If Romney Wins, Wither the Democrats?

[Alien Space Bats]

Very much so, I see a scenario where Republicans continue to ease on their Immigration platform (which has been a non-issue this campaign season) combined with an emphasis on new young Hispanic candidates will finally and conclusively put the Hispanic community in the Untied States into the GOP column. That is a powerful vote to have, especially considering the Hispanic population will make up a majority of the country by the time the century is out.

Why Hispanics? Well of course generalizations do not apply for everyone, but in theory a lot of Hispanics are religious and socially conservative, and would strengthen that aspect of the party (personally I would prefer if the Republican Party became less socially conservative and instead became intellectual conservative, but I digress) and the party as a whole.

Additionally, I do not think that the situation is as desperate as you may claim it to be. I do not see why the GOP would have to go to that length to win elections. They win them in the current system regularly.

Easing up on immigration will rip their base in half.

[Urcea]

Very much so, I see a scenario where Republicans continue to ease on their Immigration platform (which has been a non-issue this campaign season) combined with an emphasis on new young Hispanic candidates will finally and conclusively put the Hispanic community in the Untied States into the GOP column. That is a powerful vote to have, especially considering the Hispanic population will make up a majority of the country by the time the century is out.

Why Hispanics? Well of course generalizations do not apply for everyone, but in theory a lot of Hispanics are religious and socially conservative, and would strengthen that aspect of the party (personally I would prefer if the Republican Party became less socially conservative and instead became intellectual conservative, but I digress) and the party as a whole.

Additionally, I do not think that the situation is as desperate as you may claim it to be. I do not see why the GOP would have to go to that length to win elections. They win them in the current system regularly.

Easing up on immigration will rip their base in half.

As an American Conservative (not a Republican, mind you) I am fairly confident that immigration is not a make or break issue for the Conservative base. Refer to George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.

[Inyourfaceistan]

Very much so, I see a scenario where Republicans continue to ease on their Immigration platform (which has been a non-issue this campaign season) combined with an emphasis on new young Hispanic candidates will finally and conclusively put the Hispanic community in the Untied States into the GOP column. That is a powerful vote to have, especially considering the Hispanic population will make up a majority of the country by the time the century is out.

Why Hispanics? Well of course generalizations do not apply for everyone, but in theory a lot of Hispanics are religious and socially conservative, and would strengthen that aspect of the party (personally I would prefer if the Republican Party became less socially conservative and instead became intellectual conservative, but I digress) and the party as a whole.

Additionally, I do not think that the situation is as desperate as you may claim it to be. I do not see why the GOP would have to go to that length to win elections. They win them in the current system regularly.

Easing up on immigration will rip their base in half

Oh really? Since when?

[Alien Space Bats]

Refer to George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.

If the Republican leadership were still in charge of the Party, that would be true. The Bush wing of the Party understood the importance of courting the Latino vote and of dealing with immigration in a responsible way.

But the Republican leadership isn't in charge of the Party; the grass roots are. And the grass roots are currently dominated by nativists who see Latinos as a threat to their way of life. Romney went to the right of everyone on immigration not out of conviction, but out of sheer demagoguery; the fact that it worked so well for him withing the GOP primaries is proof of the way in which this issue has spiraled beyond the control of those Party elites who would rather take a broader view of things.

Indeed, this is the heart of the problem with today's GOP: Whereas Bush and Reagan were in control of the Party, Mitt Romney is not. He is riding a wildly bucking bull, just hoping to hang on long enough to win. Once he's in office (assuming he triumphs in five weeks) he won't be in charge of his own agenda; like John Boehner, he'll have his agenda jammed down his throat by the GOP's Tea Party faction, which hates Latinos and would love nothing more than to deport the whole lot of them, legal, illegal, or even citizen.

An artful demagogue - a Mussolini or somebody similar - could mold such a mob to his will; but a man like Mitt Romney can only be molded by such a mob - he can never control it.

Until the GOP leadership gets their rank-and-file back under control, there can be no hope of attracting Latino voters; it is simply not possible.

[Xeng He]

Holy...you're actually kind of right...

[Inyourfaceistan]

Refer to George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.

If the Republican leadership were still in charge of the Party, that would be true. The Bush wing of the Party understood the importance of courting the Latino vote and of dealing with immigration in a responsible way.

