Since 1988, the Republicans have won the popular vote exactly once. That was in 2004 when, aided by a deficit of voting machines in Democratic strongholds in Ohio, President Bush was reelected with a three million vote national advantage. In Ohio, he won by 118,000 votes. That’s 60,000 people in one state who could have changed their minds and flipped the election to Kerry. That’s the high-water mark for the GOP in presidential elections since 1988. You could describe it as having no cushion. They stole the 2000 election, which helps to obscure their overall record of failure.
Bush’s Electoral College tally was 271 in 2000 and 285 in 2004. By comparison, Bill Clinton got 370 in 1992, 379 in 1996, and Barack Obama got 365 in 2008. On his site, Nate Silver has a chart that plots the probability of Obama getting any particular number of electoral votes. By far, the highest plot on the chart is 330, which Obama has about an 18% chance of attaining. Most of the rest of that action on that chart lies above 330 votes.
When you look at Romney’s state-by-state strategy, you can see that he is effectively conceding about 247 electoral votes, meaning that his absolute upside is 291 electoral votes. If he actually gets 291 votes, he’ll do better than Bush ever did.
It may seem like this is a conservative country, but it’s actually tilted to the left on the national level. There are areas that are stubbornly supportive of the Republican Party, so we will not see a Democrat win 49 states as both Nixon and Reagan were once able to do. But the Republicans are now at the point where cracking 300 electoral votes is nearly impossible, while the Democrats’ ultimate best case scenario is closer to 400 votes.
What this means is that the Republicans really can’t afford any more slippage. If even one more large state becomes safely blue, their maximum upside will fall below 270 and they won’t be able to compete for the White House at all.
Because the Republicans have decided to brand themselves as the party of white conservative Christians, small business owners, and Wall Street fat cats, they have assured themselves more slippage.
What will be interesting to watch is how fast the big money donors figure out that the modern GOP isn’t worth any investment (at least, in presidential elections) and how quickly the GOP changes in response. Notice that none other than Rupert Murdoch is pleading with Mitt Romney to stop pandering to the religious right and get after the middle. But both Romney and McCain analyzed their situation and decided they needed to stimulate the base more than they needed to pander to the middle. Why did they decide that? What were they seeing that I don’t see and Mr. Murdoch doesn’t see? Why does base turnout always seem to trump persuasion with the GOP presidential candidates?
I don’t know the answer to that question. But, I wish I did, because knowing the answer would help me figure out how the GOP will respond to their coming irrelevancy. Will they listen to the big money folks who don’t give a crap about abortion or will they continue to believe that only an energized army of crazies gives them any hope of success? And, if they get it wrong at first, how long will it take them to figure that out and remake themselves?
the Republicans have decided to brand themselves as the party of white conservative Christians, small business owners, and Wall Street fat cats
I wonder how long they’re going to be able to hold onto the small business owners, too. Even the would-be-self-made blowhard might eventually figure out that things like health care reform are helping him.
Small business only cares about lower taxes and fewer regulations. They don’t seem to realize that most business taxes and regulations are at the state and local level. They just refer to THE government. With an intelligence level like that it is no wonder that most small businesses fail in the first year.
Part of the problem is that the “small business” associations are little more than fronts for the far right oligarchs. The Dems/left have done a lousy job of breaking that monopoly with alternative organizations and outlets. Small business’s natural ally is our side of the aisle, not the side of the banks and other chiselers. But we’ve never tried very hard to make that case — not in the last half century, anyway.
I really believe that that was what Bill Clinton had in mind with the DLC, but the lure of big money ran it off the rails.
I could be wrong. I want so much to like Bill. He’s such an engaging rogue.
Murdock: Because of rich merchants of power like you the middle is still to the right of center..
I expect the candidates for elected office are thinking short-term. If they can turn out the base then they have a shot at winning this election. If they reach out beyond the base, the party will benefit in the long term but they lose this election, and possibly several more to come. The conservative movement had a lot of patience once, but now it seems to be “Dude, where’s my majority?”
