More Democrats than Republicans showed up to vote in 2012, and that is why Obama won. More Democrats showed up to vote because there are more registered Democrats than Republicans. Hate it or love it, that’s the reality of politics right now: there are more Democrats than Republicans and, at least in presidential years, more Democrats than Republicans will vote. That could change, of course, but why would it?
Likewise, the Republican party is beholden to its far right wing because a lot of people from its far right wing show up to vote in primaries. O’Donnell, Akin, Mourdock…why did they win primaries? Because a lot of the people who showed up at some Republican primaries were crazy.
Jonathan Chait is right on the money: there’s no reason to think that Republicans will “tack to the center” no matter how much fan fiction Bobo and Chunky Bobo write about the supposedly newly Burkean Republican leaders. The Virginia GOP is in the process of choosing a bat shit crazy candidate over a more moderate one and there’s talk of replacing Boehner with some nut from Georgia. Here’s a pretty good list of things to keep an eye on in the way of Republican primary activity (tellingly, the first item on the list was whether the VA GOP would get behind the Cooch…they did).
This stuff isn’t complicated. Republicans will stop with the extreme rhetoric when it stops winning primaries. They’ll start winning national elections when they achieve some kind of registration parity.
schrodinger's cat
The base wants to go hardline on immigration, they want to get rid of birthright citizenship and they want to severely restrict legal immigration as well. They have learnt nothing.
The Other Bob
Why would it? Becuase we are Democrats. We are born to screw it up. Heck, we could nominate a John Edwards or something and totally screw the pooch.
Brachiator
Obama also got a fair share of independent voters, maybe even some registered Repbublicans.
But numbers and demographics don’t much matter to a GOP which is stupidly stuck on the idea that only angry white wingnut males get a full vote, and everybody else should be covered by a new version of the three fifths rule.
I also like this bit of demographic exit poll trivia, via Gawker:
The Republicans are coming close to self-deporting themselves into political oblivion.
Patricia Kayden
Shouldn’t Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents (like myself) be glad that the Repubs are tacking to the extreme right? Who are they hurting by going full wingnut? Not me.
The US deserves a sensible opposition, but right now, we don’t have one. Just a party of nuts.
SiubhanDuinne
Pretty deep bench there. I know what I’m talking about.
schrodinger's cat
@Patricia Kayden: As long as the media narrative is, both sides do it, it is a problem.
PeakVT
This stuff isn’t complicated.
Well, no. The outcome might look simple, but obviously there is more to it than voters reacting to candidate statements. Your preceding post wouldn’t be necessary if things were actually simple.
To wit, down at the bottom of the NJ article there is this bit:
Chambliss is shaping up to be the most inviting target, given his bipartisan inclinations.
The guy has a 2.0% lifetime score from Progressive Punch.
Zifnab25
When Goldwater won in ’64, he rallied the crazy base to back a crazy candidate. But he lost hard in the general.
When Reagan won in ’80, he rallied the same crazy base to back a crazy candidate. But he won in the general because he managed to look much more moderate than he was.
I don’t know if we’ll get less crazy candidates in the future. Maybe we’ll just get guys that are better at playing their cards close to the chest.
jl
TPM says TN guv won’t start him none of them damn commie Nobama health insurance exchange thingees, no sirree, no way. Yep sir!
That will win a lot of GOP friends too. Maybe all those states are too red to win in one o’ them presidentin’ contests. But might change a few House and Senate seats.
Turn it up! Bring the stink! GOP!
Mike in NC
Saw a hilarious quote from that idiot Fred Barnes recently, where he predicted 2016 could see the GOP nomination go to one of their “rising stars”: Ryan, Jindal, or Rubio.
reflectionephemeral
Yeah, I’ve been saying this since the day after the election. “The Iron Law of Institutions holds that the people who hold power in institutions are guided principally by preserving power within the institution, rather than the success of the institution itself.” So, extremism can be bad for America, even bad for the GOP’s popularity, but gaining power within the party.
Boehner fears Cantor & Price, not some mythical grown-up version of what Brooks thinks Ryan is.
In a state of around 800K, O’Donnell beat Castle 30K to 27K. Doesn’t take much for the party to continue to enforce rigid idiocracy in its primaries.
japa21
@Patricia Kayden: They hurt everyone if they win enough power to either cause us to backslide or to prevent progress. This is specially true in local, state and House elections. Many times, simply because they have an R after their names they will win no matter how far to the right they are. So yes, it does matter.
Gary
@Patricia Kayden: I’m a rabid Dem and I would much prefer to have a sane Republican Party that was harder to beat in general elections.
