So, all you need is a candidate and an agenda that appeals to reasonable and sensible conservatives while at the same time enthusiastically endorsed by the Tea Party fringe. What could possibly go wrong?
Take your “carbon tax”. Not too bad, comparatively speaking. How do you sell that to people who believe that global warming is a hoax to advance Obama’s socialist agenda?
Ha ha! Have you read any of your own posts? They’re filled with blame for everyone except the Republicans. You even blamed Carter for the Reagan revolution.
My local movie theater should have such strong projection.
He’s into class warfare, too. Rich, poor, minority, women, Democrat, Republican - doesn’t matter, you’re all getting eaten first at the same time.
And the answer is always that you weren’t wacky and divisive enough, that you need to appeal even harder to people who were already voting for you, that your views really are the popular ones since we really are a conservative country, that any and all evidence to the contrary is “skewed” or something (ring any bells there?) …
I refer you back to the thread title.
So… would you confidently predict the Republicans will never again win the White House?
Oh, snark disguised as a question time? OK, in your opinion, does this current incarnation of the Republican Party deserve to be so honored?
Adaher, don’t pretend the GOP didn’t have a hand in making some of those bill unpopular with lies about “death panels” and the mystery $716 billion in medicare cuts.
Sometimes, unpopular bills are the rights ones to pass. LBJ lost the South for the Dems by signing the Civil Rights Act. The fact that some of the bills the Dems passed in 2009 and 2010 were unpopular says more about the stupidity of the country than the merits of those bills. Simply put, they were the right bills to do.
And its completely disingenuous for you to sit there and say the Dems did this to themselves when the GOP were front and center in lying to the American people, in fomenting hatred and fear and falsehoods about what those bills would do. Even now you are doing it, pretending most people didn’t support health care when in fact a good chunk of those favored an even more liberal bill.
And contrary to your opinion, the Dems know why they lost and they made corrections in 2012. You talk about the Dems not knowing why they lost and the next closest date you have is 1994 and 1980? 19 and 33 years ago? Seriously?
Why don’t you tell me why the GOP wasn’t able to maintain their momentum from 2010? Looks to me like the Dems lost, figured it out, then won big again in 2012. Maybe that’s proof enough for you that if the GOP tries to duplicate what they did in 2010, they’ll lose just like they did in 2012? Or, don’t learn that lesson and continue losing in 2014
Your posts in this thread have shown the exact opposite. It’s you, and the Republicans like you, that are claiming that any defeat is just an accident and there’s no need to change.
I’ll be confident about it. The Republican Party, as it currently stands, will never see a presidential candidate elected. The next Republican to take the White House will exhibit the following compared to the current party line:
[ul]
[li]Less stringent anti-abortion agenda (not hard for them, seeing as their last candidate didn’t toe the party line although the VP choice did)[/li][li]Softer stance on Immigration, including a path towards citizenship[/li][li]Support for civil unions at the very least, if not outright marriage equality[/li][li]Stronger focus on gender equality, including support for the Violence Against Women Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and the Lilly Ledbetter Act[/li][li]A health care ideal that has much in common with Romneycare, or as it’s now known, Obamacare.[/li][li]A better relationship with minorities, and not in the Rand Paul, “why don’t you vote for us anymore?” way, but in a “the Southern Strategy was bad, the racists in the Republican party are/were bad” kind of way.[/li][li]Less support for restrictive voter ID laws[/li][li]No longer focused on “trickle down” economics.[/li][/ul]
Basically they need to jettison the social conservatives. Too many of the Republican primary voters want a return to the values of 60-70 years ago. Until they can get a national candidate who lives in this century, there’s no hope of ever winning the White House.
Those are mostly current-year issues as you’ve phrased them. By the time the fundamental attitude shifts they need are in place, most of them will be facts of life. Those do, however, show that the problem is a fundamental set of attitudes that appeal to a decreasingly-numerous and increasingly-dead demographic mix - attitudes that have led to the policy positions you describe. They can’t jettison the social conservatives, that’s their base.
The problem they have to face is not, as they’ve been telling each other after every defeat, that they aren’t doing a good enough job communicating their message. The problem is the message.
I think Libertarian / tea-party values will drive the future of the Republican party. If they can go far left on social issues and remain far right economically, I can see them getting a lot of support.
Yes they would be abandoning their base. But their base is a dead end at this point. What are the social conservatives going to do, vote Democrat? I think it could work if they make it clear that “These aren’t our personal values, but we believe personal freedom is more important than imposing a value system on the populace through force.”
Their social conservative base believes precisely in imposing a value system on the populace through force.
The problem there is a fundamental incapability between Libertarian ideals and Tea Party ideals. They can’t both be the way of the future. The Tea Party is almost entirely a social issue block of voters.
No, I’m claiming that the defeats are not due to the ideology. If they were, Democrats would be running as proud liberals.
And Democrats don’t even go THAT far, claiming they aren’t liberal enough. They never believe they did anything wrong at all. It’s always because of lies, or getting outspent, or they just rant for a few months about how stupid Americans are.
The Democratic party managed to jettison their social conservative base over the generation from the Civil Rights Act to the Reagan election. There’s no reason the Republican party can’t do the same and it’ll probably take a generation to do it. If they can’t win with the social conservatives, then if they want to remain a nationally relevant party, they’ll have to find a way to win without them.
The danger to the Democratic party is not that Republicans will become more competitive, but that social conservatives will move back to the Democrats. It sounds crazy, but great shifts have happened before.
Actually, I’ve long believed that social conservatives will end up back with the Democrats. That depends on how the partisan divide shakes out over the coming decades though.
Yeah, about that carbon tax and the cap and trade, most of the people who got in 2010 was thanks to astroturfing created by the fossil fuel companies, the problem here is that in reality the Republicans have you in contempt, they do not think that there is a problem and are voting that way, not pandering. So it is the elected blind guiding the blind right now; however, you are smarter than that for that preference for a carbon tax; unfortunately, if that is the case, there is a lot that should tell you that now one should **not ** vote for them until the “skeptics” of global warming (that are almost exclusively Republicans of the tea party variety) are out of office.
PBS Frontline documentary “Climate of Doubt”, explaining why Republicans elected to office in 2010 are harmful to America:
You are assuming that the Dems are internally divided (true) and the Pubs are not (false). If we had a PR system, the Dems probably would split into progressive/liberal and centrist/neoliberal parties. And the Pubs, for their part, would split into paleocon/theocon (Tea Party) and moderate/bizcon and libertarian parties. See here, and note the differences between Staunch Conservatives, Main Street Republicans, and Libertarians.
Outside of the conservative fantasy zone, nobody thinks the Democrats are liberals and they haven’t been for decades. The Republican party has been so concerned about securing the ideological right wing that they’ve handed over the ideological center to the Democrats. And the Democrats were happy to take it because there are more voters in the center then there are out on the wings.
The Democrats don’t need to come up with excuses because they’re not doing anything that needs to be excused. Democrats outpolled Republicans in five of the last six Presidential campaigns - you don’t need to spin success.
This is what the losers of every election do. Serving it up as a critique of Democratic supporters makes it look like you haven’t paid any attention at all to the last two presidential elections.