Posted on 12/30/2012 12:53:04 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Anytime a party suffers an unexpected defeat, there are two general responses: assigning blame and planning a better strategy for next time.
After Jimmy Carter in 1980 was — in the words of CBS News’ Bob Schieffer — “whomped” by Ronald Reagan, Democrats went through both reactions. As would be expected, the Reagan victory caused much debate in Democratic Party circles about how to respond. (Mostly every Democrat except Jimmy Carter’s inner circle agreed that Democratic mistakes had greatly helped Reagan.)
More traditional Democrats like Walter Mondale believed that Reagan’s victory was largely due to national anger over inflation and the Iran hostage crisis; they proposed that a labor-based campaign with the old formula of “tax-spend-elect” could restore the party’s strength in urban areas. A new generation of Democrats led by Gary Hart argued that a strategy of targeting the suburbs and the new western cities where labor was less prominent would be necessary. (Jesse Jackson also entered the fray, claiming that he could lead a Rainbow Coalition of minorities that would register massive numbers of new voters to defeat Reagan.) The new Democrats pointed to the fact that the older cities had lost so much population that even a 100% turnout wouldn’t make much difference.
Mondale defeated Hart and Jackson for the 1984 Democratic nomination, and got to test his theory against President Reagan.
The results were not pretty for Democrats, as the dynamic of an ascendant suburban vote was in full force for Reagan. Despite the fact that Mondale received a slightly higher percentage in the ten largest Frost Belt cities (65%) than Hubert Humphrey in 1968 (61%) or Carter in 1980 (also 61%), the suburbs in every large Frost Belt metro area except Pittsburgh either exceeded or matched Mondale’s city margin. Mondale’s performances in these cities ranged from a low of “only” 61% in New York City to a high of 80% in Detroit — and he still got buried by a tide of Republican suburbanites.
Adding in the usual GOP edge in the rural areas allowed Reagan to easily win every big-city state on the way to a 49-state blowout. The 1984 results seemed to settle the debate among Democrats on the need to reach out to suburbia, though Rev. Jackson remained a true believer in his inner city-based Rainbow Coalition. Eventually, in the 1990s the Democrats under Bill Clinton evolved into the “New Democrat” strategy of appealing to middle class voters and started to win national elections again.
Now, the Republicans after Mitt Romney’s unexpected loss are asking questions about the party’s future. What should be the winning plan for the GOP in 2016 and beyond: mobilizing the Republican base of conservatives, or winning back some of the independents who voted for Obama?
Fox News’ Dick Morris argued that Romney lost because not enough white conservatives turned out to vote:
The fundamental reason for Romney’s defeat is apparent, if largely unreported. It is not just that blacks, Latinos, and single women showed up in record numbers at the polls. It’s that whites didn’t. … We lost because whites stayed home.
Morris went on to blame the impact of Hurricane Sandy and the negative ads run by the Obama campaign against Romney’s business career.
While I agree that Sandy helped President Obama and his barrage of negative ads hurt Romney, I don’t believe his theory of a low white turnout is correct. There is a simple explanation for the lower share of white voters in America: demographic replacement. Every year, about two million older white voters die and are largely being replaced by the youngest set of voters, who are mostly Hispanic and Asian. The 2010 Census showed that non-Hispanic whites were down to 64% of the total American population, compared to 69% in 2000. However, the CNN exit poll showed that whites were 72% of the national voters.
So, white voters “over-performed” in terms of turnout.
Beyond turnout, white voters were also strongly supportive of Romney, as he tied with Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 at 59% for the third-best Republican performance ever among white voters after President Nixon (67% in 1972) and President Reagan (64% in 1984). The same CNN exit poll showed that 82% of self-identified conservatives voted for Romney — the exact same percentage that supported President Reagan in 1984.
Therefore, in all likelihood Republicans have already maxed out on white conservatives and need to look elsewhere for the gains they’ll need.
Beyond the need to reach out to the rapidly growing Hispanic vote, Republicans also have a ripe target in the suburban areas of the largest Frost Belt cities: New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, etc.
Mitt Romney essentially lost the election in three or four states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. What do all four states have in common? Lots of suburbanites and/or retired blue-collar workers. Florida now swings with the rest of northern suburbia.
Tipping the Sunshine State to Romney would have given him 235 electoral votes. Adding Pennsylvania (20 votes) and Michigan (16) would have given him a majority of 271, despite the loss in the national popular vote (due to huge Obama margins in traditional Democratic cities New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco). Alternatively, adding Pennsylvania and Ohio (18 votes) would have also won the election for Romney.
