigator so it was probably that.
In any case, I asked him if he thought two gay people should be allowed to get married, he said they should. I asked him if he thought someone should be able to sit in their bedroom and get high, he also said yes. I wondered to myself why he didn’t see the gotcha coming. I asked him how he could vote republican when being against both of those things is something they’re pretty vocal about.
For a party that wants a small unintrusive government, they sure spend a lot of time concerning themselves with what people are doing behind closed doors.
So, that would be my answer, the main thing the Rs would have to do to get my vote is not concern themselves with anything I do that isn’t bothering other people. Let me get high in my house, let me marry/sleep with anyone I want to etc…
IOW, to answer the question "why would you vote for them when they are the opposite of your views on abortion, climate change, LGBT, and a dozen other such issues? ", well one of would have to change our views. Either the Rs can change their stance on those issues or they can try to convince me that if a guy wants to marry another guy, that’s somehow a problem and I need to be against it.
And, to be honest, those types of things would have to change to get me to look in their direction and start putting a lot more thought into which way I vote. It certainly wouldn’t guarantee anything.
A - stop the racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. When the party seemingly supports (or at least turns a blind eye to) that kind of behavior - to some light blue D’s or true independents, the party looks like a group of “bad people.” For some of them, it is hard to think of yourself as a good person and vote for someone who (for example) targets teenage girls.
B - offer workable solutions to things that they identify as problems. (other than tax cuts). Democratic and Democratic leaning voters say the three most important issues are healthcare, the way women are treated in society, and wealth/income inequality. I’m a medium information voter.
- From what I can tell, the Republican solution to healthcare is “not ACA,” but they haven’t actually proposed a better idea other than “more of the same” which isn’t good.*
- Doing part A would go a long way toward alleviating some people’s concerns about women’s treatment in society.
- Again, the current Republican talking point seems to be that there isn’t really a problem with income inequality and wealth distribution. That is a very hard sell to an urban voter who can see tents lining the freeway. The Democratic party seems, at least, to be trying to do something (even if it isn’t succeeding or having some unintended consequences). The Republican solution is, I think, “tax cuts.” Come up with something better.
*I know that that there are surveys that say people like their insurance. IRL, I’ve never met anyone who likes their insurance - and I hang out with people who have employer sponsored insurance. They definitely prefer that to “nothing!” which is very much worse. But they don’t actually like what we have.
I heard that the Trump 2020 campaign strategy may not be try and win over Democrat voters, but rather to try to grow the base by attracting more people who didn’t vote previously, and perhaps have never voted before - turnout in 2016 was 55.7%. So this would mean more of the same, probably amplified, rather than any pivot to the center.
The Republicans are currently an extremist party, and so it seems unlikely to me that they would be willing, or able, to normalize themselves in the relatively short timeframe needed to have an effect on the election. With Trump at the helm, I can only see things getting uglier, and more abnormal. Trump’s opening 2020 campaign rally was as divisive as his rallies last time round, and showed him playing his old hits, with no new material (like Elvis '77, as Joe Scarborough put it).
I’ve heard speculation that Trump might try and move to the center some time next year, but one cannot legitimately claim to be both at the extreme and center, so if this were to transpire it would surely look ham-fisted and insincere, as I don’t think he will do anything that could potentially upset his base of followers.
It’s not as hard as you might think. Trump did a pretty good job cutting heavily into the usual margins with midwest union households. He even won the union household vote in Ohio.
Portman outperformed Trump in Ohio in his 2016 Senate race. He wasn’t very Trump- like and mostly ran his own race. He got the endorsement of the statewide Teamsters organization. They mostly liked his below the radar and relatively wonky work that helped protect the viability of their pension systems. We could probably dig through a host of Governors in the last decade that won over Democratic voters in purplish states on their way to victory. Kasich in Ohio is an easy pick but I don’t know what worked for him. Hogan winning soldily blue Maryland two years before Trump got trounced there would be another good indicator.
Nationwide the union vote as shrunk quite a bit. It’s skewed towards more white collar government workers. In the midwest it’s still 20-25% of the electorate with much bigger representation from blue collar workers. They like unions and large corporations are their competitors. That makes them relatively friendly to part of the Democratic platform. They aren’t particularly liberal, though. When Obama talked about people clinging to their God and their guns I was shocked that he’d insult so many lifelong Democrats in the midwest. I was also shocked that some many just thought rural republican in the south but not urban UAW worker in the midwest. He escaped that being a big issue. Clinton didn’t escape the rest of the party leaving those important lifelong Democrats feeling ignored by the national party priorities.
