I was talking to a Democratic political operative who knows far more about voting patterns than I do, and he agreed with my hunch that the most plausible road back to victory in the Electoral College for Republicans runs through what I think of as the Big Ten states: the Upper Midwest, the Great Lakes states minus New York plus Iowa. (Although the Big Ten is lately the Big Fourteen and sprawls all over the place.)
It's not a sexy sounding strategy: these states will undoubtedly lose a few Electoral Votes in 2024, but in 2016 and 2020, they'll be attractive targets. Rather than convert Latinos or single moms or Latino single moms or whatever to voting Republican, all you have to do is pick up some more whites in mostly white states in elections when black turnout is likely to drop if the Democrats nominate a non-black candidate.
The 2012 math is pretty intriguing. Romney needed 64 additional Electoral Votes to win, and, leaving aside Illinois, which he lost big and Indiana, which he won: he lost by moderate margins in these states:
Pennsylvania 20
Ohio 18
Michigan 16
Wisconsin 10
Minnesota 10
Iowa 6
He could have won the election if he'd just won four of those six: PA, OH, MI and either WI or MN
Or he could have won without Michigan by adding Iowa, and keeping PA, OH, and both WI and MN.
And, adding a state or two elsewhere (Virginia? Colorado?) makes the Big Ten strategy math extremely plausible.
This Big Ten strategy doesn't sound impossible: mostly it means that the GOP has to figure out how northern whites and southern whites can get along better in a Republican coalition than northern whites and blacks can get along in a Democratic coalition.
Of course, anybody who tries to put together such a sensible coalition will be the most evil person in the history of the world. Remember when Jesse Helms won re-election by running an ad against affirmative action? That was evil. Remember when George H.W. Bush's supporters ran an ad pointing out that Michael Dukakis was such a clueless liberal that he had vetoed a bill withdrawing prison furloughs for first degree murderers, with predictable consequences? That was evil.
Romney didn't do that. He ran a nice campaign and lost. But being a loser makes you evil anyway, so, short of just plain taking a dive like McCain in 2008, it's damned if you do and damned if you don't if you are a Republican.
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51 comments:
I'd be careful listening to Dem strategists. They strategize for the other team for a living. At the minimum, you have to consider that they know you are on the opposing team, and have a strong online following.
Half Sigma has been talking about this strategy for a while.
Basically, it boils down to the Republicans dropping their anti-abortion (Northern whites are more lefty on social issues), anti-union (lots of unionized whites up North), and anti-tax-the-rich mentality (the rich tend to live on coasts).
Not hard, in theory, but I imagine the "Brain Trust" of the Stupid Party (aka The GOP) will double-down on more of the same old shit and continue to try to appeal to single women and Hispanics, with predictable results.
Midwesterners are not Southerners. A lot of the stuff that plays great in the South is horrifying to polite Midwestern whites, even the blue collar ones.
The emphasis is now on wooing Hispanics, which is just batshit crazy. I think there's three or four groups Republicans have a real chance with:
1) Single white women: turned off by opposition to abortion and gov't handouts.
2) Working class whites: turned off by free trade and the not at all unlikely belief that the GOP is the party of the rich.
3) Post-grad whites: turned off by the perception of the GOP as the party of dumb, white, Rush Limbaugh listening southerners.
4) Asians: same as (3).
Some possibilities to woo the above:
1) Stop bashing government programs that people like, like education.
2) Stop defending low taxes for the rich at all costs.
3) Stop letting welfare spending increases seem cost-free. Become balanced budget hawks. When Dems propose a spending increase, insist that it be paid for with a tax increase.
4) Stop defending a bloated military and pointless wars in the Middle East.
5) Moderate on abortion. Are they ever going to ban abortion for rape victims, ever? No. So why insist on such a ban in principle? Likewise, emergency contraception and RU-486 are here to stay. Evangelicals need to understand this.
6) Don't pander to creationists. Republican candidates should have the guts to say, if asked, that they believe in evolution.
7) Play to your strengths. The GOP is the party of people who don't want to get ahead with welfare or rent-seeking. It's the party of people who believe in going to work and playing by the rules. So payoffs to industry lobbyists and amnesty for illegals plays against the natural strength of the party.
