They still don’t get it

Zak Moore (Roanoke Red Zone) and Marty Williams (Reagan’s GOP) each have posts on the future of the Republican Party.  Both want to cure the party’s recent penchant for losing elections.  Unfortunately, neither have the correct diagnosis.

Both start from the belief that he party must be a broad-based coalition in order to win elections.  While this may come as a shock to both of them, I tend to agree with that sentiment, but it doesn’t explain why the GOP has had such trouble lately.

I’ll star with an excerpt from Zak’s post:

Take Jose. Jose is pro-life. He’s a gun owner. He believes in low taxes and smaller government. He home schools his children. Jose is a Republican. But Jose is also Hispanic. And he supports amnesty for illegal aliens, many of whom are his friends who have lived here for years. They are not just people caught on camera crossing the border some 2,000 miles away. Now, some would say there is no place for that belief in our party. They would say there is no place for Jose and would seek to cast him out. Where would he go? Most likely he would become an independent. Or he may even become a Democrat. But the bigger question is does casting someone like Jose out of our party make sense?

At first blush, that might sound reasonable, but take a look at the beginning again:

Take Jose. Jose is pro-life. He’s a gun owner. He believes in low taxes and smaller government.

FULL STOP.

Now, let’s say Jose is a Virginia voter.  He has seen the leaders of the Republican Senate demand higher tax increases than Mark Warner wanted in 2004.  He saw them clamor for a tax increase that even Tim Kaine kept at arms length in 2006.  He saw the debacle of HB3202.  All the while, he sees the Republican President and (until January 2007) successive Republican Congresses bust their budget limits year after maddening year.

Would Jose necessarily be fond of the Republican Party under these circumstances?  I don’t think so.  The fact is, the Virginia GOP has not been friendly to limited-government supporters for quite some time. 

What effect this has on the base is arguable, but among those who support limited government and do not call themselves Republicans (either capital-L or small-l libertarians), the effect has been catastrophic.

It is this fact that Williams also misses, thus leading to this faulty analysis:

Fred Barnes, writing in the Wall Street Journal, makes the point:

“It was the defection of independents, not conservatives, that caused the Democratic landslide in the Congressional elections in 2006. Their preference for Democrats jumped to 57 percent in 2006 from 49 percent in 2004. [John] McCain must win many of them back, since independents constitute nearly one-third of the overall electorate.” (reprinted in the RTD)

Read that carefully - especially the last sentence. Are we going to allow the ultra conservatives in our party to drag us into permanent minority status?

We Republicans should be more than aware of this growing problem, but many seem inclined to ignore it. We have lost the independents and we can’t win elections without them.

What Marty ignores (either by inclination or accident) is which independents have abandoned the party.  A quick rundown of 21st-Century political history makes it abundantly clear, the GOP lost the small-l libertarian vote.

This is important for two reasons.

First, when the libertarians are not part of the GOP coalition, said coalition loses, period.  In 1992, they were furious over Bush the Elder’s tax increases, and they left for Ross Perot.  In 1996, they didn’t really trust Bob Dole, and they either stayed with Perot or went to Clinton (who at least agreed with them on social issues).  By 2000, Bush the Younger’s tax cuts and Al Gore’s decision to run the big-government “populist” campaign brought just enough of them to the GOP. Since then, at least here in VA, we have seen what I described above, and the libertarians haven’t been part of the GOP coalition since.

Secondly, what Zak, Brandon, and Marty would like the party to do will not bring the libertarians back.  All three have, in one way or another, insisted that their tax increase votes (Zak obviously did not vote, but he worked for Senator Bell) were defensible - exactly the kind of talk that will keep the libertarians away.  Ironically, if they really were the petty, bitter ex-pols their more strident detractors claim they are and spent all their time settling personal scores, they’d do less damage.  It is their support for enlarging government, not their anger at the “base,” that is making it harder for the GOP to win elections.

Now, all is certainly not lost here.  With McCain, the GOP has a nominee who is a dogged and principled opponent of excess government spending.  Meanwhile, the Senate GOP has clearly learned the lesson (I should also note that it was Brandon Bell himself who has presented the most thorough demolition of Governor Kaine’s pre-K nonsense).

My point is this; we lost a particular part of the coalition over the last few years - the small-l libertarians - and we must return to low-tax, limited-government policies to bring them back.  Nothing else will work.

Cross-posted to the right-wing liberal