But the Republican leadership isn't in charge of the Party; the grass roots are. And the grass roots are currently dominated by nativists who see Latinos as a threat to their way of life. Romney went to the right of everyone on immigration not out of conviction, but out of sheer demagoguery; the fact that it worked so well for him withing the GOP primaries is proof of the way in which this issue has spiraled beyond the control of those Party elites who would rather take a broader view of things.

Indeed, this is the heart of the problem with today's GOP: Whereas Bush and Reagan were in control of the Party, Mitt Romney is not. He is riding a wildly bucking bull, just hoping to hang on long enough to win. Once he's in office (assuming he triumphs in five weeks) he won't be in charge of his own agenda; like John Boehner, he'll have his agenda jammed down his throat by the GOP's Tea Party faction, which hates Latinos and would love nothing more than to deport the whole lot of them, legal, illegal, or even citizen.

An artful demagogue - a Mussolini or somebody similar - could mold such a mob to his will; but a man like Mitt Romney can only be molded by such a mob - he can never control it.

Until the GOP leadership gets their rank-and-file back under control, there can be no hope of attracting Latino voters; it is simply not possible.

Have you ever actually met a far right tea-party republican? Or are you just eating what your "unbiased" media tells you?

[Alien Space Bats]

Have you ever actually met a far right tea-party republican? Or are you just eating what your "unbiased" media tells you?

People who don't want to be thought crazy shouldn't act crazy.

<pause>

And, to be honest, I rely on what the far-right actually says in judging them, much more than I rely on what others say about them.

[Urcea]

Have you ever actually met a far right tea-party republican? Or are you just eating what your "unbiased" media tells you?

People who don't want to be thought crazy shouldn't act crazy.

<pause>

And, to be honest, I rely on what the far-right actually says in judging them, much more than I rely on what others say about them.

I have to go with Inyourfaceistan here. The racist undertones you accuse the Republican Party of really aren't there. It isn't the white boys club you make it out to be.

[Khadgar]

People who don't want to be thought crazy shouldn't act crazy.

<pause>

And, to be honest, I rely on what the far-right actually says in judging them, much more than I rely on what others say about them.

I have to go with Inyourfaceistan here. The racist undertones you accuse the Republican Party of really aren't there. It isn't the white boys club you make it out to be.

They ought cut the racial tone out of their messages then, because minorities are scared to death of Republicans. Obama is beating Romney with Latinos by 61% in Nevada. Romney's take of blacks is projected at somewhere between 0-2% depending on where you check. Women in Iowa prefer Obama by 13 points. IOWA, white bread capital of the US.

[Alien Space Bats]

It must be said that the US electoral system is, effectively, a two-party game. The Republicans aren't going to die out any time soon (they still have a lot of support in the south-eastern regions, particularly), but neoconservativism may well naturally fade back into the fringe of politics, if it proves 'unelectable'.

It is, but here's the thing - and it's the foundation of my OP: For political Parties to survive, they must be able to adapt. I believe that the GOP leadership has lost control of its grass roots, and - worse - that core functions essential to the Party (most notably fundraising and policy selection) are no longer even organic to the Party.

My thesis is that this loss of control by the leadership has destroyed the ability of the GOP to adapt: It is locked in a hard right turn, and cannot escape from that hard right turn. It may well be able to win this election, but sooner or later it will lose and then get buried because of its fundamental lack of ideological flexibility. The Republican Party may well be capable of completely collapsing into a right-wing ideological singularity, but the American people are not willing to follow it down that rabbit-hole forever.

When this happens, the Party will die. To be sure, the American political system - by its very nature - encourages the existence of two top-tier political Parties (although it has functioned with only one before [cf. 1828-1856]); to that extent, a second Party will inevitably arise - although given the natural center-seeking behavior of the Democratic Party, that second Party could as easily emerge on the right as on the left once Democrats have moved to colonize the political vacuum left behind by the GOP's self-destruction.

If you doubt this possibility, then what you are saying is either that you believe the American electorate is much farther to the right than either of its two major Parties, and that the current movement to the right by the GOP is just a reconciliation of one Party's platform with the broad opinion of the American people (to be followed by an inevitable Democratic move in the same direction, brought about by that Party's well-demonstrated impulse towards political survival); or you believe that saner heads will step in at some point and recapture the GOP, steering it back towards the center.

If the former scenario is right, then the GOP will not destroy itself by running to the extreme right; it will instantiate a new majority by doing so; in that case, the OP is completely off the mark. But if it's not, and you're expecting GOP moderates to retake control of the Party and save it, I have to ask the obvious question: Who are these moderates and when will they rise up to save their Party?

