April 20 ,2012
The Coming Republican Meltdown
Rick Santorum has suspended his campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination, putting to rest the primary process and ensuring that Mitt Romney will be the challenger to Obama in November. While the end of the primary campaign will save Romney a lot of money and allow him to turn his attention to Obama, it has also done significant damage to him as a candidate.
During this primary process, Romney has had to prove to the Republicans that he is a true, or in his own words, a “severe” conservative. To do that he has embraced harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric, endorsed the Paul Ryan budget plan that cuts taxes for the wealthy while chopping away at social services, and sided with Republican proposals to strip workers of bargaining rights. Meanwhile, he was forced into revealing his tax returns for the last two years, which showed a many earning tens of millions of dollars in investments and paying less than 15% of that in taxes. He is the embodiment of the 1% of the society that has done very well over the last 30 years, but he needs 51% to vote for him. In addition, the Republican attacks on women’s healthcare, including Romney’s own pledge to get rid of Planned Parenthood, has helped to create a large gender gap in the electorate, with Romney now losing to Obama by huge margins, especially among single women.
In fact, for Romney to win this race he will have to thread the needle. He has got to win all the states John McCain won in 2008, and also pick up Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Indiana, which were all won by Obama in 2008, and then also win at least one more state, with either New Hampshire, Iowa, or Colorado perhaps his best opportunities to get over the top.
For Obama there are multiple paths to victory as he is starting with a much larger base of states that he is going to win easily. If he can hold even one of the larger swing states like Florida or Ohio the election is over.
The problem for the Republicans, and one they are quite aware of, is that the tide of American history is moving away from them. The election of a black man with the middle name Hussein in 2008 is just part of that process. The Republican party has narrowed its appeal to whites only, mostly older voters, and predominantly religious Christians and males. Minorities, women, secular, and younger voters are all becoming very Democratic in their voting preferences. Not only African-American voters align with the Democratic Party but the anti-illegal immigration rhetoric of the Republicans has soured the Latino voters against them, with Romney polling support down below 20%. Such numbers will kill the Republicans in Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado. Younger voters are also turned off by the culture war aspects of the Republican Party, and its rather religious and Southern flavor.
These underlying demographic forces are like the tide, and they are getting stronger with every election. If Obama had faced McCain with the demographic profile of the US in 1988, he would have narrowly lost the election. Now, it is the Republicans that are facing extinction as a national party for decades, just as the Democrats were wiped out from 1968 to 1988. Only a political or economic catastrophe can save the Republicans, just as Watergate allowed a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, to win in 1976. We are in the midst of bad economic times, though they are getting slowly better.
Romney and the Republicans are hoping that they can ride the economic travails of the country to victory in November by convincing voters that the long slow recovery process is somehow Obama’s fault, though it is hard to blame Obama for the recession as it clearly was already underway when he took office. If they do not beat Obama this time though, the Democrats will win easily in 2016 as the economy will be well-recovered by then, and the Democrats will have two very good candidates in Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden to put up. The demographic tide will make it almost impossible for a Republican to win, and there will likely be another decade or more of Democratic dominance at the national level. Eventually the Republicans will adapt and retool to the new America, just as Democrats finally did after 1988 under Clinton, but it will be a difficult and painful process that will require the Republican base to give up some of its most cherished policy goals and priorities.
A win in November will allow the Republicans to avoid this challenge, so it is extremely important to them that they win. It is not the country that cannot survive another four years of Obama, which is what the Republicans are claiming; it is the Republican Party itself, at least in its current form, that will be threatened with extinction.