Occasionally the Dems will screw up or bad things out of our control will happen on the Dems’ watch and the Republicans will win in a “Throw the bums out!” election. When that happens, I would prefer that a sane conservative party take over rather than the nutjobs currently at the top of the Republican Party.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Mike in NC:
Ryan, Jindal, or Rubio
The Three Stooges (apologies to Moe, Larry, and Curly)
piratedan
well I guess the GOP will continue to follow their strategy of classifying certain segments of racial groups as being OK with them, kinda of bestowing upon them an “honorary racist” title, as they continue to employ the divide and conquer tactics that have served them so well up to now. The hard part of watching that tried and true tactic of the restored confederacy is that it’s now being accompanied by fiscal irresponsibility and religious theocracy, kinda big stepping stones for continued recruitment. They do serve their purposes as cannon fodder for the 1% though.
? Martin
Actually, it may have gotten worse:
44/32 is a huge gap.
Waldo
@Gary: Yep. Same reason I’d rather see the GOP field a sane presidential candidate: you never want to be one late-breaking scandal from putting a Bachmann or Herman Cain in charge.
Onihanzo
I think a largely ignored part of this is the youth vote.
Polls have consistently shown that the vast majority of younger voters lean liberal or Democratic. And that the turnouts are the results of those youth voters getting into the habit of actually voting. That’s a groundswell that isn’t likely to diminish.
Rafer Janders
Forget the fan fiction. Imagine the slash fiction those two would write…
JGabriel
__
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PeakVT:
Chambliss voted with libtards 2% of the time!? That fuckin’ commie!
.
Brachiator
@Onihanzo:
RE: Polls have consistently shown that the vast majority of younger voters lean liberal or Democratic.
I think this may be true of younger voters. I don’t know if it is true of the young in general. You also have a fair amount of apathy among the young, but as they grow up they may become more political, and here there is no guarantee that this mix will be consistently liberal.
And although this is not scientific or statistically accurate in any way, shape or form, I am always amazed at the number of younger males who call into talk shows who, when their political opinions slip out, are often unthinkingly near-wingnut, whether or not they intend to vote or actually do so.
And I do note in opinion polls of younger people, whether or not they are voters, their attitudes about many issues tends to be more liberal than conservative.
Turgidson
@schrodinger’s cat:
And if the 2009-10 health care “debate” is any indication, they’ll crank the crazy up to 29 on immigration and create a 50-page book full of bullshit lying talking points to scare the living shit out of their base, blue hairs in swing areas, and low-info voters and ride that shit to the 2014 midterms. If the Dems acquiesce to Medicare cuts as part of these fiscal snowjob talks, all the better for them to scare/misinform said voters.
Hopefully it won’t work as well this time as it did last. But I am going to expect the worst and hope to be pleasantly surprised.
I also don’t think the GOP will really change their stripes in a meaningful way until the approach outlined above stops working even in low-turnout midterms and they become a strictly regional party even in the House. That ain’t happening any time soon thanks to their gerrymandering skillz.
arguingwithsignposts
@DougJ and @Rafer Janders:
50 shades of gray hair?
Brachiator
@DougJ:
Not necessarily true at all. The Republicans in California kept talking nonsense and fronting pseudo-moderates like Meg Whitman. And what did it get them (from a recent NY Times article)?
Political oblivion. Right now, the GOP shows every indication of repeating this pattern on a national level.
They were successful in the past in attracting cross-over voter support even when they did not have registration parity. But now they are so “pure” that they insult potential cross over voters, and count on rich people money and voter suppression to keep them competitive.
schrodinger's cat
@arguingwithsignposts: 50 shades of invisible hair.
Roger Moore
@Rafer Janders:
FTFY. Brain bleach optional, but strongly recommended.
schrodinger's cat
@Roger Moore: eeewwwww Do not want!
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
“Set out” is the key phrase, here. The Governator may have set out to build a more moderate Republican Party, but he failed utterly. He was too in touch with reality to satisfy the California Republican Party, so he got branded as a RINO and ignored. The Republican Party won’t fix itself until its voters are willing to engage with the real world rather than the fantasy world they’re currently living in.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Turgidson:
If the Democratic Party circa 1866-1912 (the closest analog to today’s GOP) is any indication, it could take decades of them mostly being out of power before they change, and even then the change may be stimulated by a schism within the more liberal party, e.g. today’s Dems, before they change, just as the late 19th Cen Dems started becoming more liberal during the early 20th Cen. in part because of progressive reformers leaving behind the GOP of McKinley, et al and the way the GOP split over the TR vs Taft nomination battle in 1912.
At that rate it may be 2060 before the GOP changes their stripes.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
Those of us around at the time recall the brief, shining period immediately after Ahnold’s coronation when wingnuts across our great land called for repeal of the silly, very silly even prohibition on a foreign-born president.
