After reading through the Republican National Committee's
new autopsy report about the state of the party and what is to be done about it, they addressed everything: There are chapters on Demographics, campaign mechanics, fundraising, etc. Throughout whole thing, I kept thinking that Republican politicians don't care about any of this. They care about the thing the RNC didn't address: the old, wealthy, white, angry, bitter, male, bigoted, paranoid rural Republican primary voter. What are Republicans going to do about those folks? So far they've proposed nothing.
Sasha Issenberg illustrated in an interview after last year's election how difficult it is going to be for Republicans to deal with their base. In it, he notes that Demcorats went out aggressively and hired social scientists from all over the nations universities to model voter behavior, something the parties had not done before:
What randomized experiments allow you to do is distribute messages in the real world and then see who moves in response to them. What statisticians call “heterogeneous effects modeling” allows people in the most advanced campaigns to identify which voters have actually moved in response to a particular message. This is something the Obama campaign has done this year and that’s something that’s way outside the area of traditional polling.
The left has been way better than the right at engaging the political scientists and economists who use these techniques to measure real-world cause and effect. You just have dozens of professors and graduate students who want to work with Democratic campaigns, women’s groups and labor groups, and very little of that on the right.
...
The fact that Republicans lost so overwhelmingly in 2008, I think, delayed an awareness of the technical gap between the two sides, and they imputed Obama’s win to much broader conditions in the country. For the sake of innovation on the Republican side, the best thing that could happen to them is that they lose narrowly on Tuesday, that the story becomes how Obama and his allies ran a mechanically superior campaign, and Republican donors, party leaders, consultants face the existential predicament that Democrats did at the end of 2004, which is, “We’re going to lose forever unless we figure out how to make our campaigns better.”
That’s the first step. The second step is finding social scientists who want anything to do with the Republican party in the 21st century, and that probably won’t be solved on Tuesday one way or the other. That’s a bigger cultural problem.
I bolded that last sentence to look beyond the problems Republicans have with their message, candidates, and campaign operations. They have a much bigger problem with the new American culture of the 21st Century. It isn't hard to understand why a young female Silicon Valley code hacker or an old social scientist from a major research university would not want to work for a party that thinks the dinosaurs are a hoax and that there are acceptable ways to rape women. Nobody wants anything to do with these people.
The fact is, the Republican Party's problem is the base of the Republican Party. The crazy, intolerant, psycho base voters who show up in the primary. Those are the people ultimately driving the message, candidates, and campaign operations of the party. The RNC, the Washington GOP establishment, and the pundits can say whatever they please. The GOP primary voter, however, will command the attention of the candidates and the conservative media cabal that makes so much money off them.
Ultimately, if the GOP is to prosper in the future, they will have to jettison those people and the issues those people care about. When they do, they'll then have to grapple with selling their ideology to 21st Century voters. Until then, nothing else will make a bit of difference over the long haul.