The Future of the Parties

Brad from The Crossed Pond has responded to one of my posts at The Art of the Possible on Brad's idea of a single term promise from John McCain, among other suggestions for the struggling Republican Presidential candidate. Brad, tag, you're it now.

Now as Brad says, you have to be "preternaturally preoccupied with evangelical issues (either by being an evangelical, or by being particularly concerned with them) to view them as being central to the general election either by presence or by absence." As a libertarian Democrat, and therefore someone who has affiliated with the Democratic Party largely out of my opposition to the Religious Right and its affiliation with the Republican Party, I think I fit the bill of being "preternaturally preoccupied."

My argument is taht while evangelicals failed to mount a significant challenge to John McCain, they did manage to mount a significant challenge (against the will of the leaders of the movement) to Mitt Romney as the presumptive frontrunner and propelled Mike Huckabee into the top tier of the nomination fight. The nomination fight has already been dominated by stories of unhappy evangelicals and conservatives. Now, in the general election, there seems to be a weekly schedule of new stories about how evangelicals are not excited about John McCain.

Perception, in politics, is more important than fact. So I disagree with Brad's own perception that:

Even as far as the media is concerned “evangelical mobilization” is “out” as an election year theme. Though “Obama wins evangelical support” will likely be a back-page story that pops up here and there.

I think that the tug of war between Obama and McCain over evangelicals has already played a major role in media coverage of the race. But could John McCain win if only he could rally the Republican base and connect with evangelicals?

No.

The Republican brand itself is in such disarray, and the county is demographically more Democratic than it was four years ago, that the same base strategy of Karl Rove will not operate successfully for John McCain. Ultimately, George W. Bush went down a pathway in his first term that undermined his own reelection (he underperformed based on historical expectations based on the economy). Now, four years later, are we surprised that we are heading towards a Democratic landslide?

There are plenty of ways that the Republican Party could turn itself around, although a number also depend on the Democrats imploding once in power. I'm not entirely sure about which direction the GOP will take, but I don't think we can rule out that the failure to energize evangelicals and social conservatives as a possible scapegoat.

Heh, actually you preempted a conversation I'm having with Kip Esquire in the comments to an unrelated post on this subject.

First of all, I'm not buying the argument that evangelicals mounted a direct challenge to Romney. I think Romney split the evangelical vote with Huckabee (at least until it started heading South; roughly around Florida), and thus they failed to ossify enough to mount a challenge against McCain. They were, as I said, limp-wristed and indecisive, and by the time they started consolidating (around Huckabee), it was too late. But bear in mind that Iowa was purportedly a 60% evangelical vote, and Romney was bested, but still pulled in a helluva lot of them. Romney's big win, in Michigan, came in a state where evangelicals preferred him, as they did in New Hampshire and a few other critical states.

But my point is that yes evangelicals matter, but they don't rule the roost. Bush's strategy of election was an exception, not the rule. He didn't have to get elected by going balls-to-the-walls born again, he chose to get elected that way.

As a rule, evangelicals bolster candidates like Pat Robertson (who posted a strong challenge to Bush Sr. in 88) and Mike Huckabee, candidates who manage to get a lot of airtime and mount decent out-of-right-field challenges, but aren't usually significant threats to win. Of course you have to run to the right in a Republican primary---a pro-choice pro-gay anti-drug war kind of Republican is not going to win, barring some pretty incredible confluence of circumstances. It is the party of social conservatism. But a better way to think of that is not as the loudest voices controlling the debate, but as a spectrum, with evangelicals being at the extreme end of it, with the bulk of the population, in the normal distribution sense, being somewhere between, say, Mike Huckabee and Rudy Giuliani. Somewhere like, say, Mitt Romney.

My own sense, actually, is one of the big stories of the primaries is the crackup of the evangelical base. They just never got on board (though they did make a Huckabee push late), and never amounted to much as a contingent of the voting base. Evangelicals aren't some alien species, incidentally, and their motives and impulses are a lot more complex than their detractors give them credit for. A lot of evangelicals are pushing back against the Moral Majority paradigm for political engagement, and a lot of evangelicals, like a lot of the rest of us, are pretty dissatisfied with the GOP and the direction of the country. Believe it or not, they're not the only un-enthusiastic Republican contingency these days.

But, as you say, perception is everything. But even there, I'm just not seeing any kind of preoccupation from either media or conservative circles with evangelicals at the moment. In fact, thus far, there really is no meta-narrative in the sense you're looking for, save Obama is an awesome candidate and McCain kind of a sucky one (across the board). And I think you're right, McCain couldn't win by activating evangelicals even if he wanted to or was able to (which is doesn't and isn't), and I think most GOP insiders intuitively understand that. Of course evangelical leaders will blame his loss on him not cow-towing to evangelicals enough. Fiscal conservatives will blame his loss on him not cow-towing to fiscal conservatives enough. Anti-immigration people will blame his loss on him not cow-towing to anti-immigration sentiment enough. Yadda yadda yadda. That's par for the course. But it doesn't seem to me that evangelicals are going to have any more oxygen than anybody else on that front.

I'll even go you one better. There is a lot of discontent right now amongst Republican insiders about the Rovian strategy of 00 and 04 that ran the GOP brand into a ditch. Most Republicans that I know and talk to recognize quite lucidly that it isn't even really McCain's fault, it's just an impossible time to win as a Republican, and that's not even considering that Obama is the opponent. It could be just as likely that the take-away message for GOP types is that the Rovian strategy COST them viability, and thus they might in some fashion turn away from the kind of evangelical molly-coddling that's gone on under Bush (and which, again, is the exception, not the rule; certainly Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Dole, and now McCain, threw plenty of bones to evangelicals but were not, strictly speaking, ruled by them), and turn back towards something different. To put that another way, I think the farthest thing from the Republican mind come December is going to be "Man, if only we had done it more like Bush".

ALL that said, I do think that evangelicals are going to play a continued big role in Republican politics, as much because they might be the last ones around to turn off the lights after November as anything. But they'll do so in a larger context of a lot of different elements vying for a bid in the GOP's future (buying while stock is low), and won't come away from this cycle any more or less vindicated than before (and another thing to consider, if a significant number of them DO turn to Obama, that complicates the math further).

Remember, this is good news. You want to be wrong on this one. :)

"But my point is that yes evangelicals matter, but they don't rule the roost. Bush's strategy of election was an exception, not the rule. He didn't have to get elected by going balls-to-the-walls born again, he chose to get elected that way."

I agree, and my belief is that by doing so, Bush has set things up for the media narrative to be about evangelicals for the next cycle or two. The media was convinced that Bush's reelection rested on the shoulders of evangelicals. I think that when the Republicans are swept out of even the White House, the media will be tempted to revisit these values voters and write about where they are.