Also, if 5 million or so single white Republican men out there could bother to find a single white woman to marry, the odds of GOP victory in 2016 would increase substantially. It's time to start acting for the good of the group.
Don't forget Pete Wilson. Absolutely evil to run against illegal immigration, and far more evil if you win!
If Romney had come out against affirmative action and illegal immigration and hadn't been such a warmonger vis-a-vis Israel, he would be the President-elect, but "evil."
So how did Bush the Younger get elected twice?
Complicating matters is that Maryland and New Jersey are now Big Ten, er...Fourteen...states.
To win Midwestern whites, you can't be as anti tax the rich as you are now, but you can still be pro-life. There are many social conservatives in the Midwest.
This is the best strategy for Republicans, but they can still win Florida too. it voted two percent more Republican than the country.
That's why I've been explaining for ages that Romney committed political suicide with his "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" article, as well as his general aloofness from his home state and awkwardness when he returned to campaign. The GOP did very well in MI and OH in 2010. People in both states hate incompetent black Democrats. They were ripe for the taking.
In the future, it won't just be a matter of taking OH for the GOP. With demographic changes in the sunbelt (and the permanent loss of FL, CO, etc.) they will have to swing the Big 10 region as you put it en masse.
I feel that any candidate can win in a landslide on a mono-issue platform. He just has to explain it well and be adept at deflecting media's attempts to distract the public with divisive issues.
Immigration Moratorium (legal and illegal, exceptions for the truly gifted) until the economy starts thundering up again.
Carefully explain all of it's benefits in simple absolute terms the average person can understand (jobs, deficits, traffic, physical and social infrastructure etc.) without offending or being condescending towards any group. I don't think it would be very difficult. Don't single out Mexicans!
Carefully deflect and neutralize all questions regarding ANY social issue (ie abortion, gay privilege, health care, demographics, etc.) I mean, the abortion issue is still so divisive, yet nothing has changed in 40 years under either Republican or Democratic leadership. Why candidates even offer a position on issues they can't or won't affect change in, I'll never understand. Why can't they, if pressed by the media, say something like "When I see pictures of aborted fetuses, it's horrifying because you clearly see the human form and perhaps that's when life begins, but I don't believe that women who have abortions should be classified as criminals because the intent to commit a crime or murder isn't there. But, if we don't do something to fix our economy so that people can go back to work, our seniors are taken care of..."
I think the mono issue platform will receive support from poor and middle class Whites, Blacks, and even Latinos, if they already have roots here.
Just my two cents. Sorry for the long rant.
"So how did Bush the Younger get elected twice?"
He got elected once because the Republicans were seen as tough on national security after 9/11.
Anonydroid at 4:50 said: So how did Bush the Younger get elected twice?
Hunsdon explained: It was fifty percent "a more humble foreign policy" and fifty percent Al sticking his tongue down Tipper's throat on national tv. The second time we were still all high on 9/11.
A few points:
Northerners and Southerners have been voting opposite to each other since 1860. It has to do with tribal groupings. For many years the "Solid South" voted Democrat, while the North voted Republican. In the chaos of the 1960's and 1970's, the South became Republican and the North Democratic. Different party labels, but the tribal
antagonism remained. Such persistent tribal antagonism is not easy to overcome.
Steve is correct to say that the Republicans' task is to unite the whites. If they can't do it, the GOP is sunk.
Any effort to split off northern whites from the Democrat coalition using the immigration issue (which is the only issue that can do the job) will be attacked with maximum, 24/7 viciousness by the press and all the powers that be.
The Republican party currently lacks an ant-immigration leader.
An anti-immigration Republican candidate will not be able to raise major money. The pro-immigration harpies will go after donors as well. Most big donors don't like being called racists.
Hunsdon explained: It was fifty percent "a more humble foreign policy" and fifty percent Al sticking his tongue down Tipper's throat on national tv. The second time we were still all high on 9/11.
The rumors that Tipper is a recovering heavy metal, video game, and role-playing game addict didn't help, either.
Most big donors don't like being called racists.
Or losing cheap labor.
Northerners and Southerners have been voting opposite to each other since 1860
Except during the Frankfurter D. #oosevelt era, Lyndon Johnson's run for office, or Nixon's or Reagan's or Jimmy Carter's successful campaigns for Prez.
