A Pure Minority Is Still A Minority
Note: I had published this thoughts previously and hoped that perhaps as time passed it would become outdated. I don’t mean to suggest that anyone in the GOP or conservative movement leadership was going to listen to lil ol me, but that perhaps they’d change their minds after failures.
With a decent chance for the GOP to lose two key races in NY and NJ next week I thought it was worth reposting, even though I wish it wasn’t.
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Ever since the election last fall we have seen an ongoing debate in the Republican party over which direction it should take in the future. Hard liners in the party have stated that they need to swing hard to the right to become as ideologically pure as possible. Web sites like Redstate.com and Polipundit.com regularly rail against so called RINO’s for being insufficiently pure.
In recent weeks however another voice has emerged as leading Republicans call for the party to be more of a big tent organization. Calls for the party to tone down social issues like gay marriage and abortion have been met with contempt by the web sites above.
Well I’ve got a message for those hard liners, being ideologically pure may be a nice idea but if you are in the minority it doesn’t do you very much good since you lose almost every vote. I certainly understand the desire to have people in office who you agree with on all of the issues, but the fact is that absent a situation where I become King of the World this isn’t going to happen very often.
If the GOP is going to succeed in the future they need to consider the impact of the hard line attitudes being pushed by the evangelical right.
Let us first consider the advantages of having a party that is ideologically pure, only allowing those who follow the party line 90-100% of the time to be members. On the bright side you are, as a hard liner, going to be happy with the way your party caucus votes most of the time. You can count on a 90-100% satisfaction rate.
But there is a problem when it comes to actually winning elections and getting policies implemented. I think it is fair to say that right now about 40% of voters will tend to support Republican/conservative views, about 40% will tend to support liberal/Democratic ones and about 20% will shift from one side to the other.
We can debate demographic trends but I’m not sure that it will change too much from this in the future. Even in our most one sided party periods there was a pretty solid middle set of voters that held the balance of power. I’m someome who likes to play with numbers so I ran up the following calculations.
So if you restrict your party to only the hard liners that are GOP/Conservative oriented voters, you’re gonna win about 40% of the votes, which means you are not going to control much more than 40% of the seats. This means you might be able to pull off wins about 10%-20% of the time at most.
So taking 90-100% satisfaction and factoring in 10-20% success on legislation and you end up with a ‘victory quotent’ of about 10%-20% of the time, and that isn’t very good.
On the other hand if you work to a broader coalition in your party, reaching out to those 20% of swing voters and maybe even some of those on the other side you will probably lower your satisfaction figures from 90-100% down to 70% or 80%. But you raise your success rate to 80-90% because you are winning elections.
This gives you a victory quotent which could approach 75% which is a whole lot better than the 15% or so that you had before. You might not get success on all of the social issues or the harder line domestic and foreign policy debates but you do win most of the time.
To put it another way, while I understand that subjects like abortion, gay rights, etc might be important to you and you might not like the inability to get your agenda passed. But the fact is you are not going to get that agenda passed no matter what.
Either you’re going to be in the minority and fail or you’re going to be in the majority and have to give ground.
When it comes to these kind of polarizing topics majority or minority status isn’t going to matter, whether you are on the right or on the left. But when it comes to the other 90% of the agenda, being in the majority is quite important.
In addition the future is only going to exacerbate these conditions.
Younger voters are far more libertarian in their attitudes towards social issues. This is unlikely to change as they get older. But when it comes to domestic and foreign policy issues there is much more room for movement, and in there the GOP has an opportunity.
I’m not saying you should give up your core beliefs. There is nothing wrong with the Republicans having a strong pro life element, but there is also nothing wrong with including voters who agree on most other issues, but happen to be pro choice. There is nothing wrong with having a strong evangelical contingent in the party but it should not be able to dominate.
During the 60?s and 70?s the Democratic party forgot the rule of broad inclusion and the result was a serious of major defeats. So far the
Republicans have suffered two Presidential losses in a row and if they do not change things they are likely to see many more defeats.
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Well this particular base being described has as one of its defining characteristics the fact they believe some pretty outrageous stuff with little to no evidence as long as it sounds right. And I think its pretty obvious at their shock of losing this last election, one of the things they believe is that this “pure” collection of conservatives is actually a majority in this nation. That this nation and its problems are black and white. There is an “us” and a “them”, and at most the “them” is roughly, oh say, 47% of voters. Takers vs. makers.
Graham to his credit, had before the election went down a very astute observation. They don’t have enough angry white guys to keep it going.
Agree with slam, it’s taken the GOP a l-o-n-g time to become this dysfunctional which means the cures won’t be forthcoming anytime soon. The hardline swing to righters have done much damage to their party. We’ll see if smarter republicans are capable of turning away from them or not. Baby steps… maybe.
