After Tuesday’s GOP loss, there was much speculation — gleefully on the left — that the Republican Party is headed for minority status, or even extinction. Since whites will make up less of the population, and other races backed Obama in large numbers, it will only get harder to win the White House four, eight years from now. Women voters also boosted the Democrats, with 55% picking the president. But demographics are not destiny. Here, some pundits explain how the GOP can put together a winning coalition in the future.
WINNING LATINOS
Let’s be clear. It’s not the Republican Party ideology that keeps Latinos away. Most Latinos live by many of the basic concepts the party professes to own. We work hard. We are God-loving adherents of Christian values. Latinos want a better life for their family with jobs that help build a solid economic future. Most Latinos take pride in working hard and frown upon government dependence and handouts.
So, why don’t we vote Republican in greater numbers?
Simple. Because of the great number within the Republican Party who espouse anti-minority rhetoric and want to suppress our vote instead of wooing us and trying to convince us to join their ranks. The public face of the Republican Party — angry old and young white males — makes our defenses go on alert mode.
Add to that the staunch opposition by many Republicans to bilingual education. It is insulting to those who will never forsake the language of their ancestors. Comprende?
It’s not just immigration reform, though that plays a part. It’s beingtreated like an “other” rather than Americans.
At the Republican National Convetion, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez told a story about how two Republicans took her and her husband to lunch when she was a Democrat. Expecting to politely put them off, she said, “We talked about many issues, like welfare, is it the way of life or hand up? Talked about size of government, how much should it tax families and small businesses? And when we left that lunch, we got in the car and I looked over at Chuck and said, ‘I’ll be damned. we’re Republicans.’ ”
If Republicans took the time, recruited more candidates, asked more questions, they might find that reaction is common.
— Gerson Borrero, a columnist for El Diario and a political commentator for NY1
GO WITH WHO YOU LIKE
The next two years will set the vision of a more populist-oriented conservatism of which I am excited to play a part. Just please, GOP, PLEASE — in four years let’s not go with the “he’s the most electable” argument. The most electable usually aren’t.
— Erick Erickson, RedState
LOOK TO THE MIDWEST
Republican Mitt Romney lost this election for a simple reason: turnout. Specifically, the number of white voters who turned out this year was nearly 10 million fewer than in 2008, and even 3 million fewer than in 2004. A careful look at vote patterns in the swing state of Ohio, conducted by Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics, indicates that white voters who lived in lower-income areas simply did not turn out.
What happened? The most likely explanation is that they did not vote for Barack Obama because they disapproved of his policies, but also refused to vote for Mitt Romney because they could not identify with or relate to him.
Historically speaking, victorious Republican candidates usually hail from the heartland of America, not the elite quarters of the Northeast. Between the Civil War and World War II, seven of the 12 Republican presidents were born in Ohio. Since World War II, the only Republicans to have won two terms to the White House have been Dwight Eisenhower, a Kansan by way of Texas, Richard Nixon, a farm boy from California, Ronald Reagan, raised in Dixon, Ill., and George W. Bush, whose grandfather was of the Connecticut gentry but who spoke with a folksy Texas twang.
The point? Identity matters a great deal in politics, perhaps more than spending, taxes or hot-button cultural issues.
Democrats like to castigate the GOP as the party of Wall Street, but since its inception, its electoral base has been the middle class of the American heartland.
Moving forward, the party must nominate candidates who come from this background, who embody the values of these people and who speak their language without affectation.
—Jay Cost, staff writer for the Weekly Standard and the author of “Spoiled Rotten,” a critical history of the Democratic Party
GETTING WOMEN BACK
First and foremost: Champion and elevate their women leaders. Don’t caterwaul that you already do. Obviously, not enough. If Republicans are going to cut into that 36% margin among single women, or the 11% difference among women overall, they are going to have to convince women to give them a second look. In this instance, the messenger is critical.
What woman is associated with Republican leadership in Congress by the public at large? With the RNC? Within the Romney campaign? No one.
When they do promote women, the temptation among Republicans has been to only promote those the establishment sees as inoffensive. That leaves out some of the most inspiring leaders who appeal to women with different backgrounds and interests. The wide spectrum of women is a sign of strength and diversity, not a turnoff.
Next, Republicans need some savvy when it comes to dealing with “women’s issues.” Chances are, putting forward an entourage of male clergy to talk about the HSA mandate on birth control was not going to convince many women that Republicans have no intention of taking women’s birth control away — especially when millions of dollars in ads are telling them otherwise.
