Road to Nowhere

“The party united around god, guns and gays is finished.”
- Jeffrey Hart, Professor Emeritus Dartmouth College

The Republican Party is off to wander in the same wilderness from which the Democrats have only recently emerged. There are a number of reasons the Republicans find themselves lost in the desert. These reasons are larger than the “MBA President” and his mishandling of the nation’s finances. The Republicans are lost because they are following a map drawn in 1992 through landscape that has changed. So, what on the map looks like a straight highway to an exciting city turns out to be dirt road off a cliff.

After George H. W. Bush lost to President Clinton in 1992, the religious conservative were the rising power in the Republican Party. Pat Robertson showed them how to organize, Jesse Helms showed them how to fund themselves and Lee Atwater showed them the political power of fear. Pat Buchanan’s “Cultural War” speech at the1992 Republican National convention provided a rally cry with broad appeal. Evangelical conservatives rebranded themselves Social Conservatives, started purging dissenters from the GOP, and were off and running.

The share of evangelical voters who voted Republican was its highest in 1996. The fact that Dole lost was not lost on the Republicans. They ran Bush as a “compassionate conservative” to attract a wider audience, but Bush lost the popular vote. Carl Rove attributed this to the drop in the evangelicals from 1996 levels and made every effort to get them to turn out in 2004.

September 11, 2001 gave Bush a potent political issue. His 2004 win was based more on national security and fear of terrorism than on Social Conservatism. The Republican share of the evangelical vote solidified – but the proportion of the evangelicals in the electorate dropped to 20% in 2004 from 23% in 2000. The fact that Republican won a larger portion of a smaller pie was masked by moderate suburbanite’s voting Republican out of fear of Jihad.

The Social Conservatives misinterpreted the 2004 election as a mandate for their views. In 2005 they went all in and pushed the House and Senate to intervene in the Terri Shiavo case. This alienated those suburbanites that Bush had won and could have easily been converted to the Republican Party. It also began the alienation of the Goldwater Republicans.

By 2006 former White House Counsel John Dean, a protégée and close friend of Goldwater, was regularly speaking out against the Party. He became the voice of the disenchanted Goldwater conservatives who had provided a lot of the conservative movement’s intellectual force.

Initially they stayed on board into 2008 because they had some faith in John McCain. But they lost that faith when the Social Conservatives bullied McCain into picking hardliner Sarah Palin. The Goldwater Republicans joined moderate and independent voters in turning away from the GOP. Even worse for the Republicans, evangelicals increased their proportion of the electorate to their 2000 level of 23% - but Obama significantly increased the proportion of evangelicals who voted Democratic.

The Republican Party is now just a stump. The Goldwater wing left, the moderates are crushed and only the hard line Social Conservatives are left. As one writer put it, you get rid of the Social Conservatives and the Republican Party ceases to exist. This has been a long road from 1992. Now the Republicans have to decide whether to put on brakes and turn around, or blow through the road closed sign.