third-party

Think about these two survey results:

- There is a significant disparity between younger and older voters on gay marriage and some other culture war issues.

- Southerners have a significantly different view of places like San Francisco and France than do the rest of the country.

- The only region where Barack Obama does not have high approval ratings is the South.

Over and over, Democrats have been crowing that the Republican Party is turning into a regional rump party with very limited appeal outside the old Confederacy and a few Great Plains states.  It's true that the South is different from the rest of the country, which doesn't have to be a bad thing.  The only problem is that you can't talk to the whole country in the same way because of it.

The remedies to the GOP's slide proposed thus far follow the same basic paradigm.  The purists say that the GOP needs to purge the RINOs and create a clear distinction between the parties.  The problem is that the American public sees the difference between the parties and is choosing Democrats.  It turns out that the endless harping on pork and nomination battles nominally related to abortion drive the base, but seems petty and shortsighted to most everyone else.  On the other hand, the reformers are more interested in creating more conservative and market-based solutions to problems Democrats are also addressing, but they are scorned by a base that sees them as part of a cocktail-sipping Northeastern elite, thus apostates unworthy of attention.  Moderate Republican candidates who have shown their ability to win in blue states are targeted by the Club for Growth.  They may hardly better than Democrats on some issues, but they contribute to creating a majority of seats.

So how do you hold on to a base that holds increasingly unpopular ideas on social policy while reaching out beyond so-called "real America" where many voters agree with our foreign and fiscal policy but can't stand the anti-intellectualism and public moral posturing of the hard-right southern wing?

   Set it free!

Why not split the GOP into a regional southern party while creating a new fiscally-conservative, socially-moderate party in the Northeast, Great Lakes and West?  Although I don't know if this is legal, why not have the two new parties sign a non-compete agreement?

I see the following benefits:

- The two parties can get together on issues they agree on, like taxes and perhaps elements of foreign policy.

- Freeing the SoCons to be SoCons.  They always lose within the GOP at the agenda-setting stage to the FisCons.  A three-party system will involve a lot more horse-trading, so more issues important to SoCons can actually make it to the floor, where they may even have a chance of winning.

- It does not imperil the solid South.  I can't imagine that many GOP incumbents in Dixie would be ousted by a party more attuned to the region's wants and needs.

There are risks.  There are huge risks.  One wonders how Presidential elections would work. However, it doesn't seem sane to keep trying to reconcile a largely regional base with parts of the country they don't even consider "real," or to write off voters and candidates who can win because they don't tow a line that is unpopular in their districts.  If the goal is not a GOP revival for its own sake, but the implementation of conservative governance, it's worth looking at.