Going back further, a substantial percentage of Northerners voted Democrat in 1860 and 1864.
Great advice Steve but that haven't take it yet. Instead, they prefer to lose. Throw out the 1980s (and Reagan's influence), and R's are 2-6 since 1976. And Bush II only broke the 50% once in 2004 when he beat Lamo John "F'n" Kerry by a couple thousand in Ohio.
No chance. Winning by stoking latent racial animus is so 1968. And midwesterners love Hillary.
Sorry white boyz.
1) There will be immigration reform and there will be no large scale revolt against it.
2) The GOP will privately concede defeat in the culture war.
3) Both tax increases on the parasitic rich in this country and Obamacare will be popular when implemented. We'll ask: "Why didn't we do this sooner!"
The Republicans need to realize that Southern whites have NOWHERE ELSE TO GO, and stop treating them like they're a swing group that has to be catered to and coddled.
It's not 1980 anymore. In the South, the Democratic party is the party of black people. Republicans will vote for a pot-smoking transgender feminist abortion activist Republican over a Democrat.
In the Midwest, white people are a swing group, that might vote for a Democrat or might vote for a Republican, depending on the issues and the candidate. They're the ones who decide national elections. Cater to them.
If the Republican party would learn their lesson and spend the next four years pandering to suburban white chicks in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc. instead of trying to entice the vibrant Hispanic vote with capital gains cuts, they'd be in very good shape.
Remember when George H.W. Bush's supporters ran an ad pointing out that Michael Dukakis was such a clueless liberal that he had vetoed a bill withdrawing prison furloughs for first degree murderers, with predictable consequences? That was evil.
Yes, it was evil because it worked. The fact that the Democrats still howl about it to this day tells you exactly what they never, ever want the Republicans to do again.
Matthew said:
"3) Post-grad whites: turned off by the perception of the GOP as the party of dumb, white, Rush Limbaugh listening southerners.
4) Asians: same as (3)."
I agree with this: The GOP needs to target these two groups who are starting to share a common culture in blue states. Republicans use code words around white conservatives such as "bad schools" and "high crime" to rile up the white suburban base in red states. They should take the same approach to get white university and coffeehouse liberals as well with code speech like "Increasing transfer payments means no high-speed rail and transit and bike paths."
Doing this would make California competitive again and change the whole electoral map.
"So how did Bush the Younger get elected twice?"
Bush was an accidental president. He got lucky twice. First in the electoral college. Second with 9-11.
"Midwesterners are not Southerners. A lot of the stuff that plays great in the South is horrifying to polite Midwestern whites, even the blue collar ones."
The Midwest is a much less male-dominated society.
On that note, is it a fact that any state that grants full political participation to women eventually becomes dominated by female political sensibiities? I know the historical precedents are few prior to the last 150 years, but it seems like it takes about a century after women gain the right to vote before the power of the state becomes aligned to the promotion of female interests.
If you look at the countries whose cultures are the furthest along the path to dissociation, they were among the first to grant women the right to vote.
I was just in Switzerland, and was surprised at the degree of cultural adhesion and strength of tradition that still exist there. I just learned that women in Switzerland didn't get the right to vote until 1971. I know there are a lot of other factors involved, but that is still interesting.
Does universal suffrage lead inevitably to gynocracy? Does the predominance of female concerns(welfare state, open borders, reduced fertility) lead inevitably to the crumbling of a nation?
I guess we'll see.
Attacking AA as being unfair and Anti-Asian is the single easiest way to break the hold of Democrats on Asian-American votes. But of course, it's "evil" and Republicans have been too stupid to try it. I wonder if that's because mid level Republicans genuinely fear the rise of Asians? If not, it's plain stupidity that they don't use this tactic. And if Dems scream racism, focusing on Asians vs NAMS will only hurt the Dems even more.
Good stategy, but it is lost on the GOP. The current GOP will have to suffer losses in 2016 & 2020 before they change their ways. Of course, by then, the "Big Ten" strategy will no longer be viable.
No, the GOP pundits are already talking about how they just need to make it clearer to the electorate the "benefits of small government."
The GOP is not going to listen to any advice. The dissolution of the GOP is the only solution. They will never learn.
