".....As my colleague Alec MacGillis described last year in the New Republic, it’s how the former county executive became governor, survived a recall attempt, and won re-election. And if Walker can capture the nomination, it’s how he might win the White House, too.
Before heading there however, we should step back and look where the GOP stands in national politics.
Even with its midterm success last November, the Republican Party still has two challenges to meet before 2016. First, it has to learn to speak to fears over income inequality without committing to a specific agenda and limiting its course of action once in office. And second, it has to find some way to deal with the party’s pitiful showing with minority voters in the last presidential race. No, Republicans don’t need to win Latinos, Asians, or black Americans (the latter is probably impossible), but a better margin makes the White House an easier reach."....
...... After the 2012 presidential election, the conventional wisdom was that Republicans needed to win over a greater percentage of nonwhite voters. But at Real Clear Politics, senior election analyst Sean Trende argued the opposite. For him, “the most salient demographic change from 2008 to 2012 was the drop in white voters,” and specifically, “downscale, Northern, rural whites.” It’s unlikely that these voters were liberal, and if they were in the electorate, there’s a good chance they would have broken for Romney in large numbers.
More importantly, Trende argues that the floor for Democrats’ share of the white vote is lower—and the Republican ceiling higher—than is commonly understood. If that’s true, then the GOP has an alternative strategy to broadening the base—it can deepen its support with its existing coalition. Or as he writes:
Democrats liked to mock the GOP as the “Party of White People” after the 2012 elections. But from a purely electoral perspective, that’s not a terrible thing to be. Even with present population projections, there are likely to be a lot of non-Hispanic whites in this country for a very long time. Relatively slight changes among their voting habits can forestall massive changes among the non-white population for a very long while. The very white baby boom generation is just hitting retirement age, and younger whites, while unsurprisingly more Democratic than the baby boomers … still voted for Romney overall........."
The supporting data are there; one need only condense it with sources. I suspect Dave Brat did exactly that, so it might only need minor tweaks to go national, if any.
For him, “the most salient demographic change from 2008 to 2012 was the drop in white voters,” and specifically, “downscale, Northern, rural whites.” It’s unlikely that these voters were liberal, and if they were in the electorate, there’s a good chance they would have broken for Romney in large numbers.
Assuming that everybody who's "unlikely to be liberal" is conservative in the sense many of us use it, is a mistake. It's the sort of mistake people make with Perot voters. They certainly weren't liberal in the Berkeley-Cambridge-Manhattan-San Francisco sense and would be open to vote for a Republican, but it certainly doesn't follow that they're looking for the most conservative of Republican candidates. There are things about conservatives and Republicans that they also may not like. So, yes, Romney wasn't the right candidate to win them over, but the right candidate wasn't necessarily the most conservative one, and probably wasn't in the race either.