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November 23, 2008

The GOP's Wilderness Years

By David Shribman

They won only two states in 1936, prompting the immortal aphorism that as Maine goes, so goes Vermont. They won only six states in 1964, suggesting to many analysts that a great political party was in eclipse. They saw a party warhorse defeated by an upstart governor in 1992, making them fear that their dream of a Republican era was imperiled. Things have been bleak for the Republicans before.

Now they face what the Democrats faced in 1984, when a man who personified every party orthodox was repudiated by the voters; in 1988, when the competence-over-everything nominee won only 10 states; in 2000, when the party watched its southern-moderate model expire in the Supreme Court; and in 2004, when a Catholic from the eastern salon base of the party lost the Catholic vote and alienated the party base: an agonizing season of soul-searching and second-guessing, moaning and maneuvering.

It is almost too terrible to watch. And yet no party can avoid the agony that the Republicans must endure as they try to regroup for a future in a landscape they could not have imagined even a decade ago, dominated by an Internet-savvy opposition mobilized by a black man reared abroad who took advantage of the bad choices and even worse luck of the man who still holds the White House but holds the loyalty of increasingly fewer Republicans.

"The numbers are bleak," says Stuart Stevens, who has helped elect more senators and governors than perhaps any other active Republican strategist. "There's nothing good in it. The Hispanic numbers are terrible. The number of people under 30 who supported Obama is terrifying."

The back-stabbing and the hand-wringing are only accelerating as the party surveys the landscape. But the Democratic experience -- and the Democrats will concede they are very experienced in this particular wrinkle of the political game -- is instructive, and if the Republicans want to learn how to recover from defeat they might take a look at how their rivals responded to defeat:

The center of the challenge is the center. The 2008 election was not a case where party loyalties changed, or even where people changed their minds. The voter statistics show that the number of Democrats who voted for the Republican nominee earlier this month was about the same as the number of Republicans who voted for the Democratic nominee. That tells us two things: That the difference very likely came more from new voters making up their minds than from veteran voters changing their minds. And that the battle is at the center, not at the extremes.

"They've got to regroup and figure out who they are," says Leah D. Daughtry, chief of staff of the Democratic National Committee. "Will they move farther to the right to energize their base or move to the center to get to the growing center of the country? I don't think we've just had a liberal mandate."

The face of a party is often transformed by a new face. The Democrats learned that in 1960, when John F. Kennedy, whose face was not wrinkled, emerged, and again in 2008, when Obama, whose face was not white, swept into prominence. Right now the Republicans have a surfeit of sourpusses, which is no fun and no advantage.

Former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts may try again, mostly because he can afford it and he can't take his eyes off the prize, and so might former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, but I'm betting the next GOP nominee's name won't be preceded by the word "former." The fact that many of you have never heard of Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana or Sen. John Thune of South Dakota might be the best thing they (and the Republicans) have going for them.

The new key to politics is the new generation. Voters between the ages of 18 and 29 voted two-to-one for Barack Obama, by far the largest margin of any age group. That is important, but what may be more important is that this bloc of voters was larger than the bloc older than age 65.

We know that people who first vote for one party tend to stick with that party. But we forget that an entirely new group of voters will be moving into the 18-to-29 bloc four years from now. The Democrats, by virtue of their message and messenger, have the advantage with this new group, roughly 33 percent of the bloc that will vote in 2012. But this bloc is not lost to the GOP.

Disadvantages in politics exist to be overcome -- but only if the Republicans come to grips with the most important message of 2008, which is that the new technology and the new social-networking culture of the young are the new keys to the kingdom. In the old days you had to organize at the county level, maybe at the precinct level. This month we saw that parties and candidates also have to organize on the Web, particularly Facebook.

Yet the rate of change of technology and social-networking suggests that by 2012, Facebook will be so 2008. Change was the Democrats' friend in 2008, but the very nature of change makes it possible for the Republicans to capture it in 2012.

Just as there are places to make money in a bear stock market, there are places to make progress in a down political market. Former Rep. Rob Portman of Ohio, who was the Bush administration's chief trade negotiator and then the head of the Office of Management of Budget, argues there is room for a Republican campaign that has clear positive proposals on the economy, taxes and health care. "We didn't connect," he says.

One of the places where the Republicans didn't connect is with Hispanic voters, where the Obama margin ran even a little larger than it did among young voters. This is another face of the future (about a 10th of the electorate, and growing fast). Four years ago George W. Bush took 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. This month John S. McCain captured only 31 percent.

That 13-point margin is a gap of opportunity for both parties. If the Republicans aren't to slip into a long period of opposition, they must make that opportunity theirs, not their rivals'.

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