“Whites Will Abandon The GOP”: Having Alienated Every Racial And Ethnic Group, Republican Party Will Be The Party Of True Equality
As you are certainly aware, the new consensus among most Republicans and conservatives is that they don’t need no stinking Latinos (don’t get huffy on me; this is OK, because it’s a clever movie reference, and in any case it’s aimed not at Latinos, but at stupid Republicans) and will soar to victory on the strength of the white vote. People like me have spent a lot of airtime and ink these past couple of weeks arguing over whether this can work. But what’s interesting is this. There’s an assumption embedded in the argument that no one disputes: namely, that whites will always be as conservative as they are now and will always vote Republican in the same numbers they do now. This assumption is wrong. White people—yep, even working-class white people—are going to get less conservative in coming years, so the Republicans’ hopes of building a white-nationalist party will likely be dashed in the future even by white people themselves.
We already know all about the creative-class white voters, the well-educated and higher-income people who have shifted dramatically to the Democratic column over the past generation. Those voters are increasingly lost to the GOP. True, Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama among college graduates (of all races) 51 percent to 47 percent, but Obama won going away among postgrads. Combine that with a Democratic lock on a huge chunk of a growing minority vote, and that’s why the Democratic Party goes into presidential elections now with a massive presumed Electoral College advantage (in recent elections, Democratic candidates have regularly won states totaling 263 electoral votes, just seven shy of the magic number).
Everyone knows and concedes all this. And everyone counters it by saying that the Republicans will just goose the less-educated white vote. As I noted above, everyone agrees that that vote is theirs for the goosing. But what if it isn’t?
Back in March, the Brookings Institution and the Public Religion Research Institute released a big poll on immigration. Those findings are interesting as far as they go, but the questions and results went beyond that. It’s the first poll I’ve seen that breaks the white working class into four distinct age groups (65-plus, 50 to 64, 30 to 49, 18 to 29) and asks respondents attitudes about a broad range of social issues. And guess what? White working-class millennials are fairly liberal!
Click on the above link, scroll down to page 44, and look at the charts. On most questions, white working-class respondents in all three other age groups yielded results that were pretty similar to one another’s, but the youngest cohort was well to their left.
White working-class young people back gay marriage to the tune of about 74 percent. Another 60 percent say immigrants strengthen the United States (the totals for all three other age groups are below 40 percent). About 56 percent agree that changes immigrants have brought to their communities are a good thing. Nearly 40 percent agree that gays and lesbians are changing America for the better (more than double the percentages in the other three age groups).
They have different views because they’re different people: only 22 percent of white working-class millennials are evangelical, compared with 32 percent as a whole and 42 percent of seniors. And an amazing 38 percent of the group call themselves religiously unaffiliated.
All in all, not your father’s white working class. Sure, their views will become a bit more conservative as they age and have kids and own property. More will start attending church, undoubtedly. But the striking differences between their views and those of the three older groups are consistent, they are uniform, and they are pretty vast. (The poll did not ask about their attitudes toward African-Americans, about which I’m curious; I would expect less though still meaningful departure from the older cohorts.)
Which suggests to me that some views won’t change. These young people grew up in the America of Will and Grace and the relentlessly multi-culti Sesame Street just as surely as children in Berkeley and Takoma Park did. They won’t vote like their counterparts who grew up in Berkeley and Takoma Park, but they—and certainly their kids—just aren’t going to be carrying around a lot of the racial resentments that their grandparents shoulder every day.
So let’s hand it to the Republicans. They make the strategic decision to go all 1980s South Africa on us at a time when a sizable and sure-to-be-growing chunk of one of the most Republican-friendly segments of the white vote isn’t going to want that anymore. So, far from the GOP share of the white vote sailing up toward 70 percent as Sean Trende so giddily predicts, it seems just as likely to decrease as we enter the 2020s and see the sprouting of a more liberal (or less conservative) white working class. Finally, the Republican Party will be the party of true equality, having equally alienated every racial and ethnic group in America.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 10, 2013
“The Challenge Of Rebranding The GOP”: The Prescription For A Republican Comeback Outside The South Will Be Painful
The trendlines are bad for Republicans. They’re falling behind in the battleground states. Demographic and generational change are making matters worse over time. And outside of the South, they’re not even making gains among white voters. That latter point does create room for Republicans to do even better among white voters and win without big gains among Hispanics, at least for now. But conservatives take solace in the possibility of victory through whites on the assumption that it will be easier to improve among whites than Hispanics. In reality, the prescription for a GOP comeback outside of the South will be painful.
