Over at “Politico.com’s Arena”:http://www.politico.com/arena/, the topic of the day today was the RNC’s resolution to rebrand the Democratic Party as the “Democrat-Socialist Party”. Here was “my answer”:http://tinyurl.com/olckcf to the question of whether this was smart politics, dumb politics, or a joke:
bq. It is interesting to juxtapose the fact that we are even discussing this question with “yesterday’s Gallup report”:http://www.gallup.com/poll/118528/GOP-Losses-Span-Nearly-Demographic-Groups.aspx documenting that over the past 8 years the Republican party has lost identifiers in practically every single demographic group that Gallup reports data on (with the one exception of frequent church goers). Particularly notable is the support that the Republican party has lost among males (>6%) 18-29 year olds (>8%), Midwesterners (>8%), middle income earners (>8%), and self-described political moderates (>8%). Overall, in 2001, Gallup had a near even split between those who identified with or leaned toward the Democratic party (45%) and the Republican party (44%). Today the gap is 14% points in the Democrats favor (53% to 39%). While it’s possible that this is all just a branding problem and that announcing to the world that the Democratic Party should really be called “Democrat-Socialist Party” will take care of everything, somehow I doubt it…
“Nolan McCarty”:http://blogs.princeton.edu/mccarty/ “wrote”:http://www.politico.com/arena/perm/Nolan_McCarty_6DE70BD6-A135-43FF-B4FF-41479E6A3BC6.html:
bq. Of course, the resolution will excite the base and maybe sway a few votes. But it is ultimately a distraction from what the RNC should be doing: formulating and promoting an alternative to President Obama’s agenda that will help expand the party’s appeal. There are plenty of items in Obama’s agenda that will concern independent and moderate voters. But simply labeling the Democratic agenda as one big march to socialism is not likely to persuade many of these voters that the Republicans have something better to offer.
Reading over these posts got me thinking a little bit about politics, political science, and expectations for the behavior of the Republican Party. Anthony Downs’ _An Economic Theory of Democracy_ (and much of the spatial models of voting that followed it) suggests that in a two party system, parties should move towards the median voter. This is similar to the conventional political wisdom that parties in two-party systems need to embrace a “big tent” strategy, especially after losing elections; this is largely the same thing as Nolan’s point about helping to “expand the party’s appeal”. And, by and large, this is what we think the Democratic Party did in the post-Carter years.
Yet ever since Obama’s election, it seems as if for every step the Republican party takes towards a “big tent”, it seems to take three in the opposite direction. Perhaps the most significant action in this regard from a policy stand point was the near unanimous opposition to the stimulus bill among Congressional Republicans. From a symbolic stand point, though, it is hard to top the “come to Rush” moments of apologies by elected lawmakers for offending Mr. Limbaugh. I suspect any forthcoming resolution on “rebranding” the Democratic party in the midst of an economic crisis will come to be seen in a similar light.
So it would seem that the Republican party is ignoring both the conventional political wisdom (build a bigger tent) and spatial models of voting from political science (move towards the median voter). However, perhaps there is a method to this madness. As my colleague Adam Przeworski has pointed out, democracies are countries where ruling parties _lose_ elections. They not lose them any time soon, but, as Gordon Brown will probably learn in the near future, they lose them eventually.
So perhaps what is going on is that conservative Republicans have given up trying to win elections at all right now by conventional means (read: not behaving in a Downsian manner), and are relying instead on the assumption that eventually the Democratic Party will self-destruct. Or, put in somewhat milder language, eventually the voters will want change for change’s sake. In the meantime, therefore, there is no reason to stop trying to remake the Republican Party in an even more conservative image (read: “fire up the base!”), so that when it does return to power, conservatives will be in a prime position to enact their preferred policies. If this is indeed the case, it seems like a high risk/high reward type strategy for conservatives, but I wonder what it means for the rest of the Republican Party.