Because, frankly speaking, I don't see them; and even if I did, I don't think they have the power to challenge the right for control of the GOP.

In contrast to the foregoing, the Democratic Party faced the same crisis the GOP faces now in the late 1960's: It moved too far to the left, and got pounded by the Republicans in the 1972 Presidential Election. For those who don't remember that election, here's what the State map looked like on November 8th of that year:



Nixon beat McGovern by a whopping 520-17 count in the Electoral College (Libertarian Party candidate John Hospers got 1 EV from a "faithless" elector in Virginia); the popular vote was 60.7% for Nixon and 37.5% for McGovern, a spread of over 23 points. After that election, the leadership of the Democratic Party began to take steps to make certain that the rank-and-file couldn't run off and nominate somebody the Party bosses (i.e., its principal officeholders) weren't comfortable supporting. Ever since that point, the leadership has pretty much taken the Party wherever it pleases and the rank-and-file have pretty much followed - sometimes grumbling about how little love they get, but following all the same.

Of course, there are limits to this arrangement: The 2000 Presidential Election demonstrated what could happen if significant numbers of rank-and-file Democrats thought that their leadership wasn't listening to them. In another recent post, I've used exit polls to show that a significant percentage of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader's support consisted of disaffected Democrats, and that these Democrats - had they remained loyal - would have made all the difference in the world in that election. This is the danger Democrats face, and it's the reason why I argue that they will necessarily grow more radical should Barack Obama be defeated rather than quietly surrender to the Republicans and their agenda, as the Beltway press all predict they will: If Democrats don't throw their grass roots a bone every now and then, the rank-and-file will either revolt or defect. We saw a little of this dynamic in 2002-2004, when the Democratic Party leadership almost universally endorsed President Bush's decision to invade Iraq over the objections of the rank-and-file, which very clearly opposed the war: By 2004, the Party leadership was forced into switching positions and opposing the war, simply because pressure from their grass roots had become too great for them to ignore.

---

As somewhat of a sidetrack, I compared the ethnic vote breakdown from 1972 with the ethnic vote breakdown for 2008, just for fun:

Year	Party	White	Black	Hispanic	Asian
1972	Democrat	31%	82%	63%	-
	Republican	67%	18%	35%	-
2000	Democrat	43%	95%	67%	62%
	Republican	55%	4%	31%	35%

The difference between McGovern's support and Obama's - in ethnic terms - is that Obama ran 24 points better among whites, 13-14 points better among blacks, and 3-4 points better among Hispanics (Asian numbers aren't available, but using the oldest numbers we have for that demographic - those from 1992, it would appear that Obama ran 25-26 points better among Asians as well). Even with recent changes in the electorate, McGovern would have still lost to Nixon with cross-tabs like that, only by a 16 point spread instead of his actual 23 point spread (and losing the Electoral College 488-50 [taking only New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and D.C.]). What this points out is how important it is for Democrats to maintain a decent foothold among white voters (and especially white female voters): McGovern lost the white male vote by 35 points (31-66) and the white female vote by 37 points (31-68), whereas Obama only lost these groups by 16 points (41-57) and 7 points (46-53), respectively. Indeed, it was specifically white Protestant voters who turned on McGovern by a whopping 54 points (22-76); Obama only lost white Protestants by 31 points (34-65). McGovern only lost the white Catholic vote by 15 points (42-57); by comparison, Obama only lost white Catholics by 5 points (47-52).

The lesson here is that the Democrats couldn't win running too far to the left, and so they changed. While it's a mantra among Republicans that every Democratic Presidential candidate is further to the left than the last, and that all Democrats are some odd species of crypto-Communist, the reality - as virtually everyone on the left understands - is that American leftism reached a high-water mark in the early 70's, and then receded; and it has never quite been back to where it was since then (indeed, if anything, it continues to recede).



Senator George S. McGovern scored a -.579 on his First Dimension of DW-Nominate; in contrast (and to best place him in the foregoing diagram), Jimmy Carter's score on this same dimension would be -.539, while Obama's is -.399.

So both the cause and effect of the Democratic Party's shift back to the center since 1972 are obvious: It was a pragmatic maneuver, aimed at broadening the Party's appeal at the polls; it's result over time has been an increasingly more centrist Party, but also one that is considerably better positioned to win - and nothing warms Democratic hearts more than winning... including even ideology.