Without the base, getting to 150 EV would be difficult for the Republicans. There is always a lot of talk about how the base would crawl naked over broken glass to kick out the Kenyan usurper. But I have a hunch that if they felt the GOP banner holder wasn’t fully on their side they would (or at least enough to count) either not vote or form a third party. I would guess the GOP internal polling is showing this to be the case. Mittens made a brief trip toward the middle just after picking Ryan for VP, probably assuming the would satisfy the wingers. My guess is they realized it didn’t. If Obama was white, even though he is a Dem, the 400 EV level woudl be in the realm of possibility this year.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Republicans are doomed because of demographic shifts, which is true, but I think their base’s growing tendency to shut out any reality not created and approved by Fox is accelerating this process. They are simply not making sense to the majority of voters who do not exist in that world, and really can only signal to each other. I don’t think that either McCain or Romney are true believers, but they both came to realize that any deviation from that constructed reality is strictly forbidden. Romney’s hilarious and dizzying oscillations between contradictory positions is just a symptom of this underlying pathology.
In other words, “Rupert, just shut up and go look in the mirror.”
I’m not sure there will be any “they” there. Counter intuitive as hell, given the lockstep in Congress, but the GOP has no place to go. Anything to the right of the Dems leaves them in extremist territory. Their patchwork frankenstein is suffering a major immune reaction and rotting away at the core. Pandering to the know-nothing base in order to power Aynal economics is not working out for the oligarchs anymore.
I’d like to think this predicts a collapse of the two-party system so disdained by the founders. An open oligarch/Dem coalition won’t work for long, so will we see the rise of several viable parties? Or will the Oligarchs cement their place among the Dems, and the progressives return the GOP to its early roots? After this election anything could start to happen, maybe for good, maybe not.
Interesting comment, thanks.
The glue for the two party system is the Electoral College. (That may not be what the founders intended, but in the world as it is, that’s how it has played out.)
So there are powerful forces driving political actors to form/join a party that can compete for a majority in order to elect a president. (That’s a major reason why the Republican Party emerged so quickly from the wreckage of the Whigs. And why after the Civil War, the duopoly re-established itself.)
My guess is that the bigots lose power in the Republican Party over the next 10-20 years, and that Republicans start to do what Bush & Rove (and McCain) tried to do: have a party that’s welcoming to conservative Latinos, African-Americans, Asians and Indians.
If they build themselves up to, say, 40+% of the Hispanic vote, 15-20% of the Black vote, etc., then they’ll be able to compete nation-wide.
If they stop dog whistling to the base, will the base still be the base?
The Corporations have already bought their way into the Democratic Party. If they leave the GOP, it will indeed go the way of the Whigs. That will happen if a real true believer like Ron Paul gets control.
The religious nuts and bigots would be better off forming their own third party. It couldn’t win the White House but it could throw the election to the House. With at least 26 Senators from Southern and Western states they could be a force to be reckoned with. The remaining Republicans would be a rich white man and corporate party, but would rapidly be a rich man’s plaything as the corporations left for greener pastures in the Democratic party. The allure of that Citizens United cash will have Democrats welcoming them with open arms.
That is my greatest fear, a two party system. One Right and the other insane Right.
That’s not too far from what we have now. Compare the national Dems with the center-right parties in other Western democracy (save Israel, which is a special case for several reasons) and explain to me how the Dems are more progressive.
It’s coming.
“But both Romney and McCain analyzed their situation and decided they needed to stimulate the base more than they needed to pander to the middle. Why did they decide that? What were they seeing that I don’t see and Mr. Murdoch doesn’t see? “
The answer may be that in order to win the teahadist primaries, they gotta be as nuts as they can be to stand a chance. In the general, if they pivot to more sane positions, the nuts stay home and don’t vote.
So it’s probably a zero sum game. What they keep with their nuts they lose in the center. If they make a play for the center they lose the nuts, but there’s a long, filmed history of saying things pandering to the nuts, which is devestating for attracting the center.
Keeping the nuts happy, though, has the upside of keeping the nuts energized and helping downticket races. You dance with who brung ya.
“But both Romney and McCain analyzed their situation and decided they needed to stimulate the base more than they needed to pander to the middle.”
This statement applies quite well to their choice of VPs, for instance. Everybody knew Romney would have to tack right during the primaries, and to the center afterwards; why he decided to go with a right-wing firebrand like Ryan is a mystery to me, especially after the Palin fiasco. She was great at firing up the base but they still lost, big time.
Romney has made a few fumbling stumbling attempts to broaden his appeal more recently (eg. his Sunday interview where he went back and forth on keeping parts of Obamacare). But he just sucks as a candidate– he can’t execute the plays. And he’s gonna get sacked in the debates.
I’m thinking the base is just looking down the road toward that fantasy of armed insurrection so many of them have been pining for. It appears, thought, that both Romney and McCain overestimated the number of angry white guys they could conjure up.
The money is being shifted downticket, and Sherrod Brown is the first of the targets. And it has had some effect in the opinion polls.
