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What's next for the GOP?

The Republican Rump

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 3, 2008

Maybe the polls are wrong, and John McCain is about to pull off the biggest election upset in American history. But right now the Democrats seem poised both to win the White House and to greatly expand their majorities in both houses of Congress.

Most of the post-election discussion will presumably be about what the Democrats should and will do with their mandate. But let me ask a different question that will also be important for the nation’s future: What will defeat do to the Republicans?

You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.

Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.

Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place.

For example, Larry Sabato, the election forecaster, predicts that seven Senate seats currently held by Republicans will go Democratic on Tuesday. According to the liberal-conservative rankings of the political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, five of the soon-to-be-gone senators are more moderate than the median Republican senator — so the rump, the G.O.P. caucus that remains, will have shifted further to the right. The same thing seems set to happen in the House.

Also, the Republican base already seems to be gearing up to regard defeat not as a verdict on conservative policies, but as the result of an evil conspiracy. A recent Democracy Corps poll found that Republicans, by a margin of more than two to one, believe that Mr. McCain is losing “because the mainstream media is biased” rather than “because Americans are tired of George Bush.”

And Mr. McCain has laid the groundwork for feverish claims that the election was stolen, declaring that the community activist group Acorn — which, as Factcheck.org points out, has never “been found guilty of, or even charged with” causing fraudulent votes to be cast — “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” Needless to say, the potential voters Acorn tries to register are disproportionately “other folks,” as Mr. Chambliss might put it.

Anyway, the Republican base, egged on by the McCain-Palin campaign, thinks that elections should reflect the views of “real Americans” — and most of the people reading this column probably don’t qualify.

Thus, in the face of polls suggesting that Mr. Obama will win Virginia, a top McCain aide declared that the “real Virginia” — the southern part of the state, excluding the Washington, D.C., suburbs — favors Mr. McCain. A majority of Americans now live in big metropolitan areas, but while visiting a small town in North Carolina, Ms. Palin described it as “what I call the real America,” one of the “pro-America” parts of the nation. The real America, it seems, is small-town, mainly southern and, above all, white.

I’m not saying that the G.O.P. is about to become irrelevant. Republicans will still be in a position to block some Democratic initiatives, especially if the Democrats fail to achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

And that blocking ability will ensure that the G.O.P. continues to receive plenty of corporate dollars: this year the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has poured money into the campaigns of Senate Republicans like Minnesota’s Norm Coleman, precisely in the hope of denying Democrats a majority large enough to pass pro-labor legislation.

But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 3, 2008, on page A31 of the New York edition

It looks like there will be some internal bloodletting, but I think ultimately the same basic tent (economic conservatives + social conservatives) will stick together and wait for the Dems to screw up.

-Arrian

I'll take 1-3 for $500, Alex...

Seriously, what part of our recent history is going to suggest anything else but the passing of the baton back and forth based on incompetence of the incumbent party?

I mean, sure, it may all blow up and we get something else someday... but the odds aren't looking good that it will be soon.

Originally posted by Whoha
hopefully they'll ditch free trade. http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...s/neeschud.gif

Maybe because Obama's Mister Free Trade also?

Originally posted by Whoha
We just put Mister Free trade up, and he got crushed like an insect. McCain believes that every syllable of Nafta is Sacrosanct, and it didn't win him your (moral)support. Too bad he pandered to social conservatives, huh?

Originally posted by Darius871

In 8 years everybody will forget that the preceding mess or the present circle-jerk ever happened. The left-right paradigm is metaphorically just a continuing sine wave winding around one line that barely moves at all.

Nothing changes. At least not until people have an attention span that lasts longer than broadcast segments. Nothing changes?!? http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...milies/eek.gif

People forget that the Dems seized power in '32 and turn the U.S. into a world economic superpower with the highest standard of living in history for its everyday citizens. Once Reaganomics was instituted in '80, the middle class has been stagnating, the infrastructure has been deteriorating, and we've become the world's biggest debtor nation.

What does that have to do with my reasons for not "supporting" McCain?

I heard something strange might have happened in '92 too.

http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...lies/smile.gif

If you simply didn't support him because of Palin then oh well, obviously having the most strident supporter of free trade in the Whitehouse wasn't your primary concern this election.

It wasn't my primary concern because Obama in the WH won't have any real effect on the US trade relations except in very specific instances.

http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...lies/smile.gif

Lose the free trade and you lose the pro Main Street business types.

Originally posted by snoopy369
Normalize that graph by population and it might well be a bit more interesting... http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...lies/smile.gif

Certainly the personality on the republican side matters, but I think it's a bit more complex than that. You're basically starting at a high watermark for the republicans; since 1968 we've shifted dramatically to the right, and this is presumably the end of that shift (starting in 1968, peaking in 1984, ending in 2008, for 40 years of republican or fake-democrat republican dominance). We'll see if it holds up of course (and how the GOP changes its strategies ... hopefully dumping the RR but of course that's probably the least likely strategy, sadly). Man, would I love to see more Republican politicians get a spine and severe themselves from the religious right . . . .

Combo of:

Originally posted by Elok
1. They spend many years in effective exile, barely holding on to a few seats in Congress and being unobtrusive, until the public has forgotten the W years and starts voting for them again.

2. Obama does something phenomenally stupid, or there are a bunch of gigundo scandals, or the Democratic party in some other way lives up to its reputation for screwing up a sure thing, and the political balance returns to 2004 levels or so.

5. The GOP gets another Reagan-type figure or otherwise succeeds in reinventing itself. Business as usual. We'll see if Jindal is all he's cracked up to be, which would accelerate 5 at the expense of 1 and not having to rely on 2.

Perhaps, but he did win 489 to 49 over Carter.

Oh, no way in 2012... unless Obama is caught sleeping with white women throughout his term http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...ilies/wink.gif.

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Oh, no way in 2012... unless Obama is caught sleeping with white women throughout his term http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...ilies/wink.gif. I was thinking about this today.

When Greenspan said that no one could have predicted the crisis look how many people rolled their eyes at that. Now Obama has a choice. He can react now to what is a possible very severe crisis or he can go about like the economy is going to turn around in a year or so. If he does that and it turns out to be a serious prolonged crisis than people are going to blaim him for not taking serious action quickly. No one is going to accept the "no one could have predicted" the crisis would be this bad.

In this case a left wing party has an opportunity.

Agreed. Plus, we finally get our jetpacks!~~~