The Democratic party has supposedly been working on shoring up the union vote since 2016. 2018 seemed to look like it might be working. Those votes aren’t unwinnable for Republicans, though. I never thought I’d be saying that.
In this vein, I dont think Republicans need to do anything substantive or meaningful in order to pull in a certain segment of the (D)s. Specifically, DINOS, the Blue Dogs, the Joe Manchins of the country. All the republicans need to do is rachet up or just continue what they are already doing, namely using the Media to paint the Democratic Party to be the party of AOC, theparty of Rashida Tlaib, the party of Iihan Omar, the party of the dark skinned Socialists. I dont know if that number would be all that substantial but it definitely would be a non-zero number.
I heard George Will interviewed a while ago and he said “conservatives believe in the lowest possible taxes, but the emphasis is on ‘possible’.” That sounds fine, I guess, but it’s not a testable hypothesis. Somehow, lower taxes are always ‘possible’ no matter how high our deficits are. If Republicans care to face up to that reality, that their beloved tax cuts lead to their despised deficits, it would be a step in the right direction.
I heard a snippet somewhere (and it was just speculation) that since we’re on our way to an election year, he’ll likely back off with the extreme stuff and then ramp it up if/when he’s reelected and a lame duck.
That would make sense. I know some of my far right friends* that (obviously) support the GOP, had a hard time voting Trump. Some even went so far as to vote Independent so they’d be able to play the ‘not my president’ card if/when he was elected.
It was interesting when his wife (also R) made the comment that, realistically, this is a two party country and a third party isn’t going to win. Going on to say no matter how much he dislikes Hillary, if he didn’t want her to win, he needed to vote for Trump.
This was, of course, on the premise that a third party vote doesn’t take a vote away from the other candidate, it hands them one.
While I’ll agree that more and more of Trumps followers seem to have a harder time supporting him each time he does something bizarre or out of line. I assume they’ll consider every promise he makes to be totally sincere. If for no other reason, (as many/most of us do) to justify voting for him.
Honestly, how many rabid Trump supporters would believe, and vote, for him if he promised to cut income tax by 90%.
*One of these friends is not just Republican, but Religious Reight. He considers anything the pope says to be the end all-be all of how to behave and what to believe in. It was, to me, rather entertaining to see him struggle with Pope Benedict supporting LGBT issues.
It’d be interesting to get some data on this, but my impression is that Obamacare has become very popular to a lot of purplish blue voters, and in particular a lot of the GOP plans to replace it are extremely unpopular among moderate Dems. Although it appears that at least GOP senators have basically given up on “repeal and replace” - I guess the next thing they could do to pick up left-leaning moderates would be to start to promise to preserve it entirely, or to preserve popular elements. They probably are going to continue the current plan of not talking about it because they’ve rallied the base with “repeal and replace” for years and don’t want to reverse themselves.
I’ve had some success selling the idea of a public healthcare system by linking it to entrepreneurship. There’s a lot of people who would like to own their own small business and have the money and the skills - but don’t make the jump because they don’t want to risk giving up their job-related health insurance. A responsible parent isn’t going to take that kind of risk. So they put aside their dream of starting their own business and work a “safe” job where they have a health plan.
If everyone had a health plan that wasn’t tied to their job, I think a lot of people would be willing to take on all of the other risks of starting their own businesses. We’d have a boom in new businesses and a major economic surge.
I don’t know why this reminded me of it, but I’ve always wished that there was an entity that noted every promise a candidate made while on the trail (and publicaly clarified each and every one with them before the election). Then, at some point during their presidency, they could put out a report showing all the promises they made and which one’s they’ve carried out.
I’m not entirely sure what it would accomplish other than maybe keeping them from being re-elected. But maybe it would get candidates to make promises that are actually doable.
As for lowering taxes in the face of increasing deficits, it reminds me of a teacher from college that pointed out that many things we blame the president for, tend to be due to the previous president (or further back) just due to how long things take to make their way through the government. So you blame one president for increasing debt, but ignore the previous one that lowered taxes. If we end up going to war in 2021, people will be quick to forget about all the wheels Trump set in motion.
IIRC, Trump spoke about the great economy we we’re having when he was in office for just a few months. And this could be totally wrong, I thought he took credit for a decrease in unemployment for a quarter when Obama was still in office, but the report came out after he was inaugurated.