But what Republicans should do isn’t obvious. On its own, the observation that the GOP is doing worse among non-Southern whites doesn’t obviously lend itself to a solution. We might assume, for instance, that the GOP’s problems in northern Virginia, Columbus, and Denver are related to cultural issues, but do we know how many of those voters could be persuaded by any of the shifts suggested by pundits and analysts? What about middle class communities, like Appleton, Ft. Collins, or Lancaster? We might assume that the GOP’s problem is mainly economic, but probably part cultural as well—but in what proportions? And in the culturally Southern areas where the GOP hopes to improve further, like in western Pennsylvania or central Florida, it is highly unclear how much more the GOP can improve—especially if race was part of Obama’s problem.
And as a historical matter, it’s hard to predict how parties will rebound. Many DLC Democrats didn’t realize that the Democrats would eventually find a new base in the Northeast or California. The “Emerging Democratic Majority” characterizes West Virginia as “lean Democratic.” The fact is that the next Republican coalition will be built on dissatisfaction with Democrats, and we just don’t know who will revolt against the Democrats or when.
In the absence of great data on what the GOP should do, analysts and pundits are mainly resorting to what they do best: assuming that what they want is what the country wants. The more culturally liberal Republicans want the GOP to move left on social issues. The populists think populism would do the trick. The conservatives say they should go to the right. It’s all too predictable.
But there are limits to these targeted approaches. For one, parties can’t just excise parts of their base and win elections, especially when they’re the minority party. Moreover, any realistic solution won’t lead to massive gains: Republicans would still be vulnerable to Democratic attacks on their support for cutting entitlements or lower taxes for the rich, or opposition to abortion, gun control, and probably gay marriage. That limits how much they can gain among any particular group. Democrats also have the ideological flexibility to embrace good ideas and co-opt a strong Republican message, as they have done on energy. The Electoral College also makes it harder for a party to win with narrow, deep gains among any single group, like missing conservative white voters or Hispanics—there just aren’t enough them in the critical states. The GOP has a broad problem across a very diverse set of battleground states, and it will require an equally broad set of remedies.
So the best option is to spread the pain around. Don’t castrate the party, smooth out the many sharp edges of the GOP’s platform and message. Keep supporting tax cuts and less regulation, but add an agenda and message aimed at the middle and working class. Remain pro-life, but don’t appear opposed to Planned Parenthood or contraceptives, and return to supporting exceptions in instances of rape or the health of the mother, as President Bush did. Stay committed to religion, but don’t reflexively doubt the science of evolution and global warming, or the promise of stem cell research or renewable energy. Oppose gun control, but why force yourself to oppose background checks? Oppose gay marriage if Republicans must, but could Republicans at least support civil unions? On all of these issues, the GOP need not compromise on its core policy objectives, but can’t afford to consistently stake out ground so far from the center. That allows Democrats to cast the party and their core beliefs outside of the mainstream, which has already happened on abortion.
This prescription is informed by Bill Clinton’s revitalization of the Democratic Party in 1992. He was ostensibly a “New Democrat,” even though he was pro-choice, supported higher taxes, a universal health care system, gun control, and expanded rights for gays in the military. Rather than abandon core elements of the Democratic agenda, Clinton softened the edges on unreformed welfare, crime, middle class taxes, and said abortion should be “rare,” even if it should remain legal.
The success of heterodox, but conservative Republicans suggests that this formula would be sufficient. Chris Christie is doing great in 2016 presidential polling, and he’s basically followed the approach listed above—although there’s a case that went further than I would advise on gun control. Similarly, Jon Huntsman earned quite a bit of support among moderates for merely saying that he believes in evolution and gay marriage, despite being very conservative on economic issues. Paradoxically, it seems that the GOP’s extremism will make a rebrand even easier, since a candidate can move to the center and still clearly stand on the right.
