Quote:
Originally Posted by Daldolma
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The core of our disagreement is apparently over how many hardcore fiscal conservatives in swing states have grown so disencouraged that they will not vote. That is an extreme minority in my opinion. Implicit in your argument is the belief that, by getting those conservatives to the polls, and despite any subsequent loss in moderates, a Republican candidate would be able to overcome blowouts amongst Latinos, blacks, and gays. That simply doesn't work anymore. The numbers bear it out.
Unless you expect a Republican candidate to carry 65-70% of the white vote by moving even further right, you're fighting a losing battle. And winning that kind of majority with white people just doesn't happen.
I also disagree that Romney was merely attracting anti-Obama voters. He did extremely well with whites and independents. If you're beginning with a premise of getting thrashed amongst Latinos and blacks, you can't do much better than Romney did.
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We've both been making a mistake here which has lead to some confusion and fallacious ideas. We have been using a single axis (left-right) for political thought. This is a common practice, though it is an overly simplified model which does not come close to being useful for political discussion. People don't just place themselves at some point on a line and then look for the candidate who is closest to them. The truth is that people have multiple issues they vote on, and each of these issues can be pictured as its own axis, or dimension. Everyone's multi-dimensional space is different as not only do they have a different set of issues they care about, but they place varying amounts of importance on each one. Thus you could get someone who considers them self as a democrat voting for a Republican and vice versa. For most of my youth, I considered myself as a democrat because I cared most about social liberty. You could say I moved to the right as I became more interested in economic liberty, but the truth is that I really moved out of the left-right axis and now have equal distance to both the dem and repub ideologies.
The dimension I've been mainly focused on here is the "economic liberty" dimension. This is the dimension which I think the republicans need to move to the right on to have any chance. There are many on the left who would be considered on the right side on this dimension. Blue dog democrats, west Texas democrats, there are many examples of this. And on this dimension, the Republicans are being soundly destroyed. It's not because their position is far from the majority of Americans on this, but because their actions do not match their words in this area. Once they let Bush enact the largest expansions to Medicare and the Department of Education (which they had talked about eliminating entirely only 20 years prior), the Republicans lost all credibility on this issue. Their words are on one end of the spectrum and their actions on the other. And remember that Romney was very much the same in this respect. He talked about economic liberty, while his tenure in Massachusetts was wildly different. People tend to remember the things that piss them off about politicians, and so people on the liberty end of this spectrum will remember the statist actions of Bush and Romney and people on the statist end will remember the liberty rhetoric. This disconnect loses a lot of votes. Not only does it lose the votes of those who care greatly about this dimension, but it's also a glaring contradiction that makes the person look like a liar. This hurts the candidate even with those who place little value on this particular dimension.
So I suppose the key is that the Republicans would need to move their actions to match their rhetoric, or vice versa. Currently they are trying to plat both sides, and I think most people see right through it. I wouldn't bet on that changing anytime soon though.