Republican strategy

Scott Brown’s victory is an enormous opportunity – for the Democrats.

That is if we repeat the mistakes of the past in interpreting a “change” election.

There is no doubt that President Obama and Democratic over-reaching on stimulus and health care – to no immediate effect – fueled the Brown momentum in Massachusetts.  They know that and after they get through finger-pointing and in-fighting, they will do some serious soul-searching in the wake of Brown’s election much like we did after November 2008.

Republicans meanwhile appear to be reacting to Brown’s win by puffing up our chests and assuming that we will win every place we play.

However, more than anything, voters in Massachusetts – as in states around the country – are fed up with government.  The have no faith in the current leadership of both parties for good reason.

Neil Newhouse, the pollster for the Brown campaign, posted a summary of the verbatims from Massachusetts voters during the last two weeks of the race.  “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore,” “Washington isn’t listening to us,” and “Don’t take my vote for granted.” 

I worked with Neil on a race in 2006, and these were nearly word-for-word the verbatims we were hearing then.  Voter dissatisfaction has nothing to do with party: the reason a plurality of independents voted for Obama in states like Virginia and Massachusetts, but voted to reject the status quo by voting for a Republican in November 2009 and yesterday.

Gauging the overall reaction to Scott Brown’s victory returns bold statements about a Republican sweep in 2010, and the expectation that new candidates will materialize to challenge entrenched Democrats across the country.  The theme “If Democrats Can Lose Massachusetts, They Can Win Anywhere” is taking off along with its sunnier twin, “If Republicans Can Win in Massachusetts, They Can Win Anywhere.

We can, and we will probably sail to victory in some races. Yet, in the same way that an over-confident, arrogant Martha Coakley saw the race slip from her hands, like Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary, it’s quite possible that several Republicans could suffer the same fate if we misinterpret the Brown win.

Failure to step back from a health care bill proven enormously unpopular. Failure to utilize new, effective tools and tactics for reaching voters like social media and online advertising. Failure to hold frequent townhalls, forums or events whereby a conversation takes place between candidate and citizens.

These failures are all hairline fractures caused by the same injury: arrogance.  It’s so last year to criticize Republicans for aloofness, but it will be so this year if we don’t take a measured response to Brown’s victory. 

Old people vote. Because they vote, the Republican Party can win elections even when they are a minority of voting-age citizens. Republican presidential nominations frequently reflect the party's geriatric base: Ronald Reagan dreaming about an idyllic past, Bob Dole grumbling about the baby boom generation, John McCain looking very, very old. George W. Bush was young, but he got the nod based on being the son of a president, who got the nod from being vice president under Reagan.

The strategy works, sometimes...for now. Old people vote. Old people also die. The Republican Party resembles a country Episcopal parish: dignified, traditional, and filled with gray heads. Where is the future?

Consider this hefty glop of polling data from a long-running online political quiz. Liberals outnumber conservatives by more than 2:1. Admittedly, the data is noisy. Some people play with it and take it more than once seeing the results of different answers. The population is large (over 60,000 people) but self-selected. The population is Internet-savvy, young, and interested in taking a political quiz. In other words: the future.

Perhaps the quiz itself is biased. Take it for yourself and decide. The author of the quiz claims to have deployed it at gun shows and found conservatives to outnumber liberals. So it's not all test bias. The quiz gives a real signal, and its prognosis for conservatives is grim.

But not as grim as the 2:1 numbers indicate. Young people age. When they get married and have kids, they have more concerns about drugs, security and sexual morality -- and they have less time to play with online political quizzes. More importantly, the quiz finds plenty of libertarians, more libertarians than liberals even. This is in part bias: many libertarian sites link to said quiz, and Libertarian Party members cluster at the radical libertarian apex. But even with the radicals (8.9%) filtered out (which thus excludes most LP members), we get more libertarians than liberals, and way more libertarians than conservatives.

To have a future, the Republican Party needs its libertarian wing. Instead, it listens to its aged conservatives, because of the party's seniority system for nominating presidents. As a result, the Democrats have the presidency and both houses of Congress, and our nation is sliding towards moribund European style welfare state status.

The Republican Party needs to listen more to its libertarian wing, but it still needs the rest of the conservative coalition; it cannot become merely a moderate libertarian party and win. The party needs its security minded seniors and its upright rural folk who live in the real world thus having better things to do than take online political quizzes.

How can the Republican Party appeal to its traditionalists without alienating its libertarians? Currently, the Republican Party is too divided to rule. It is good at grumbling in opposition, but not so good at putting through its agenda when in power.

The conservative coalition is not only too disunited, it is too small. As such the Republican Party depends too much on remoras and uncommitted swing voters. We saw this during the second Bush years: crony capitalism, sole source military contracting, incompetent appointments and a new Medicare entitlement. The first Bush gave us "read my hips" and the Americans with Disabilities Act. His reelection bid was an embarrassing pork fest.

In the coming months I shall suggest ways to better cohere the conservative coalition. I will point out overlap between Christian and libertarian values, and how to further liberty and security simultaneously. I will also explore ways to broaden the coalition, how to be "kinder and gentler" without sacrificing core values.

President Obama is not the only one with a difficult decision to make in the face of mounting pressure from various groups.  The Republicans will have to decide what posture to take: combative or deferential, political or analytical.

With Obama still at the height of his popularity, and with solid Democratic control of the Senate (even without Arlen Specter and Al Franken), the GOP is unlikely to sustain a filibuster or generate significant opposition to any but the most extreme nominee — such as the radical transnationalist Harold Koh, whose nomination to be the State Department’s head lawyer is currently pending.

What Republicans should do instead is force a full public debate about constitutional interpretation and judicial philosophy, laying out in vivid detail what kind of judges they want.  Instead of shrilly opposing whomever Obama nominates on partisan grounds, now is the time to show the American people the stark differences between the two parties on one of the few issues on which the stated Republican view continues to command strong and steady support nationwide.  If the party is serious about constitutionalism and the rule of law, it should use this opportunity for education, not grandstanding.

C/P Cato@Liberty

Tennessee Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, interviewed by Shepard Smith on FOX News  this afternoon, pointed out an opening for Republicans.

Democrats came to power two years ago. Are you really better off today than you were two years ago?