[New England and The Maritimes]

I do think that people are scared enough of Republicans to not desert the DNC at the moment, though. There's a lot more crazy in that spectrum now than there was in 2000, and it's a lot more visible, and it's seeping into their presidential candidates.

[The Land Fomerly Known as Ligerplace]

I do think that people are scared enough of Republicans to not desert the DNC at the moment, though. There's a lot more crazy in that spectrum now than there was in 2000, and it's a lot more visible, and it's seeping into their presidential candidates.

Black people are definitely staying democratic.

Latinos seem to be approaching the same entrenchment as blacks.

Women may sway towards us depending on what legislation the republicans get through.

[Greed and Death]

snip

72' is not a good election to compare as Nixon had just gotten the US out of Vietnam and grabbed a portion of the left.

84', is most certainly.

[Alien Space Bats]

72' is not a good election to compare as Nixon had just gotten the US out of Vietnam and grabbed a portion of the left.

I'm guessing you're not old enough to remember that campaign.

The agreement ending the War in Vietnam was not signed and announced until after the election; indeed, Nixon's failure to end the war was one of the issues in the campaign (a Democratic joke in '72 was that "Nixon has a secret plan to end the war - and it's still secret"). Operation Linebacker II - the famous "Christmas Bombing" of Hanoi - didn't happen until after the election, in December, 1972 (its predecessor, Operation Linebacker, was still going in October, 1972).

The final agreement to end the war wasn't hammered out until early January, 1973. The Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27th, 1973.

And, for the record, the American left hated Richard Nixon.

[Forsher]

72' is not a good election to compare as Nixon had just gotten the US out of Vietnam and grabbed a portion of the left.

I'm guessing you're not old enough to remember that campaign.

The agreement ending the War in Vietnam was not signed and announced until after the election; indeed, Nixon's failure to end the war was one of the issues in the campaign (a Democratic joke in '72 was that "Nixon has a secret plan to end the war - and it's still secret"). Operation Linebacker II - the famous "Christmas Bombing" of Hanoi - didn't happen until after the election, in December, 1972 (its predecessor, Operation Linebacker, was still going in October, 1972).

The final agreement to end the war wasn't hammered out until early January, 1973. The Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27th, 1973.

And, for the record, the American left hated Richard Nixon.

At the time, or following Watergate?

[Greed and Death]

I think the biggest danger for the democrats if Romney wins is who he will appoint to the court.

Ginsberg is pretty much done next Presidential term. Romney would be able to shift the balance of the court to the right.
He would also likely get to replace Scalia and Kennedy.

This would not make Roberts the swing vote this would make Roberts a dissenting liberal vote, and this court would stay intact for at least 12 years until Thomas retires, and even if Thomas was replaced by a liberal justice it would just make Roberts the swing vote.

[AiliailiA]

I think the biggest danger for the democrats if Romney wins is who he will appoint to the court.

Ginsberg is pretty much done next Presidential term. Romney would be able to shift the balance of the court to the right.
He would also likely get to replace Scalia ...

Replacing Scalia would be a good thing, whether viewed from left or right. Even if you like the side he comes down on, the way he gets to his conclusions is plain out obfuscationist. He seems to go out of his way to confuse the rulings of the Court.

Is he a smart-ass, a lunatic, or just trying to make more work for future SC Justices?

[Alien Space Bats]

And, for the record, the American left hated Richard Nixon.

At the time, or following Watergate?

Pretty much throughout his entire Presidency. Remember that Kent State, the Wounded Knee occupation, and the Pine Ridge shootout (just to name three things off the top of my head) all happened on his watch.

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming.
Four dead in Ohio.

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

<goes and gets his tie-dye T-shirt out of the bottom drawer>

[Alien Space Bats]

Well, Mitt Romney didn't win; Barack Obama did. On that basis, unless someone can think of a good reason why we should continue this thread, I'm going to ask that the mods lock it up.

I think I'll give it until Monday or so. How's that sound?

[Yumyumsuppertime]

Well, Mitt Romney didn't win; Barack Obama did. On that basis, unless someone can think of a good reason why we should continue this thread, I'm going to ask that the mods lock it up.

I think I'll give it until Monday or so. How's that sound?

Yeah, there's a thread already in place for Alternate History, and an entire forum out there dedicated it it as well.