That went away quickly enough. (Had they not noticed he married a Kennedy, for Pete’s sake?)
Not Sure
@The Other Bob: I hope all you folks who stayed home in 2010 (and you know who you are) realize just how badly you shot your party in the freaking head. Thanks to gerrymandering, you’ll have a hell of a time fixing this and other dick moves made by the Republicans because fuck you, until 2020 at the earliest. In the meantime, enjoy your minority status in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania and remember how much it sucks.
FWIW, I did NOT stay home in ’10. I did, however, seriously consider leaving the House column blank because the Working Families Party declined to endorse our now-former Blue Dog congressman. Then I thought of the idea of Speaker Boehner and got over it. You all should too.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
RE: It is a giant turnaround since 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger knocked out the Democratic governor, Gray Davis, in a recall election and set out to build a more moderate Republican Party.
The GOP in California began to seriously decline in 1994.
You would think they would have learned something. Instead, they are upping their anti-Latino rhetoric at the national level.
And as you note, even though the Governator was not the answer, the California GOP kept doubling down on wingnut level stupidity. And they looked for controllable faux moderates like Meg Whitman.
The result: in the 2010 elections, Whitman not only lost to Jerry Brown, more people voted to legalize marijuana than voted for Whitman. More people voted for Republican Steve Cooley for Attorney General than voted for Whitman (and Cooley still lost).
And then, in 2012, the GOP picked another out of touch rich person, Mitt Romney, to run for president, and insist that he would have won if America just hadn’t been so stupid.
Neither the GOP leadership nor the GOP base is showing any signs of sanity. They may turn it around, but it is going to be very, very tough.
EconWatcher
We always talk about the demographics of the electorate as a whole, which strongly disfavor the GOP. But what about the demographics within the GOP itself? As the older wingnuts die off, will the younger GOP supporters be just as extreme?
I don’t remember ever seeing any analysis of this, but the tea party crowd, at least, seems to be generally pretty old.
Liberty60
I do a fair amount of arguing with libertarians online, and no matter how “out there” their ideas are, they mostly at least understand that their ideas are “out there”, and fringe-ish.
Not so the conservative base- when I stroll (ok, troll) through Wingnutopia, they almost to a man fervently believe that their ideas are mainstream, and that there is a latent groundswell of True Conservative agita among Americans and if only they could find the next Reagan who could explain things clearly…
It really does remind me of the arguments I used to have with Marckists in the 70’s, when they honestly thought that Teh Revolution was immminent, and only a spark would set it off.
Chris
Actually, I remember reading that there had been more registered Democrats than Republicans for some time. It’s just that between the Nixon/Reagan Democrats, the “LIBRULS COMIN FER MAH GUNZ!” independents, and the Dems who didn’t show up to vote, that didn’t translate into Democratic victories.
What’s changing is that we’re trending towards not just a Democratic majority but a liberal majority; and not just among citizens but among voters.
Chris
@Zifnab25:
There are a lot of reasons Goldy got shafted, but one of the big ones IMHO is that the GOP had only just begun to use cultural wedge issues to peel away Democratic voters. Nixon was the one who really opened the floodgates.
Reagan ran as the next Nixon, and governed as the next Goldwater.
Tonal Crow
@Rafer Janders:
Well, remember when Bobo complained about a Republican senator keeping his hand on Bobo’s inner thigh all through a villagers’ dinner?
Arclite
That line cracked me up. “Chunky Bobo” always makes me laugh.
Chris
@Brachiator:
My generation is most definitely liberal on social issues. I think also on foreign policy to a lesser extent. Economics is the great unknown for me. I don’t think we’re nearly as committed there. Actually, the sense I get is that while we’re much more cynical than our predecessors about the whole trickle down crap, that doesn’t necessarily mean we have faith that the government can fix it. We know Republicans are full of shit when they say their policies will make us rich, but I’m not sure that translates to Democratic votes on those issues.
If there’s any polling or even anecdotal data out there that disagrees with me, I’d love to be wrong.
Chris
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I would LOVE to see an era in which the Confederate Party is as marginalized as it was in the Gilded Age, but the other party is actually liberal.
@EconWatcher:
My anecdotal experience says no. The College Republicans I knew at AU (not exactly a wingnut bastion) were just as mad as their grandparents.
Frankly, after the last fifty years I think anyone sane enough to see the GOP for what it is has left the party, regardless of age.