Here’s the stat that will have Republicans tearing their hair out: if Romney had just matched Gerard Ford’s 1976 performance of 55% in the suburbs of Philly and Detroit, he would have carried Pennsylvania and Michigan and (assuming Florida also swung) won the Electoral College a la Bush in 2000. Ford lost the 1976 election by two points.
Republicans have lost key big states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Michigan at least six straight times. But all is not lost for the GOP in the industrial states: if they can recover among suburbanites, they can become quite competitive in the Frost Belt again. With the South, Farm Belt, and Mountain West turning over Republican majorities, the GOP can get to 270 electoral votes by carrying just a few industrial states like Ohio and Missouri or perhaps Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin. The last Republican nominee to carry the suburbs of the big Frost Belt cities was the first George Bush, way back in 1988. He is also the last Republican to win resoundingly in the Electoral College by carrying 40 states.
Historically, winning back the suburbs of the major metro areas should be quite do-able for the Republicans in 2016 or 2020. After all, these voters were among the most loyal Republicans dating back to the party’s first victory in 1860 for Abraham Lincoln. From the Civil War to the end of the 1980s, Republicans carried the suburbs of the largest Frost Belt cities in every election except the rare Democratic landslide years of 1912, 1936, and 1964.
In fact, 51% of northern suburbanites voted for Herbert Hoover during the depths of the Depression in 1932.
Independent candidate Ross Perot helped break the Republican grip on suburban voters in the North in 1992; every Democratic nominee has won at least a plurality of these voters since then. How can Republicans recover lost ground in the Northern suburbs? The best advice would appear to be to downplay controversial social issues like birth control, and to emphasize the traditional GOP economic message of lean, efficient, honest government and low taxes. This message worked for over 12 decades, from the 1860s to the 1980s.
If the Republicans were really clever, they would let the Obama administration raise taxes by even more than currently proposed, and then run against high taxes. Historically, suburbanites have been the most tax-sensitive voters. As Bill Schneider wrote in the Atlantic:
Upscale voters are the most likely to say that government has too much power and influence, that taxes should be kept low, and that people should solve their problems for themselves.
The lessons of 2012 are obvious: the Republican future doesn’t lie in an even greater mobilization of rural conservatives, but in winning back the northern suburbanites who for over a century were part of the Republican base. New Jersey, which is dominated by the overflow of population from New York City and Philadelphia, is the most heavily suburban state in the nation. A shorthand way of measuring the Republican Party’s progress in courting the suburbs will be to simply watch the Garden State.
Not a POTUS year, don't be fooled comparing apples and oranges.
# voters 2010 88m
# voters 2012 127m
You ain’t God, and you ain’t the Pope. You don’t dictate SQUAT as to what political reality is when you’ve never gotten of your arse to do something about it.
I AM involved in implementing it, not sitting around like some little drama queen beeotch whining woe is me.
See post #40 douche, that’s just a start.
You could start by growing a pair, and quit going from thread to thread like a little DU bootlicker spreading your hopeless despair to everyone here.
The shifting of 4 states by a total of less than 300,000 if I remember right
Most new immigrants & non-whites are not buying what the GOP are selling. You can have the greatest ideas & the greatest intentions in the world, but if the public is not interested then it’s all for naught....
The fundamental culture of blacks, hispanics, and asians is much more accepting of govt control. Add that to two generations of “progressive” controlled education in the US and you have the recipe for Democrat success.
And that is our chink we can exploit. :-D
Voter ID
Crush the unions
Govt program fraud.
Other things I’m probably missing.
These are all things we can deal with at the state level with state legislatures and governors, way easier than we can federally.
The key is thru the states, just as the Founders intended.
Look, Free Vulcan, I am not whining anything to you, I am telling you what reality is.
If one wants to be truly free of the tyranny of other men, then one cannot be in the world of other men.
That is the only way.
I am not hopeless, I am not spreading despair, I am telling you a fact.
Even if you lived on a desert island all by yourself, you are not guaranteed to be free of the tyranny of other men at all.
Any day, their actions could effect your life.
If you look at the history of man, one free society has existed. That’s it. And its life span was short. It isn’t going to survive, because men will not allow other men to be free, and eventually even a free man will not allow himself to be free.
That is plainly evident.
I really do not care if that pisses you off, or makes you think less of me or anything at all.
That is the reality of being alive on this planet.
I also read post 40, and you are wrong.
“Obama won by fraud, pure and simple.”
Wrong.
Obama won because free people are voting away their freedom.
Pure and simple.