"The Republicans need to realize that Southern whites have NOWHERE ELSE TO GO, and stop treating them like they're a swing group that has to be catered to and coddled."
You mean the Southern whites who stayed home and cost Romney Virginia and Florida and almost cost him North Carolina? Those Southern whites had a place to go.
You make this so complicated when it isn't.
States have a partisan lean from their ideological lean. These leans are stable unless something transformative happens in the electorate.
As it so happens, the American electorate has been very stable since 1996. The only changes were West Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri became solidly Republican while Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia became slightly Democratic.
The targets here have the following Democratic leans:
PA&IA +1
MN&WI +2
MI +3
A few other states have similar Democratic leans:
NH&CO +1
NV + 2
NM +3
VA is even with no partisan lean
OH is Republican +1
FL is Republican +2
NC is Republican +3
Three other states lean slightly Democrat:
OR +4
WA&ME +5
Romney lost not because of anything about Hispanics or Asians or single women, but because he was not popular and failed nationwide to win the middle of the electorate.
The ideological breakdown of the exit polls explain these states. Romney won states where the conservative part of the electorate exceeds the liberal part by 18% or more. In swing states, the conservative lean is as follows:
IA +16
NM, OH & FL +13
WI & NV +11
CO & VA +7
NH, MN, PA, and WA +4
OR has a 1% liberal lean and ME has a 2% liberal lean, but these states are relatively competitive because the Democratic party has only 36% and 32% of the electorate.
Who the middle of the electorate is in these states is no mystery - whites who are mainline Protestant, irregular church-going Catholic, and non-religious, young single white men, male union members, divorced white women with kids, lower middle class whites, urban whites. Some smaller groups also pop up here and there - Arab Christians, married non-Muslim Asians, and married Hispanics self-identifying as white (especially native Hispanos in New Mexico but also white immigrants from Mexico, Brazil, Venezeula, Columbia, etc.).
When you look at the red-blue maps at a precinct level, its the people who live in the light blue neighborhoods in large cities, inner suburbs, and small towns. If you can make those places a light reddish-pink, the Republicans will win. That is what Bush did in 2000 and 2004, and its what Republicans did in 2010 too.
The other option is to find a specific subset electorate in these states and push it permanently Republican as in Appalachia and the Ozarks in 2000 by so that the states tip. The Republicans have been at this in Western and Northeastern PA and rural MN, especially in the Iron Range. This requires lots of local legwork and money, and usually only succeeds after the utter failure of the previous regime. In Pittsburgh, Richard Mellon Scaife is a guiding force behind the electoral movement to move the area Republican.
The key to 2016 or 2020 is finding a candidate who can appeal to people in these states in this middle group. That person is not an elitist snob from MA, not a Cuban from Florida, or a good ole boy like Mike Huckabee. Nor anyone who has lost an election, like Rick Santorum. The ideal person would come from the most difficult of the states to win and is thus proven in the fire - Michigan. I.e., someone like John Engler or Rick Snyder. A weaker alternative might be Terry Branstad or Tim Pawlenty or John Kasich. This route is the direct appeal to the midwest, and does not attempt to reverse the bleeding out west.
The alternative path is a western Americanized Mexican Governor - like Brian Sandoval or Susanna Martinez..
"Does universal suffrage lead inevitably to gynocracy? Does the predominance of female concerns(welfare state, open borders, reduced fertility) lead inevitably to the crumbling of a nation?"
Huh? Neither "open borders" (polls on immigration consistently show no significant gender difference) nor "reduced fertility" (again, women overwhelmingly desire larger families than men) are "female concerns." Everyone here needs to stop listening to, and engaging with that liar Whiskey.
In your defense, the part about the welfare state is absolutely correct, though the difference in opinion is nowhere as large as many here seem to believe.
"No chance. Winning by stoking latent racial animus is so 1968."
It seems that the strategists on your side apparently rather vehemently disagree with you; they do it all the damn time and it works wonders for them.
"And midwesterners love Hillary."
Yes, so much so that she won only two of the six legally valid primaries there in 2008 (Ohio and Indiana), and both were fairly close wins.
"There will be immigration reform and there will be no large scale revolt against it."
The "immigration reform" attempt of 2007 was the only time in the last twenty-five plus years that the GOP activist base turned against the establishment Republican leadership. I see no reason why it would be any different just a few years later.