But Bill Clinton had the benefit of a relatively moderate Democratic primary electorate with a large conservative contingent in the South and Midwest. That allowed him to “soften the edges” and still win a Democratic primary, despite battling serious attacks on his character. In contrast, Jon Huntsman received 739 votes in Iowa and there are questions about whether a popular governor like Chris Christie could win the nomination.
If someone like Huntsman was way too moderate for GOP primary voters, then the GOP rebrand won’t be easy. That makes it even more important that immigration reform passes. Sometimes, allowing issues to disappear can be just as helpful as rebranding. Clinton benefited from the end of the Cold War, which he obviously had nothing to do with. Getting immigration reform off the table would dovetail well with a better economic message, which should appeal to persuadable Hispanic voters. But many of the same forces that couldn’t tolerate “smoothing the edges” seem poised to block immigration reform. And if the GOP can’t “smooth out the edges” and won’t allow Democrats to take issues off the table, like on background checks or immigration, the consequences for 2016 could be fatal.
By: Nate Cohn, The New Republic, July 9, 2013
“A Party That Can’t Decide To Chose”: The GOP Establishment Fractures On Immigration
Over the course of this year’s immigration debate, we’ve come to view the Republican party division as follows. On one side, advocating for comprehensive immigration reform, you have a group that is sometimes called “the establishment” or “the elite,” made up of people whose primary interest is in the party’s long-term national prospects. These are the big money people, the top consultants, some senators, and so on. On the other side, opposing comprehensive reform, you have “the base,” which is not only voters but also members of the House with a narrow interest in getting re-elected, usually by appealing to extremely conservative constituencies. On that side you also have some conservative media figures and others with strong ideological motivations against immigration reform. And then caught in the middle you’ve got the Republican congressional leadership, which can’t afford to antagonize the base but also worries about the effect killing immigration reform will have on the party.
But we may be reaching the point where these categories are no longer adequate to describe what’s going on within the GOP. This morning, William Kristol and Rich Lowry, the editors of the two most important conservative magazines (the Weekly Standard and National Review) joined together to write an unusual joint editorial titled “Kill the Bill,” coming down in opposition to the “Gang of 8” immigration bill that passed the Senate. The substance of their argument is familiar to anyone following this debate—the Obama administration can’t be trusted, it won’t stop all future illegal immigration, the bill is too long—but the substance isn’t really important. What’s important is that these two figures, about as establishment as establishment gets, are siding firmly with the anti-reform side.
Those of us who have been around for a while can’t help but be reminded of a memo Kristol wrote to Republicans 20 years ago, when Bill Clinton was trying to enact health-care reform. It argued that from a substantive and political point of view, Republicans should not try to negotiate with the Clinton administration or work with them to pass a reform that was as conservative as possible; instead, they should wage all-out war to kill it. “The plan should not be amended,” Kristol wrote, “it should be erased.”
Politically speaking, it was good advice; Republicans followed it, and they won. Sixteen years later they used the same strategy during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, and they lost.( It turned out, however, that conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman did the Republicans’ substantive work for them, extracting a number of concessions from the administration that moved the bill in a more conservative direction). There’s a difference in this debate, however. Those two efforts at health care reform were always understood as a conflict between a Democratic administration seeking a longtime Democratic goal, and Republicans in Congress trying to stop them. It was reported like a sporting event: Clinton loses, Republicans win; Obama wins, Republicans lose. Immigration, on the other hand, has been reported largely as a battle within the Republican party. President Obama, knowing full well that anything he advocates immediately becomes toxic for most Republicans, has been using a lighter touch when it comes to public advocacy for comprehensive reform. (I’m not saying he hasn’t been pushing for it, but he hasn’t done the all-out, campaign-style barnstorming tour that would help turn it into a purely Democrats-versus-Republicans issue). The story has always been, “What will the Republicans do?” and if reform goes down, the headlines won’t read, “Obama Defeated on Immigration Reform,” they’ll read, “Republicans Kill Immigration Reform,” with subheadings like “Danger ahead for GOP as Latino voters react.”
