In these days of financial crisis when coalition building and capturing independent voters seems to be the key to electoral victories more than ever, the Republican party now has a problem: it is steadily shrinking and growing more conservative.
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza points out that the GOP now suffers a serious shrinkage problem:
The new Washington Post/ABC news poll has all sorts of intriguing numbers in it but when you are looking for clues as to where the two parties stand politically there is only one number to remember: 21.
That’s the percent of people in the Post/ABC survey who identified themselves as Republicans, down from 25 percent in a late March poll and at the lowest ebb in this poll since the fall of 1983(!).
In that same poll, 35 percent self-identified as Democrats and 38 percent called them Independents.
If you had to put your finger on the problem the simplest way to put it would be that political parties are are their winning-best when they aggragate interests. The GOP since the election has seemed to be trying to aggravateinterests.
Although independent voters are dissed by some of the GOP faithful as people who are either wishy washy, mushy or REALLY must closet Democrats, the fact is: they are voters who can be wooed. Some analysts believe the ranks of independent voters are growing…with formerly proud Republicans. Meanwhile, the party’s once vibrant moderate wing has virtually vanished as the party has moved further to the right and become seemingly less inclusive. Just as the Democratic left has often seemed to want to purge moderates (a word still considered dirty in some Democratic circles), the GOP has had the attitude that its good riddance to bad moderate rubbish for those who don’t pass or won’t try to live up to imposed conservative litmus tests.
As Cillizza notes, the truly bad news for the GOP isn’t just that the party is shrinking — but that it’s significantly shrinking since the last election:
These numbers come on the heels of Steve Schmidt, former campaign manager for Arizona Sen. John McCain’s presidential bid, declaring the Republican party a “shrinking entity” last week — citing the decline of GOP numbers in the west, northeast and mountain west as evidence.
And they show a somewhat significant decline from even last November’s election when exit polls showed 32 percent of voters identifying as Republican as compared to 39 percent for Democrats and 29 percent for independents and others. (A caveat: voters tend to see things through a more partisan lens after having just voted in a presidential election than they do in an April poll.)
The Post poll numbers show the challenge for Republicans in stark terms.
The number of people who see themselves as GOPers is on the decline even as those who remain within the party grow more and more conservative.
This isn’t the first time analyists have noted that the GOP’s base is shrinking. Paul Waldman noticed it in 2006. TMV co-blogger Dennis Sanders noted it on his own blog in 2007. Read this piece in May 2008 by Alan Abramowitz. This year liberal cartoonist Tom Tomorrow offered this take on the trend.
What does all this mean? It means it’s likely there will be more tea parties that will rally the existing base but potentially turn off some voters who may only see an over the line sign or two (pictures of Obama as Hitler are as persuasive to winning Democratic and independent voters as pictures of Bush as Hitler were in winning Republican and independent voters). The rallying point — and clamor center — for the Republican party will likely continue to be cable and talk radio shows and weblogs….shows that seek to saw off and solidify a demographic and deliver it to advertisers.
The GOP will first have to shore up its base but in doing so the likelihood is that it could continue to turn off other voters who do not agree with the rhetoric or no-cooperation stance of many of the party’s most conservative partisans. What can change it? Some baby steps towards cooperation with the Democrats that can ease its image and pay some political dividends, or future large defeats that lead to a rethinking. Right now the party’s most prominent faces are Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich — hardly the kind of symbols that will win over wavering voters or those displeased with the GOP in the past.
Eric Cantor and other newer GOP figures will have their work cut out from them: if it’s the same ‘ol same ‘ol, then the results at the polls could be the same ‘ol same ‘ol. Which will suit Barack Obama and the Democrats just fine.
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.