Perhaps the most troubling voting trend is how the GOP has lost the Asian vote. This should strike most thinking people as a hint that they are joining a non-white voting block.
Yup.
And don’t get me wrong, the RNC absolutely SUCKS right now. No disagreement there. But remember Murdoch defeated the Lugar machine in Indiana, because it’s much easier to win primaries with Tea Party candidates. Granted, he was an idiot later on with that stupid slip, but you get my point.
So please, understand that a good number of us conservatives are going a different path, thru the states, and going ground up. That is my path. Part of that path is Tea Party congressman too, even though that’s a federal office.
The state parties are generally a different beast. Ironically, the Iowa Republican Party is completely controlled by the Ron Paulbots with a few SoCons sprinkled in. My county and surrounding county parties are so conservative...hell where do I start? There are so few moderates left that they are hardly worth bothering with anymore.
All these things can be used to our advantage. Especially if you already have a GOP state majority and no voter ID or limited union powers. THAT is something that one can jump into right now and try and fix, especially if you are one of those critical swing states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Florida.
Uh no, not because you say so. You are not God and you are not the Pope.
It has been WELL documented that there was serious fraud in this election, an approximately 150K vote swing across several states among millions of votes in the same, more than enough questionable precincts to account for it.
That research trumps your opinion.
You don’t have the clout, credibility, or resume to tell me or anyone here what political reality is.
I simply do no understand why someone who thinks things are so hopeless would waste their time here spreading it.
Unless they have ulterior motives.
I am sort of not disagreeing with you.
Palin has in my opinion the possibility of turning an entire new block of votes to the GOP.
Seriously women voters are the biggest block of all. And the most partisan. The most influential.
If Palin can actually impact that massive voting block by even a couple percentage points, that is the election.
Just saying.
What is needed first though, is to adjust our partisan approach. That is narrowing our appeal already.
More in the future.
Be for America. Now.
Just looking at Congress, 90% of the GOPers are cave-in artists. I have no high hopes.
Paulbots? lol.... I consider liberturdians to be the spawns of satan
No it doesn’t.
He didn’t win it on fraud alone.
He won it because there are more people willing to vote away their freedom than one would expect.
One would expect that no free person would vote away their freedom, but that is not the case in reality.
Trust me, they are. I’m living the nightmare as we speak. Two seats away from winning the Iowa Senate in ‘12 and these blowtards ran around the whole time in a circle of congratulatory backslapping for taking over RPI. We are now still two seats down post election with TWO races lost by less than 2%, and several more by single digits.
We need alot of Congressional primaries in ‘14 too, for sure.
Bullsh!t, Free Vulcan.
I have the clout, the credibility and the resume to tell you what the reality of man on planet earth is.
I am a man on planet earth, and the reality of men on planet earth is that men will not allow other men to be free. This always has been and it always will be. That is the nature of man.
If you go to the Antartica and make the Republic of Free Men, then other men who hate your freedom will come there and not allow you to be free.
Man is a tyrant.
That is all there is to it.
Then retire to your cabin in the woods, and prepare to make your last stand when that day comes.
Others of us will fight on, because that’s the stock we came from.
I’m glad the Founders didn’t feel as you.
No.
You don’t get to tell me what to do.
I’m going to live my life the way I see fit until the day I die, and then I will be truly free from the tyranny of other men, including yours.
And the reason that I will be truly free of the tyranny of other men on the day I die is because that is the only way to be truly free of the tyranny of other men.
I see that you don’t like my line of thinking, but prove me wrong.
However the Founders felt, and as noble as they were, they were wrong.
I don’t like saying that one bit, but it’s accurate. They stated that our freedom comes from God. But are they right? If they are right, then how is it that Diane Feinstein can pass a bill and make that freedom disappear?
How is it that Obama can pass a bill telling us that we must buy a product whether we want to or not and the SCOTUS of the only free country on the face of the earth upholds it?
How is that?
Do you realize that the very same document that stated that our freedom comes from God also created the mechanism that will consume that very freedom?
Do you realize that it created a machine that when driven by the tyrant known as man shall consume the blessings of God?
The fact of the matter is, the reality of man is that the constitution is not going to survive the tyranny of men and the freedom established by it is not going to survive the tyranny of men.
This does not make me happy, I am not cheering it on, I do not want any of that to happen, but it’s going to happen.
It’s obvious, look around you.
You spout your crap here, and basically tell me I’m gonna eat it because that’s reality, and then tell me I’m the tyrant because I won’t let you run me over?
You sir, are a Marxist.
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