DC experts believe they have achieved this. Certainly, President Obama and the Democrats have dropped from their unusually high post-election approval ratings. But the Republicans have no message or candidates and are a party that has allowed itself to be marginalized by its over-reliance on the support of Southern whites.
Evil.
To start with, no Republican is praying for the White House without leading the table in some vast Southern states. Florida, Virginia and North Carolina elected George W. Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama four years later. If we win back these states, the Republican candidate will be halfway to victory in 2012. So downplaying the importance of Southern support for the GOP is a flawed analysis. The region is their base and no party will win if it does not maintain its base first.
Then consider states like Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico. They are less populated than the southern states just mentioned. However, if they all switch to the Republican Party in 2012, their cumulative influence on the election could make the presidential race highly competitive. Then the battle for the great swing state of Ohio begins. Suddenly the race is close and the supposedly marginalized “party of Southerners” becomes viable again.
Another false accusation is that Republicans have no message. None other than Bill Clinton rejects this thinking. In a recent interview with NewsMax CEO Christopher Ruddy, the former president essentially stated that there are scenarios in which the Republican Party could reclaim the presidency in 2012.
Clinton acknowledged that his own health care reform efforts as president played a role in the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. I would add that no oppositional policies that Republicans pursued that year could compare to the administration’s array of potential policy mistakes Obama and Democrats in Congress have already “gave” the GOP within a matter of months.
Yet Clinton attributes the Republicans’ 1994 success to the GOP’s “Contract with America” rather than to any mistake of her own. In fact, he credits his White House with implementing some of the better parts of the Contract. Would you expect him to say otherwise?
Clinton maintains (and I have all these years) that ideas matter – and elections matter. But ideas don’t always have to mean up-to-date government programs. They may also mean reductions, eliminations, restrictions and limitations. Current polling suggests that Republican Party candidates running on a less-is-more basis will not necessarily be perceived as negative, but rather as constructive. Less spending, less interference in the free market economy and fewer up-to-date White House advisers and “czars” – these are some of the ideas that could create a solid platform from which the Republican could launch a successful 2012 presidential campaign.
Another blow to the GOP is that it has no up-to-date faces or fresh blood to enter the political arena. This is off base too. Early polls show former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as a up-to-date hotshot in GOP politics. In addition, there is intense support for former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. It’s hard to quantify the scope and durability of this deep support at this point, but Palin cannot be dismissed as some experts do.
The results of the lightly publicized state Senate special election in Florida that took place earlier this month will also tell the future of Republican voting trends. (I wrote about this in a recent column). The Democrats did not field any viable candidate in the race, so the victory was decided in the Republican primaries.
Thanks largely to voter turnout that was almost twice as high as expected in the Northeast Florida primary, the veteran former House Speaker won by a fairly decisive margin. He defeated a relatively up-to-date candidate whose best-known political affiliations were with recent “Tea Party” efforts and with members of that movement, who tend to be pro-tax and pro-business voters.
He finished ahead of other candidates who had previously held elective office. This is critical to conservatives in this conservative area of the belligerent state. It showed that “Tea Party Republicans” could be a force. But it also showed that these voters want elected officials with experience.
This makes sense when you consider that many Americans in public opinion polls express concern about the inexperience of President Obama and many of those working in his White House. People expect a practical mix of ideology and experience from their leaders. This should be good news for Republicans like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.
First of all, all this is almost certain: Current trends tell us that the Republican Party’s best chance of regaining power is to re-introduce the philosophy that brought the GOP to the top with Ronald Reagan, but which somehow got lost in George W. .Bush: keep government out of our lives as much as possible.