I once knew a professor who would say to his students, “Institutions don’t speak. People speak.” His point was that we often ascribe a unified intelligence or will to things like the government or a corporation or a political party, glossing over the fact that it’s individuals making those decisions and statements. There may be a single most beneficial path for the Republican party to take, but the Republican party can’t just decide to choose it. A party is made up of lots of individuals, each with their own opinions, self-interest, and levers of influence, who will push it in one direction or another. With Kristol and Lowry coming out in opposition to reform (and perhaps other people like them to follow), it may no longer even be possible to say that the party establishment has a single position on the issue.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 9, 2013
“Are These People On Drugs”: House GOP Apparently Wants To Be Even More Unpopular Than It Already Is
With the July 4 holiday behind them, House members might be expected to take up work on the immigration reform bill passed by the Senate. But they won’t. They’re looking at piecemeal reforms that will be heavier on border enforcement than the Senate bill – which doubled the number of border control agents, after the border control budget already doubled in size in the last decade — and even nuttier ideas.
Instead the House GOP is apparently making big plans for another debt ceiling hostage-taking, and this time they’ve got a strategy to demand big budget cuts from President Obama and the Democrats. According to the National Journal, House leaders are working on a “menu” of budget-slashing offers to Obama in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling for a short, medium or long period of time. Their template is Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget – the budget so unjust and biased against the poor that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops took time out from restricting women’s rights to criticize the Ryan plan.
House members reluctantly voted to raise the debt ceiling in January promising to come back with a strengthened hand on behalf of budget cuts next time around (which will probably be the end of this year). So House Speaker John Boehner is reportedly meeting with Ryan and other conservatives like Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, who boasted about their talks to the National Journal. The key points:
For a long-term deal, one that gives Treasury borrowing authority for three-and-a-half years, Obama would have to agree to premium support. The plan to privatize Medicare, perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Ryan budget, is the holy grail for conservatives who say major deficit-reduction can only be achieved by making this type of cut to mandatory spending. “If the president wants to go big, there’s a big idea,” said Rep. Steve Scalise, chairman of the Republican Study Committee.
For a medium-sized increase in the debt-limit, Republicans want Obama to agree to cut spending in the SNAP food stamp program, block-grant Medicaid, or tinker with chained CPI.
For a smaller increase, there is talk of means-testing Social Security, for example, or ending certain agricultural subsidies.
…Even at the smallest end of the spectrum — another months-long extension of debt-limit — there is talk of pushing back the eligibility age for Social Security by an equal number of months.
Are these people on drugs? These are wildly unpopular ideas that have no chance of passing the Senate. (“Republicans are eager to look like they are giving the White House plenty of options, convinced that it is in their interest to appear engaged and flexible at the negotiating table,” the NJ’s Tim Alberta reports, apparently unironically.) Unfortunately, the president himself has come out behind the chained CPI, but given the enormousness of House GOP demands and delusion, he’s unlikely to get much for that concession. So one cheer for House GOP delusion.
Scalise seems to be the main source for the National Journal story, and you can imagine other members wincing at his clueless bluster. Not surprisingly, Scalise starred in another story today about the Obama team’s belief it will see some congressional movement on both immigration reform and the economy this summer. Not so fast, Scalise told the Washington Post: “We’re going to continue to be very aggressive in serving as a check and balance against the Obama administration. That’s what the country said in November. We’re very far apart.”
It’s interesting to note that Paul Ryan is key to these debt-ceiling strategy talks, according to the National Journal, when he’s also supposed to be key to comprehensive immigration reform. To his credit, Ryan has come out for something along the lines of the Senate bill, but the question is whether he’ll expend any political capital getting other members to join him. So far, he hasn’t. It looks like another round of debt-ceiling hostage taking is a higher priority for him.