Well of course there is, Patrick. Yours is a thought-provoking post, and the thought it provokes for me is the choice between being a party of principle or a party in charge. If you compromise important principles to welcome more people into your tent, you’re choosing the latter.
It’s much the same choice the artist faces: do you follow your inner, avant-garde muse, or do you “sell out” in hopes of commercial success by toning your work down for the masses?
Both are valid choices. The Libertarians opt for the former, raise excellent points, and remain largely unemployed. Republicans have traditionally opted for the latter, but they could alternatively become a party of principle too. They got off to a good start this year.
Dr J, are you saying every Republican is pro life and if not they are violating fundamental principles? Why is there room in the other parties for people who are both pro life and pro choice? Maybe because other parties don’t make that their platform. I guess they figure its a personal decision between a person and their family, their conscience and their God, and not the decision of a party or government.
Yeah, the Republican are the “Party of Principles” alright…
Now if those aren’t principles nothing is.
Add to their “Principles” the fact that the Republican run House of Representatives in the 112th Congress is the least productive Legislators in 65 years.
NYT – Congress Nearing End of Session Where Partisan Input Impeded Output
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USA Today – This Congress could be least productive since 1947
Put it all together and you get a pretty good picture of what “GOP Principles” have become… As a member of the opposition, I certainly hope the adults on the other side stop listening to the flakes and start taking their party back.
The problem (from my perspective) seems to be that the GOP has changed what its “important principles” are, or at the very least have prioritized them differently.
Lately, the principles which cannot be compromised upon are abortion, gay marriage, and tax increases. Yet if I remember correctly, these were not the issues when I was part of the party, and there certainly wasn’t an attitude of “if you don’t agree with us 100 percent, get out of our tent.”
No, obviously they’re not. But some are pro-life, they consider that an important principle, and they’ve been wielding more influence of late.
If you’re enjoining “the Republicans” as a group to adopt a new course, who specifically are you asking to do what? Patrick’s post seems to be addressed these true conservative believers, asking them to shelve their beliefs for the sake of winning an election.
All this really says is that as the times change, Republicans refuse to. They are conservatives, after all. They want to conserve..all that has been. Anything that is NOT as it has always been is a threat. As new elements of change arise, they are perceived as a threat and since they are new, they go to the forefront of importance.
Bill O’Reilly said it perfectly when he lamented the fact that we no longer have a Leave It To Beaver life in America. ( and I am sure there were Republicans that thought Leave It To Beaver had some questionable episodes back then.) You are dealing with fear, and people aren’t rational when they are afraid all the time.
No he wasn’t! YOU were doing that. I asked you why other parties can accept both views but didn’t get an answer to that.
I don’t think “why” is an answerable question, sheknows. There are a million reasons any one of us does anything, and there are many millions of Republicans. Any explanation is going to be partly true and partly unfair, but it might get an argument going.
What??? Wow, a huge backtracking cop out there. “There are a million reasons any one of us does anything”
You said if the Reps accepted both avenues of thinking on the issue of pro life,they would be compromising their principles.
The answer to why other parties have room for both ways of thinking is a very simple and easy one to answer…but you don’t like the answer you see.
Dr J, are there also a million definitions of the word “principle”?
Almost. I said some individual Republicans consider that issue paramount. If they choose to hold true to it rather than compromise for the sake of winning elections, that’s a rational choice.
The rest of the party could also choose to ignore them. But of course the rest of the party is also a diverse group of individuals, no one of whom decides where the group heads. Hence the question I asked (and didn’t get an answer to): if you’re calling for Republicans as a group to change course, who specifically are you wanting to do what?
Dr J — The author addresses you question in the first paragraph of the post: “I don’t mean to suggest that anyone in the GOP or conservative movement leadership was going to listen to lil ol me, but that perhaps they’d change their minds after failures.”
Your line of comments kind of harkens back to tidbit’s recent post on how it’s fruitless and even silly for people (particularly those outside the party) to make suggestions about what the GOP did wrong this time around. For me, it seems kind of an existential question: “Is there anything anyone can do to change anything at all?” I think the answer is yes, but that’s hardly relevant, I suppose. Writing one’s opinion is just that. Whether anyone listens or agrees or takes the advice or opinion given is up to them.
More basic still, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.
As this thread is about political dinosaurs… And the Bobby Jindal and Creationism has closed with a comment saying maybe both “the earth is 6000 years old” AND “science” are reasonable ideas…
Please pardon this slightly off topic video:
Even Pat Robertson Admits the Earth is more than 6,000 Years Old
If nothing else it’s an interesting about face for Mr. Robertson… Possibly deserving a front-page thread of it’s own?