Almost everything that can be said about last Tuesday’s elections has already been published somewhere, so my reflections are unlikely to win a prize for originality. Still, for what they’re worth:
The most obvious cautionary note is that the world won’t remain static between today and November 2, 2010, much less November 6, 2012. While an optimist will recall that in 1993 and 2005 New Jersey and Virginia foreshadowed triumphs by the out-of-power party, one must not forget the counter-example of 2001, when Democratic wins in both states foreshadowed nothing at all.
One interesting way to view the election results is as a continuation of trends that were interrupted by the Republican collapses in 2006 and 2008. If we “gray out” those years, we see Virginia moving steadily into the GOP camp, New Jersey as a place where Republicans can be competitive under favorable circumstances, New York as increasingly hopeless, California as frozen by Congressional gerrymandering. Maybe all that is happening is that our political universe is regressing to its pre-2006 mean.
And why shouldn’t it? Undisturbed by recent perturbations is the fact that 40 percent of the adult population (and presumably a larger percentage of likely voters) are self-identified conservatives, outnumbering soi disant liberals by almost two-to-one. So long as that remains the case – and there’s no sign that the current liberal ascendancy is altering it – the right-of-center party has immense resilience, no matter how badly it goes off the tracks now and then. With hardly any special effort on the GOP’s part, suburban voters seem to be returning to it, while Barack Obama’s ability to spur voters to the polls has waned. It may be that all the theorizing about how to revive the Republican Party is beside the point; revival may take care of itself, and the real question will be how to prolong it.
Leaving that thought aside for the moment, let’s look at a couple of the prescriptions for revival. One is ostentatious moderation. Its advocates attribute the New Jersey and Virginia outcomes to Chris Christie’s and Bob McDonnell’s embrace of the center (so what if McDonnell was denounced during the campaign as a troglodyte who yearned to repeal the 20th Century?), the loss in NY-23 to Doug Hoffman’s refusal to let Dede Scozzafava do the same.
There is, however, no need to speculate about how well the “me too” strategy would work. Since the mid-1990’s, New York has furnished a natural experiment. George Pataki tried to govern as a conservative reformer; the state Republican hierarchy stultified his efforts; GOP fortunes have steadily declined, sinking both when the national party was successful and when it wasn’t. Failure in New York seems to me a poor recommendation for the “moderate” direction.
On the other end of the spectrum are the more enthusiastic tea partiers, who imagine that an upstart libertarian-populist movement can engender a viable third party. One may hope that NY-23 has sobered them up a bit. I rooted for Doug Hoffman, gave money to his campaign and am disappointed that he lost. His defeat shows, alas, how hard it is for a right-of-center minor party candidate to prevail in a three-way race. Even the long-established Conservative Party couldn’t provide a major party’s “ground game” and financial resources. As the Republican nominee, Hoffman would probably have won comfortably. As an out-of-party insurgent, he only came close. A “Tea Party” starting from an organizational zero would be an asterisk.
Finally, there are those who think that the only way to “save” the Republican Party is by trotting out shiny new gimmicks to entice the middle class back to our side. For their benefit, I note that Messrs. McDonnell and Christie didn’t beguile the electorate with innovative ideas. They didn’t affirmatively reject creative thinking; it just wasn’t essential to victory. The trouble with believing that one has to come up with something new and brilliant is that the former is a lot easier than the latter.
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