Ironically, the fact that the deficit is falling faster than at any time since World War II is helping drive the House GOP’s extremism – they have to go for big, slashing cuts, because the deficit is already shrinking. Here’s hoping the extremism of the House GOP’s opening salvo will remind the Obama administration not to waste its time on another attempt at a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, July 8, 2013
“Listening To The Radicals”: The GOP’s Future, Move Right And Move White
It’s an eternal verity of American politics: the Republicans are the party of big business. Democrats since Franklin Roosevelt have sneered it as a putdown, to which many Republicans respond with no shame, yes, we are, the business of America is business. And business, in Washington, means chiefly the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, the two beefiest business lobbies in the city. But funny thing—the chamber and NAM support the Senate immigration bill that the House Republicans are going to kill. In addition, some prominent evangelical groups are pro-reform, too. Which makes me wonder: if the Republicans are no longer listening to these people, then to whom precisely are they listening, and what does that tell us about what kind of party this is becoming?
The chamber, NAM, and the evangelical groups have been in on the immigration discussions from the start. A great deal of the hard work here was done by congressional negotiators in conjunction with the chamber and the AFL-CIO, working through different categories of workers (high-skill, low-skill, guest) and arriving at language and numbers that suited all the interests at the table. Each of these groups has done the kind of outreach to its members that is vital in the case of big and controversial legislation like this. The Evangelical Immigration Table, a project of World Relief (which is an arm of the National Association of Evangelicals), persuaded pastors across the country to support reform.
There was a time in this country when the linked arms of those three groups would unquestionably have been joined by most Republicans on Capitol Hill. But that was long ago. Now the GOP is a different animal altogether.
And so the Chamber of Commerce—the Chamber of Commerce!—is a bunch of sell-outs. This isn’t the first time, by the way, that the chamber and the GOP have been at odds. The chamber has long supported substantial public spending on infrastructure. You might have thought that the fact that the chamber was for it would bring Republicans along. But these Republicans don’t listen to the chamber.
Instead, they are listening to the Tea Party. Back in 2010, the press tried to tell you that Tea Party people just cared about economics, but that’s dead wrong. As Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson showed in their book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, immigration is a huge issue to Tea Partiers, and along precisely the immigrants-are-freeloaders lines you’d expect. Remember when Mitt Romney’s attack on Rick Perry over immigration worked so well? This is why.
And more disturbingly they’re listening to the likes of Peter Brimelow and Steve Sailer, two crackpot haters of nonwhite immigrants who’ve been at it for a couple of decades now. Now I can’t say for sure of course how many Republicans are reading their unhinged website, where one contributor recently dismissed the Evangelical Immigration Table as “Soros-funded,” an imprecation that in right-wing circles is about as ominous as you get and is meant to be read as “can’t be trusted.” But I can say this: the defeat in the House of immigration reform, on the explicit political grounds that “we” (the GOP) don’t “need” Latinos and can win in the future by just riling up the white vote—which is in fact the argument now—represents a mainstreaming of Brimelow and Sailer that would have been totally unimaginable a decade ago.
Business groups, like everyone I talk to who is pro-reform, hold out hope. But it’s a shaky kind of hope, as evidenced by one conversation I had yesterday with a source close to business groups. This person thought the odds of success in the House were “about 30 to 70.” Later in the conversation, he termed himself “optimistic.” If that counts as optimism, that tells us something. The key thing, this person said of the House Republicans, is “just getting them in the room” with senators in a conference committee.
He did correctly identify the hard part. But getting to the conference stage means that the House has to have passed its own bill, and one containing a path to citizenship that isn’t strewn with poison pills that make it impossible for the other side to support. And that’s the huge if.
What we are watching here is absolutely historic. The process by which the GOP has gone from “we must get right with Latinos” to “who needs ’em” has been … well, not quite astonishing. Depressingly unsurprising, actually. But amazing all the same. If immigration is killed for the reasons stated, then the Republican Party has consciously made the decision to become a quasi-nationalist party. They’ll probably never sink to the level of a Le Pen or a Haider (I added that “probably” upon re-reading; you never quite know with these people). But they will have killed immigration reform twice in six years, opposing not just the usual suspects like La Raza but America’s top corporate interest groups. And they will have staked out their bet for their future: move right and move white. And this will be the year it all took hold.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 3, 2013
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