Are Elections Decided by Chance?

Real Clear Politics ^ | August 13, 2013 | Sean Trende

[neverdem]

Over the past nine months, the Republican Party has been consumed by a debate over how it should respond to Mitt Romney's loss in 2012. Should it reach out to Hispanics? Should it move to the center? Should it try to differentiate itself from the Democratic Party by moving more to the right? Or perhaps it should attempt to redefine what "left" and “right” mean, possibly by embracing a more populist approach?

Let me step a bit outside of the proverbial box here, and ask a more foundational question: What if the GOP doesn’t need to change all that much? This grows out of an article I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the last election, showing that the state of the party wasn’t nearly as dire as many had made it out to be. It is nowhere near as weak as it was in the 1930s, and hasn’t begun to plumb the depths it reached in the 1970s. In fact, at the sub-presidential level, it is in pretty solid shape. Even at the presidential level, over the course of the past six elections, the GOP has lost the popular vote by, on average, 3.9 percentage points. Democrats, by contrast, lost by 9.9 points on average from 1968 to 1988.

Let’s flesh this idea out by asking ourselves seven interrelated questions, each of which casts some cold water on the idea that a rebranding would be overwhelmingly helpful:

1) What if elections are simply random?

2) What if it really is just the economy, stupid?

3) What if Republicans actually aren’t that out of step ideologically?

4) What if...

[gusopol3]

Standing back too far, sucking his thumb while contemplating his navel. How can voter participation slide as far toward 50% as it did in 2012 in the face of the “high tech wizardry of team Obama” in the environment of high turnout in increasing early voting and mail in voting? And nobody asks the questions?

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!