Editorials & Other Articles

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A Blueprint for the GOP

When the 2008 election was called for Obama, I remember thinking: maybe this will teach my party some very important lessons. You can’t nominate people, like Sarah Palin, who scare away swing voters. You can’t actively alienate every growing bloc of the American electorate—Blacks, Latinos, the youth—and you can’t depend solely on the single shrinking bloc of the electorate—Whites. And yet, four years later, I am again forced to reflect on a party that nominated the worst kind of people, like Richard Mourdock, and tried to win an election by appealing only to White people. The 2008 election, it seems, taught Republicans precious little.

At no time was this more obvious than last Tuesday. During the weeks before the election, conservatives I spoke to were confident—even hubristic—that Mitt Romney would win. But even before Tuesday, I thought that confidence was misplaced. The New York Times’s resident prognosticator, Nate Silver, had the odds of an Obama victory somewhere between 85 and 90 percent. Every non-partisan poll had the president winning the states he needed to secure a comfortable victory. Yet conservatives remained confident. The worst of the ideological conservatives criticized Nate Silver as a political plant of the “liberal media.” Even the best, from George Will to Michael Barone had constructed complex arguments for why the public polling was undercounting Romney’s strength. Whether you were an average Joe who listened to Rush on the way home from work, or an Ivy League reader of the National Review, if you were a conservative, you were likely to believe that Romney would win.

And then reality intervened. Nate Silver, that political hack from the Times, correctly predicted that Obama would win 332 electoral votes. Dick Morris, a conservative pundit on Fox News, was left apologizing for the Romney landslide that didn’t materialize. Conservatives lost, they lost big, and now it falls to the party’s leaders to explain why.

Many movement conservatives are already trying to deny the undeniable. Dave Wiegel, in an awful blog post on National Review, blamed the election results on an electorate that has become dependent on government and the Democratic politicians who make such dependency possible. The problem with this logic is that the people who depend most on government—retirees—are the Republican Party’s base—to the degree that the party even has a base. Wiegel similarly blamed public sector union beneficiaries, despite the fact that federal government workers in the DC suburbs broke decisively for Romney. Others blamed the party’s frontrunner and the “establishment wing” of the party that nominated him—essentially arguing that Romney was insufficiently ideological. The problem is that Romney did better than virtually every Republican Senate candidate in every competitive state. One glaring exception was Wisconsin senate candidate Tommy Thompson—an “establishment” Republican if there ever was one—who lost by a slightly narrower margin than Mitt Romney. Others pretend that the Democratic win wasn’t that impressive. After all, we are in the same place we were before the 2008 election: a split Congress with a Democratic president. But this ignores the inherent weakness of an incumbent party in a tough economic climate, and the fact that Democrats were able to overcome all of these problems to gain seats in both houses of Congress and re-elect the president. In short, the Republicans lost big, and they can’t blame Mitt Romney or the American electorate for their problems.

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