In any case, good luck getting through 234 GOP House members, all of whom want to keep their jobs in 2014. Do you think 40-50 (assuming improbably few Democrat defectors) of those are going to willingly commit career suicide to support an Obama amnesty proposal? Keep dreaming, idiot.
"That's why I've been explaining for ages that Romney committed political suicide with his "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" article"
As I've noted here before, the NY Times headline writer screwed Romney. He could have made the title "How the Federal Government can help save Detroit" instead, and it would have been accurate.
A genuinely anti-war Republican candidate who wasn't as completely insane as Ron Paul would easily pick off a lot of Democratic voters who normally hate Republicans, although he would also alienate most of the Republican base who are clamoring for war with Iran.
"You mean the Southern whites who stayed home and cost Romney Virginia and Florida and almost cost him North Carolina? Those Southern whites had a place to go."
You're falling for a myth. Republican turnout was not down. A day or two after the election when this talk started there were still about 10 million ballots yet to be counted.
It takes weeks for all the late absentees and provisional ballots to be counted, and for the election results to be certified.
In the states that have already finished counting, turnout was up from 2008.
Republicans voted, and they voted in high numbers. White people in Mississippi aren't going to stay home and let blacks take over the state government just because the national Republican party nominates someone who has a chance of appealing to voters in the Midwest. They really don't have anywhere else to go.
It's usually easier to get traction by hammering one or two key issues, rather than referring voters to your website for your x-point plan. And to compete, you need to offer something different.
Why not pitch a scaled tariff and a freeze on immigration (with the exceptions for O-1s and E-B5s) until the unemployment rate drops below 4%? Who's against having an unemployment rate below 4% (and why do they hate the unemployed!)?
Just hammer that, and stop talking about abortion -- don't ape the Dems' abortion-on-demand position, just stop talking about it.
It really shouldn't be hard for Republicans to hold Southern and Northern whites in the same coalition by focusing on economic issues. Democrats were able to keep blacks and Southern Segregationists in the same coalition for years by doing that.
the election of 2016 won't matter. or any other election, ever again.
the republican will never win pennsylvania again.
"As I've noted here before, the NY Times headline writer screwed Romney."
Romney was for bailing out AIG and the Big Banks and against bailing out GM and Chrysler. That's what killed him in the Midwest. That and refusing to attack illegal immigration and his trumpeting "Free trade" at every whistle stop.
Talking about the NYT is just misdirection.
So how does a forthcoming nullification crisis factor into all this?
Bob Arctor said...
Huh? Neither "open borders" (polls on immigration consistently show no significant gender difference) nor "reduced fertility
Actually, the studies that I have been able to find consistently show that female voters are less likely to favor restrictive immgration policies than men. And hasn't achieving smaller families through access to birth control been a primary policy goal of most women's political organizations over the past century?
Going the long away around, I don't think it is arguable that women as a group tend to be considerably more politcally liberal than men, and that liberal policies promote increased immigration from "diverse" cultures and less (and smaller) native families.
The point was that females in general will vote more liberal than males, that that left-liberalism in countries has grown steadily in those countries once women achieve the right to vote, and that (in my opinion) left-liberal policies, while they can have positve benefits in the short term, are inimical to the long range survival prospects of a culture.
There are no historical precedents for these developments, which means of course that the path taken by Western nations could be due to something completely else, and probably is due to a great number of factors, but in any event is hard to discern from the inside.
Whether this progression of "progressivism" is inevitable in a democracy with universal suffrage is an interesting question. That's all.
Can anyone say "white working class?" You won't get enough of their votes with the outsourcing/anti-labor Republican economic philosophy (which is the real stupidity of the Republicans -bad economics leading to bad politics in a perfect souffle' of stupidity).
Dutch Boy said...
Can anyone say "white working class?" You won't get enough of their votes with the outsourcing/anti-labor Republican economic philosophy (which is the real stupidity of the Republicans -bad economics leading to bad politics in a perfect souffle' of stupidity).
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Especially since the white working class has been expressly abandoned by the Democratic Party. This has been a huge source of votes just sitting there that the Republicans have been too obtuse to grab.