It looks like the big money has written of Mitt and is working on firewalling the Congress (both Houses).
The house race has just taken a huge step backwards for them with the Ryan selection and Akin meltdown…
One would hope.
Akin is out of luck if he loses. Republicans have already backfilled the candidacy in that district.
According to Politics1, Paul Ryan is still a candidate for his House seat. That one has serious opposition this time.
According to a diary at Dkos, Ryan is starting to run ads for his Congressional race. Confidence much?
I think this is a reasonable thing for him to do, but the optics are terrible.
Ryan’s excuse for running in 2 races was that it was too late to remove his name from the ballot. Starting to advertise makes that look like yet another lie. There’s just something ugly about a guy hedging his bets this way. That gag reflex could be used to good advantage by his Dem opponent.
It’s very disappointing that the Dems and outside groups are not throwing money into WI-1. This could be a winnable fight and a delicious win.
Until quite recently, there was no reason to think that district would be competitive.
That’s the way wave elections work. One day, some polling comes in, and everyone says, “We’re close where? You’re kidding me!”
Yeah. Why would ANYONE think a 50-state strategy would have any application in today’s world?
Because shit happens. People go to jail. Candidates get found in bed with dead women AND live boys.
You don’t have to spend gobs and gobs of $$$ for a 50-state strategy. It simply means having 4-5 professional people in the state for a 3 month period in case something good happens. Then you have the ability to actually do something. 3-4 million in an election cycle.
sigh. Penny wise, pound foolish
Hasn’t a GOP political operative (Rove?) been hammering on the notion that millions of Bible-thumpers didn’t vote last time?
Unlike GWB who was embraced as one of their own by the fundies, McCain and Mitt have to work hard at keeping them in the fold. Would be an even harder task if Obama were white. If Mitt were to alienate the fundies, would they show up and vote? As it is (assuming no significant defection by the Paulbots or more “moderate” white women), Mitt is going into the home stretch with 45% of the vote in the bank, enough for the man to continue to dream.
Rove does this just about every election – wildly inflating the expected success of R candidates. He’s a propagandist, not a political analyst, and his goal is to frame expectations. And like everyone in the Village, he never, ever pays a price for being spectacularly wrong.
Unless the Constitution and Senate rules change the GOP will still have oversized power relative to their actual popular support.
That is good and bad. Good because there is a lot of demonstrated cleverness in the way the Constitution designed the government. Bad for all the reason we know too well.
As for not being able to win the White House, well they have spent a lot of their history as both a minority party and shut out of the WH. Not sure they are going the way of the Whigs just yet.
What will IMO actually push them to Whigdom is if they continue to shut out people who think ANY government is illegitimate and inherently bad and see NO benefit in even attempting to competently govern.
These are people who see nothing wrong with appointing hacks like “Brownie” to head FEMA because Brownie helped them win an election and they believe FEMA will never be able to do anything well no matter who runs it anyway. Until they can privatize FEMA by selling it at 10 cents on the dollar to a campaign contributor who then is awarded fat soft contracts, they don’t care how it runs. In fact, screwing up FEMA would make it easier to win the argument that the government should get out of the disaster business.
But these people also fail to realize that most people actually value and want good services from the government. And get really mad when they don’t get it. Six years later and the stink of Katrina is still on the GOP. That IMO is ultimately going to be what does in the GOP.
Correction. Meant to say “…continue to shut out people who DON’T think any sort of illegitimate…”
As a lifelong emergency responder, I have fond memories of a FEMA that once set an example of what a well-run government agency could accomplish. Dubya and the GOP destroyed it all and for that one act alone I will never forgive them.
The Senate rules better damn change if the Dems keep control, or they’re going to find a grassroots rebellion on their hands.
Well talk about head in the sand
this was the headline at Redstate this morning
Quote a FactChecker Earn a Ban
By: streiff (Diary) | September 11th, 2012 at 09:48 AM | 31
I’ve pretty much had it with the grotesque turn the various “fact checking” organizations have taken. “Politifact” is little more than a bunch of shills, devoid of even the vestiges of integrity, that sling about “pants on fire” ratings to any GOP or conservative politician. The Washington Post is no exception. Back during the War on Women thing, Glenn Kessler, their alleged Fact Checker, penned this gem:
Imagine how upset they’d be if all reporters returned to being consistent and honest fact-checkers that prevented blatant partisan lies from ever getting any traction.