Seanly
I’m a civil engineer and have often worked with other civil engineers who are fully anointed in the 27% mentality. The worse was 3 or 4 folks in one department where I worked from ’97 to ’04. I was often thankful that their political voice was limited to 1 vote (maybe 2 if their wifes followed orders on Election Day like they bragged). Now, those same insane ideas are touted as solutions and the same willful lack of knowledge & empathy are spread as common wisdom. Uggh.
Mustang Bobby
On the state level, as long as the GOP keeps sending up people like Rick Scott, Rick Snyder, Scott Walker, John Kasich, Nikki Haley, and Jan Brewer as governors, there will always be a deep layer of meshugge to go around. None of those fenceposts learned anything from the election.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Chris:
Unfortunately that would require Wall St to be wholeheartedly on our side, which would mean a Democratic Party much more Blue Doggy than it is today. I think we are likely to see some evolution in that direction if the GOP continues to fall victim to changing demographics, but it won’t make for a more liberal Democratic party on economics. Actually I would love it if somebody could recommend a good set of books on the subject of how and why the party of Lincoln (“Labor is prior to Capital…”) moved so far to the right so quickly on economics from 1865 to 1900, as that is still a bit of a mystery to me. I get the C.R.E.A.M aspects of the story, but I’d like more details.
Chris
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I guess I was hoping for Wall Street to calm the fuck down like they did in the Gilded Age. I can dream.
And I second your request. All I know is the Radicals were outed and the Liberals took over. Tiredness with Reconstruction may have helped.
James E. Powell
@Chris:
Nixon was the one who really opened the floodgates.
The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act is what opened the floodgates. Also too, court-ordered desegregation of public schools in the not-at-all racist northern industrial cities that had been Democratic strongholds.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
And I’ll keep arguing this point. I think 1994 was a sign that the Republican star was fading, not the cause of its fade. Pete Wilson backed Prop 187 because he knew he needed a wedge issue that would drive Republicans to the polls in order to have a chance of winning. And remember this was in a big Republican swing year when Newt Gingrich and his gang took over Congress. Prop 187 was a response to Republican decline, not the cause of it. If you look at California, it’s about as liberal as you’d expect given its demographics and national voting trends. There isn’t some magical difference between Latino voters here and elsewhere in the country, just that they’re numerous enough here to make a big difference.
Roger Moore
@Liberty60:
Of course; I think that the intellectual boldness of Libertarianism is a big attraction to a lot of its adherents. They want to take positions that are “out there” because it proves what bold, unconventional thinkers they are. If those positions were actually popular, they’d have to become Marxists or anarchists or something to prove just how capable they are of independent thought.
rikyrah
they are the party of racist muthafuckas.
which is why they don’t get anyone who isn’t White, other than the self-haters.
I don’t give two shyts if these racists get their act together.
they are sociopaths….period.
jayackroyd
Fucking numbers.
Fair Economist
@PeakVT:
The Republican strategy of demonizing their opponent seems to have an odd side effect – they can’t stop picking opponents, even within their own party. The true moderates have been gone for years; even the highly conservative guys who occasionally compromise like Lugar are going; and yet they still have to have evil corrupt RINOs to oppose so they’re going after people who really have no genuine moderate or bipartisan inclinations at all. It makes me think of communist party purges.
Matt McIrvin
@Not Sure: I said it just a couple of days ago, and I’ll say it again: 2010 was not a Republican landslide because disgruntled progressives stayed home to punish Obama for his sins. The people who think that way make a big noise on the Internet, but their numbers are tiny, and the only elections in which they can swing the vote are fantastically close ones.
2010 was a Republican landslide because most Democrats, and especially young voters, were as apathetic about midterm elections as they typically are, but the Republicans turned out in unusually large numbers.
What we need is not so much to keep incipient Naderites on board as to get lower-information, lower-commitment Democratic voters in the habit of voting in elections in which the presidency is not at stake. They actually turned out in 2006 because Bush was doing so awfully.
In 2012, minorities turned out in huge numbers in part because they were upset about racially tinged attacks on Obama and attempts at suppressing their vote. It’d be nice to think that the 2012 coalition could be persuaded to keep voting in midterms on the grounds that people are still trying to prevent them from doing so.
Matt McIrvin
@Liberty60:
I think this is still just the latent effect of 1980 on the thinking of middle-aged-to-old people. That was the year that the mainstream media were shocked at the groundswell of True Conservative agita they were missing, and forever after devoted themselves to bend over backwards to acknowledge it.
What they’re missing is mostly demographics. Romney won a larger fraction of white voters in 2012 than Reagan won in 1980. You just can’t build a landslide that way any more. If you’re white and you mostly talk to other white people, you might well be able to convince yourself that it’s still 1980.
...now I try to be amused
@Roger Moore:
This reminds me of a Sun Tzu quote:
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
And damn, the Republicans are noisy.