As Republicans in Congress on several fronts give clear signs that they will ignore the party’s own election “autopsy,” and aggressively take positions that alienate women voters, rising demographic groups such as Hispanics, and continue to reject compromise in favor of using power to force acceptance of their priorities, a new poll says Americans blame Republicans for gridlock more that Democrats or President Barack Obama:
Gridlock in Washington is pretty common, but voters are more likely to say unyielding Republicans are at fault.
A new Quinnipiac University poll shows that 64% of voters say Republicans and Democrats are equally to blame for the gridlock.
But when asked if the standstill occurs because of the GOP blocking President Obama or whether Obama lacks the skills to bring Congress together, 51% point fingers at Republicans. By comparison, 35% of voters say Obama “lacks the personal skills to convince leaders of Congress to work together.”
The poll’s findings come as the GOP-led House considers changes to the nation’s immigration system — and House Speaker John Boehner and his Republican allies are adamant they won’t consider the bipartisan bill passed by the Senate.
Don’t look for any shift anytime soon. In fact, expect the GOP to continue on its present course. Norm Orstein, in fact, suggests there are now actually FIVE Republican Parties — and that present no compromise, no attempt to expand the tent attitudes will prevail for the foreseeable future. Here’s part of his must-read-in-full piece:
Across the nation, not just in Washington, there are ever more signs of a Republican Party veering to the right edge of the right wing of the political spectrum. With prospects for a comprehensive immigration bill fading, what will it take to bring the GOP back at least to the right edge of the center of the spectrum, to compete to win national elections on its own merits and not just when the Democrats fail or the economy falters?
American history has many examples of a party going off the rails and taking a long time to recover. It was true of the Democrats in the 1890s and again in the 1960s and early ’70s. One rough rule of thumb is that a party has to lose three presidential elections in a row to make it clear that the problem is not just individual presidential candidates and their failures but something deeper, enough to motivate a party to move to expand beyond its ideological base and capture the center. But if that happens in 2016 — if Democrats make it three wins in a row — I am not sure it will be enough for the GOP.
That is because I see at least five Republican parties out there, with a lot of overlap, but with enough distinct differences that the task is harder than usual. There is a House party, a Senate party, and a presidential party, of course. But there is also a Southern party and a non-Southern one. The two driving forces dominating today’s GOP are the House party and the Southern one — and they will not be moved or shaped by another presidential loss. If anything, they might double down on their worldviews and strategies.
AND:
In part through redistricting, in part because of the “big sort,” with Americans increasingly congregating in areas where they are surrounded by like-minded individuals, more and more House Republicans represent homogenous districts that tilt Republican. In the modern media age, their constituents get information from the same talk-radio and cable-television sources, and these modern media reinforcements tilt sharply right. For many of the lawmakers, they themselves believe what their constituents believe. For others, the consequences of voting in a different way are clear.
As I’ve often noted, we’re in an age when people will only turn on a cable channel or visit a website if they are confident they will already agree with what the infosource believes politically IN ADVANCE. It’s an exercise in belief re-affirmation and if an echo chamber doesn’t have a perfect echo, viewers and readers will stay away. Talk radio has become the 21st century’s town hall and ideological line quality control centrer for the GOP. Talk show hosts both influence their listeners and may respond to their listeners to fine tune their own positions. And they’re potent tools to keep elected Republicans in line. MORE:
So here’s the Republican dilemma: The House and Southern Republican parties are more concerned with ideological purity and tribal politics than they are with building a durable, competitive national party base to win presidential and Senate majorities. In most cases, they are in no danger of losing their House seats or their hegemony in their states. They will be resistant to changes in social policy that reflect broad national opinion; resistant to any policies or rhetoric, including but not limited to immigration, that would appeal to Hispanics, African-Americans, or Asian-Americans; and resistant to policies like Medicaid expansion or Head Start that would ameliorate the plight of the poor. They also will be more inclined to use voter-suppression methods to reduce the share of votes cast by those population groups than to find ways to appeal to them. I see little or nothing, including a potential loss in 2016, that will change this set of dynamics anytime soon.
The biggest problem in the long term for the Republican Party is this: democracy requires people feeling they are allowed to vote and not disenfranchised. If Republicans win a national election in which a chunk of America feels its votes were sleazily stolen from them by partisans either abusing powers entrusted to them or by partisans using every little comma in the law to keep them and not members of the partisans’ own party from voting, there will be a major problem with the perceived legitimacy of that elected government — one that will put the attempts to question Barack Obama’s legitimacy in question by claiming Obama was born in Kenya to shame.
It will be major — and it will be problematic.
Resisting change or policies is one thing; proactively trying to keep blocks of voters from voting so the other side can’t win is another.
This could be a big issue in 21st century America — and polls such as the one above suggest Republicans could win on power politics but they are not winning on perceptions of their party. There are already consequences. Since the election there has not been Republican re-branding. It has been Republican branding reinforcement and confirmation.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.