“both Romney and McCain analyzed their situation and decided they needed to stimulate the base more than they needed to pander to the middle”
My guess is a fear of reprisal. The right wing base is so fanatical they would destroy their own candidate from the right flank if they were to stray away from the hard party line even a little bit. I don’t think Murdoch realizes how thick skulled these idiot he helped to create are. They will devour their own before allowing them to venture too far from the family farm. This is why Mittens is playing this game of agreeing with some policies, ie; parts of health care reform, auto industry bail out, abortion in extreme circumstances, then immediately pulling back when things get too hot from from his rear. He is boxed and locked and there is no way out.
The GOP knows they have to get past just whites. Blacks are out of reach for the foreseeable. Asians cannot be addressed as a monolith, though they can peel off some. That leaves latinos. But the GOP cannot make concessions on immigration without creating civil war within the party – both Bush and Perry found that out. So they have to find a block of latinos who will vote not as latinos, but as socially conservative Catholics. Note the new face of the religious right in the party – Santorum, to a degree Ryan – is Catholic. I don’t think this will work, but it is the cards they are holding, and it does mean sticking with the abortion etc. planks on the premise that they have already lost all the votes they will lose with it, but it might get them somewhere with latinos. As it happens, though, I don’t think latinos are going to vote their religion too much, so I’m not worried about this.
The GOP may indeed be a dinosaur, but unfortunately we seem to live in the Mesozoic era, haha. For all their prez incompetence over the past 20+ years, they seem to have done quite well in re-making the country in their braindead “conservative” image and generally fucking up everything, from the federal budget to the earth’s climate. The billions spent on propaganda during the “conservative” era has destroyed the brains of millions and millions of (resentment-filled) citizens, who will never be able to think clearly again.
The Dinosaur Party also held the Congress for 12+ years (1994-2006) and had complete control of the gub’mint from 2002-2006, something Dems haven’t come close to managing. They recently demolished the new Dem congress in record time, thanks to the 5 conservative male activists masquerading as “justices” on the Supreme Court. With their newfound corporate “free speech” rights, they have never had such a rigged playing field. In short, I’d say the GOP is doin’ fine and the plutocrats have no real concerns about the future.
If their prez field was especially putrid this time around, it can get “better” in future. In the meantime, they have a solid lock on the House via Citizens United, and it’s very likely that there is no retribution coming for the GOP’s criminal decision to obstruct any sensible economic recovery measures during the Great Recession, which only the Congress can adopt, BTW.
Incredibly, we have a nation and “media” yapping about what the PREZ should be doing to revive the economy, when it is abundantly clear under any rational macroeconomic theory that it is the CONGRESS which has the power to pass the legislation needed to aid the economy in a serious recession. The prez is essentially a bit player in the area of fiscal policy. It’s the Congress that the constitution envisions as the engine of government. Yet the Do-Nothing Repub Congress is not even being talked about, anywhere. Not even by Obama!
So the plutocrats and CEOs who are funding the criminal enterprise that is the GOP don’t have a care in the world, IMO. Their main goal is that no sensible tax or economic or environmental policies ever be adopted. That can easily be accomplished via the gridlock that the two party system and the constitution and the filibuster all ensure. That’s all the plutocrats want and need. The WH? They don’t really care.
With around half the nation’s citizens permanently cretinized by 30+ years of “conservative” lies and propaganda, and the ongoing corporate control of the media, this dinosaur ain’t goin’ anywhere, whatever the demographic trends.
I like to phrase it as, “Republicans have lost the popular vote in 4 of the last 5 elections. The time they won, they did so with an incumbent wartime President, who won by a narrower margin than any other incumbent wartime President in American history.”
Soon, that will be 5 of the past 6.
When your actual policies are so unpopular you can’t afford to discuss them with voters for fear of tanking your poll numbers, it’s probably time to get some new policies. But the GOP invited the Evangelical crazies, the social crazies, the racists and bigots in and kicked everyone out who was sane, so the whole “new policy” thing is a non-starter.
I’m thinking the GOP is slowly going the way of the Whig Party. Or whichever party it was that Jeff Davis was head of from 1861-65.
“When your actual policies are so unpopular you can’t afford to discuss them with voters for fear of tanking your poll numbers, it’s probably time to get some new policies. “
I would love to hear Obama, or Clinton, or Biden say something like that at a rally.
I think Obama could pull it off with that chuckle of his that he sometimes uses when he’s mocking the republicans. Clinton, too. Less certain that Biden could pull that off, but he did say “a noun, a verb and 9/11”, so maybe he could do.