I think DaveinHackensack's idea above about tying immigration to the unemployment rate would be a brilliant way to attract white working class voters while at the same time legitimizing immigration restrictions as something other than racist. The Democrats would be stuck having to choose support for immigration over the interests of American workers, thus delivering Ohio, Pennsylvania and possibly Michigan to the Republicans.
Give Reince Priebus that man's number.
A genuinely anti-war Republican candidate who wasn't as completely insane as Ron Paul would easily pick off a lot of Democratic voters who normally hate Republicans, although he would also alienate most of the Republican base who are clamoring for war with Iran.
If Ron Paul wasn't completely insane, he would have been swallowed up by mainstream politics. IMO, he needs to be more like Harry Browne (RIP), a man who Paul already greatly admired.
Bush beat Kerry in Ohio by 120K votes. By comparison, Obama beat Romney there by slightly over 100K. Obama's margins in VA and CO were also about 100K votes, and even less than that in FL, NV, and IA. If you think Bush's reelection was narrow, you have to recognize that Obama's was even narrower than that. Burying the Republican party is way premature.
"Politics is the study of who hates who." Can't remember who said that, maybe Ray Wolfinger.
I once read a book by a Dem insider about why Reagan won in 1980. His conclusion was that it was about black crime, and that the most illustrative voting district was Macomb County, MI. I don't understand why the same factor wasn't dispositive this time in the states you mention.
Rev. Right,
"Give Reince Priebus that man's number."
We'll have to get Reince out of his puzzle box first.
Leave MN off the list of states the Republicans can win. As far as I remember, The Nixon landslide in '72 was the only time Republicans won MN.
"Politics is the study of who hates who." Can't remember who said that, maybe Ray Wolfinger.
Carl Schmitt: ... In 1927, Schmitt published the first version of his most famous work, The Concept of the Political, defending the view that all true politics is based on the distinction between friend and enemy.
...
... the criteria of friend and enemy define ‘the political’...
"He ran a nice campaign and lost."
I don't think that's the biggest factor.
There's an economic policy spectrum that runs from pro-labour at one end, pro big business and the 1% at the other end and pro small-business somewhere in the middle. Political parties all pick a point on that line as the centre-point of their economic policy from which all else flows. They can appeal to voters some distance in either direction from that centre-point.
The national GOP elite are only interested in the 1% and all their policies revolve around the economic interests of the 1%. This is their biggest problem - race is only 2nd.
If they shifted their economic centre-point to the pro small business spot on the economic spectrum they would still get all the voters up to the 1% plus find it a lot easier to delve down into the white bluecollar demographic.
It's not difficult and the only thing stopping it is the donors want their own private little 1% party.
"Basically, it boils down to the Republicans dropping their anti-abortion (Northern whites are more lefty on social issues), anti-union (lots of unionized whites up North), and anti-tax-the-rich mentality (the rich tend to live on coasts)."
The only reason they have to focus on social issues nationally is because they have to deflect people from their one-percenter economic policy.
If the ditched the one-percenter economics then all the social issues stuff could be wrapped up in states rights - that way the different state parties can use it if it works in that state and not if it doesn't.
"So how did Bush the Younger get elected twice?"
War patriotism wears out over time.
"2) The GOP will privately concede defeat in the culture war."
"will"?
"3) Both tax increases on the parasitic rich in this country and Obamacare will be popular when implemented. We'll ask: "Why didn't we do this sooner!""
There is going to be egg on a lot of people's faces when the rich don't tax themselves yet again.
"The Republicans need to realize that Southern whites have NOWHERE ELSE TO GO, and stop treating them like they're a swing group that has to be catered to and coddled." - They do realize that, which is why they put two damnedyankees on the ballot.
"In the Midwest, white people are a swing group, that might vote for a Democrat or might vote for a Republican, depending on the issues and the candidate. They're the ones who decide national elections. Cater to them." - It was their steadfast support of 1% issues, not issues that play well in the south that sunk them in the midwest. The republicans as they are will not be making any significant changes to who they are, though local republicans(particularly in the south) will still do reasonably well for their people.
"
You mean the Southern whites who stayed home and cost Romney Virginia and Florida and almost cost him North Carolina? Those Southern whites had a place to go." - It was the transplant areas that threw both to the democrat column.
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