But an army of high-profile Republican women presenting a united front could have turned the issue around to be a positive one: a defense of the Constitution and our First Amendment rights as well as an exposé of Democratic efforts to manipulate women voters.
And finally, Republicans must do a better job of explaining to women why theirs is the party of freedom — the party that wants to keep government out of their business. It’s an indictment against the Republican Party that the Democrats were able to paint it as the party that was going to interfere between a woman and her doctor. ObamaCare mandates that the government, and a panel of non-doctors, will stand directly in the path between women and their doctors. Republicans win on the issue of restraining government — hardly an issue to run away from.
— Kate Obenshain, author of “Divider in Chief: The Fraud of Hope and Change” (Regnery)
STOP ENCOURAGING OUTSOURCING
Would the GOP wipeout in those heavily Catholic, ethnic, socially conservative, blue-collar bastions of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Illinois, which Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan swept, have anything to do with the fact that the United States since 2000 has lost 6 million manufacturing jobs and 55,000 factories?
Where did all those jobs and factories go? We know where. They were outsourced. And in the deindustrialization of America, the Republican Party has been a culpable co-conspirator.
Swiftly, US multinationals shut factories here, laid off workers, outsourced production to Asia and China, and brought their finished goods back, tax-free, to sell in the USA.
Profits soared, as did the salaries of the outsourcing executives.
Tuesday, these ex-Reagan Democrats came out to vote against some guy from Bain Capital they had been told in ads all summer was a big-time outsourcer who wrote in 2008, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt!”
— columnist Pat Buchanan
STOP FIGHTING GAY MARRIAGE
If conservatism can be boiled down to one word, that word is freedom.
The freedom of consenting adults to act as they please in the bedroom is a not unimportant sector of that freedom, and though it is absurd to suggest that the Framers of the Constitution meant “gay marriage” when they wrote “due process,” the era in which sexual matters were any part of public policy is rapidly drawing to a close. Fifty-state gay marriage is nearly here, and there is little point in even token opposition anymore.
At some point in the next couple of years, Justice Anthony Kennedy and the Supreme Court’s liberals will agree the due-process clause obliges every state to recognize gay marriage and the matter will be settled forever. This will present an opportunity for modernization the Republican Party should not miss.
The conservative protest that the institution of marriage is being harmed by recognition of gay unions sounds, to the younger voters and single women who have turned their back on Republicans, not like a principled stand in favor of “family values” but as a modern Jim Crow stance.
Surveys show an astonishingly rapid change of American attitudes on gay marriage, which was so unpopular just 16 years ago that a Democratic president could continue to be adored by liberals even after signing the Defense of Marriage Act. Today opposition is down to 44%, according to a July Pew survey, and falling rapidly.
When the Supremes rule, the next Republican candidate for president need not carry a rainbow flag while marching in the next gay-pride parade (though it wouldn’t hurt) but he or she must warmly embrace the court’s decision. A sincere, open-minded, welcoming speech to mark the new era would be an attention-getting way to freshen up the party’s image and move forward with history.
Besides, we know that marriage accompanies or causes all sorts of wonderful habits, not the least of which is voting Republican. We should be doing everything we can to back it. How about a tax break for Adam and Steve when they finally make it legal?
— Kyle Smith, Post columnist
KEEP HISTORY IN MIND
The Republicans will deserve to be endangered if they overinterpret Mitt Romney’s defeat and if they fail to keep things in historical perspective. Romney lost the presidency by barely more than a whisker, historically speaking. With a better candidate, one who articulated the party’s conservative message more consistently, they might well have won. And instead of talking about endangered Republicans, we doubtless would be talking about endangered Democrats.
Again speaking historically, the Republicans have been here before and have come roaring back. In the early 1960s, the Republican right gained control of the party, nominating Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. Goldwater lost by 10 times the popular margin that beat Romney. Many pundits thought conservatism was finished in the GOP; some thought the GOP itself was DOA.
Yet within two years the conservatives had a new darling, in California of all places. Ronald Reagan twice won the governorship and in 1976 challenged the sitting president of his own party, Gerald Ford. In 1980 he swept to victory and altered the course of American history, pushing the political mainstream far to the right of where it had been a decade before.
Conservative Republicanism is by no means dead. It simply needs to recruit better candidates. It could start by junking the marathon of debates the party put its hopefuls through this primary season. No one could survive that ordeal with sanity and integrity intact. Besides, as Romney’s besting of Barack Obama in the first and most important debate of the general campaign demonstrated, winning debates doesn’t win you the presidency.
— H. W. Brands teaches history at the University of Texas at Austin; his latest book is “The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace”