Senate The Future of the Republican Party

I live in Alabama, where blue is a four-letter word.

Many of the Republicans here are truly good eggs, but there's also a vast number of utter hypocrites - the ones that will go to church every Sunday but are the absolute antithesis of what it means to be a Christian the rest of the week. For instance, one of my friends actually received a death threat in a Publix store for wearing a Obama-Biden shirt a couple of years back.

I personally find it best to stay as apolitical as possible in this hornet's nest.

 

The GOP has no future. And I say this as somebody who voted for Mitt Romney in the last two elections. The GOP has lost its way, and the ship has taken on too much water to avoid sinking. Personally, I believe the GOP has nobody to blame for this except themselves, and quite frankly, I think they deserve what they got.

 

Except failure on the part of the Dems will bring them back to power, where a wholesale institution of their policies will likely lead to the largest political backlash of the modern era.

 

Well, I didn't sign up here to wax political, but I will say that for me personally, this last election (2012) was and is the last time I will ever vote for one of the two major parties in my life. The ONLY exception would be if either Mitt Romney runs again, which I don't think will happen, or if Hillary Clinton runs. I think this country desperately NEEDS the refreshing change that can only come from a third-party candidate... someone who is not firmly entrenched in the gears of the partisan machine. What's more, I think for the first time in modern history, this country is actually ready to embrace a third-party candidate. IMO.

 

It has to go deeper than just a presidential nominee. There has to be a significant third party in Congress too, i.e. one that controls one or both chambers, or else the executive branch is going to have to ally itself with a side in order to get any agenda passed.

 

It has to be genuinely grassroots, from the ground up third party. Local elections, city councils, etc. All of this before a presidential candidate. I never totally understood why, for instance, the National Libertarian Party ran a presidential candidate instead of spending that time on building a genuine third party at the local and state level. I understand the marketing of it, but if you dont have a base or a constituency you dont have much.

So it will have to come from the ground up in order to gain trust and appeal across a wide enough swath of voters.

 

That's pretty much it. Look at what happened this week. 2 Colorado democratic senators both lost their recall elections and will be replaced by republicans. Both districts that they lost in are heavily democratic, but with some specific right leaning issues. The general consensus with voters isn't that there is a huge defection to the republican party per se, but that the politicians themselves were viewed as out of touch with the voters, and so typical party affiliated voters installed 2 members of the opposite party. It's the issues that are important, not the label. Also, both Spitzer and Weiner also lost the various races they just participated in, and finally with a nod to common sense, Weiner only mustered about 5% of the vote in his race. But why do people like this continue to run and run and run in party elections?

This is what balances everything out, which those around here who subscribe to the "just vote democratic and everything will be fine..." don't seem to understand. It's also why, if a two party system is going to be the norm, we need a party and counter-party and vice versa. But yeah, if a successful third party is to emerge, it can't just jump into fielding a national candidate. It has to develop the local connection first, and springboard upwards.

 

Only 5%? That was an incredible achievement. Who would have thought the "pro penis" vote would be so high?

The Colorado recall vote shows how polarized the urban-rural demographics of two-party politics have become as the Republicans slip nationally in the numbers of their core base. The pro gun lobby's grassroots power is clear for everyone to see and shows why and how but above all exactly where the NRA can make good on its threats despite the overall decline in the Republican base due to inevitable demographic shifts. These white rural Republican voting strongholds will remain secure for a while longer particularly in the south and the big mostly thinly populated non coastal western states.

 

The thing about the Colorado recalls is that it wasn't the NRA making it happen. It was a real grassroots effort, started out of someone's living room. Recall proponents were outspent over 6 to 1, with the opponents garnering over $3 million ($350000 from Bloomberg alone). Both sides spent a lot of effort on GOTV.

In the end, it goes to prove, more than anything, that money alone cannot buy an election. You still need to actually get the votes, and nothing can replace those votes.

 

That's true. While the NRA did spend $300,000 in the state for the recall election, KK is absolutely correct, Bloomberg and others spend over 3 million for the same thing. The NRA came in and supported the recall based on its main topic, but that was only after it was started at the local level. It's not like there wasn't any mention of the recall until the NRA came in and made it happen-it was quite the reverse. I guess one could compare outside spending, but the scale isn't even the same. I don't know how I feel about recalls in general. They tend to snowball, but I think in this case, the NRA's pro-spending was nowhere near the amount of Bloomberg's, etc... anti-issue spending, and I think positive spending is more palpable than negative spending in general.

And Jabba, the secondary issue you mentioned didn't even apply here. Neither district was anywhere close to a GOP voting stronghold. Both of them where the opposite in fact. It would be no different if Berkley elected a GOP representative based on some sort of issue, and you dismissed it as "oh well, Berkley was always a republican stronghold anyway...." ?! This doesn't mean that the voters in these districts suddenly became republican, but as I said, the issue was that the 2 demmies were viewed as out of touch, and as KK mentioned, nothing actually replaces the votes.

 

I agree with that, but the NRA was a substantial contributor too, giving more than Bloomberg to the effort. Also, there is support from the NRA that wasn't exclusively monetary - including membership access and outreach. The NRA has helped provide the communications backbone making second-amendment-based grassroots initiatives effective at the local level.

What all that outside money was unable to buy was the prexisting local pro gun membership and activist communications (email, social media, fundraising, local organizing, etc.) backbone that the NRA has carefully built up over the decades. This is why legislators correctly fear the NRA - it's that ability to get advocacy messaging to nearly anyone who owns a gun or likes the idea of owning guns.

 

Yeah, but that strength comes from its members. The ACLU is another powerful politically focused lobbying organization. I seriously doubt that ACLU contributors would ever call for the organization to stop taking up issues just to give the other side a chance. If the NRA has 15 million contributors, or whatever the number is, then it must be doing something right. Which is the issue here. One can compare the NRA to Bloomberg for this recall and it is quite obvious why one was successful and the other wasn't. The Bloomberg group sat in New York miles away from the issue and basically threw money for ads which said how evil guns were for no other reason that it knew better than anyone else. The NRA had booths at skeet shooting competitions, and information at local gun stores and put a giant hand on the shoulder of voters while saying "we're all in this together..."

This doesn't mean that any one lobbying group is "good," while the other is "evil," but one certainly gets a better return on its investment.

 

All I'm saying is that no community initiative like this would have succeeded without the immense experience of the NRA in building grassroots advocacy efforts and activating its members for local politics. Local members plus a high level national communications network. The opposition could not buy such an infrastructure into existence. I'm not sure any other organization can do exactly what the NRA does, certainly not as efficiently. They've given gun ownership the kind of immediacy that having a well-paying job with benefits used to have for the labor unions in their political efforts. The Obama election apparatus is the only organization I've really seen do it at a higher level.

 

I'm sorry, but do you have any sources that back up your claim that the NRA provided "membership access and outreach"? The stories I've read have said that they essentially were hands off, except for their financial contribution.

Incidentally, here's the breakdown of the finances both for and against the recall:

The NRA's contribution is roughly equal to the annual dues for all 10000 members who live in Colorado.

 

As you said, it wasn't the money that was instrumental, it was the grassroots organizing infrastructure and local member commitment.

 

And, by all indications, the recalls were a true grassroots project. Victor Head started the recall against Giron from his living room and managed to beat her by 12 points in a district Obama won by 20 points. He has no previous political experience beyond voting. He'd never even donated to a political campaign.

For all some people keep trying to point the finger at the NRA, it was the local people who actually made it all happen.

 

....and I wonder just how much these newly-elected legislators will toe the national GOP line in the heavily "Democratic" district.

 

Politics in the state may have changed radically now that Boulder and Denver have both been washed away in the Deluge.

 

This.

I am not a Republican, and I am not a Democrat. I consider myself to be a moderate independent. On some issues, I am very much to the right. On some issues, I am very much to the left. On others, I am in the middle. When Gore ran against Bush, I voted for Gore. I voted for Romney both times against Obama. Unless he (Romney) ever runs again, I will vote for Hillary in 2016, if she chooses to run. I vote for whoever I feel is best in touch with my values and priorities, who I think will govern using a logical and pragmatic approach, someone who isn't handcuffed to their party, and who will reach across the table to compromise, and someone who demonstrates common sense. The GOP did MANY, MANY things to cause me to abandon them after this last election, and as a result, I may end up voting for someone from the opposing party. I am not sworn to a specific political party. If I feel a party or candidate is out of touch with me, I will look at the alternative(s).

 

This. A 3rd party President would be extremely ineffectual. They would have no allies in Congress to push their legislation forth and would probably have both parties pissed at them over something. Getting legislation passed is how you play the game and your working relationships with Congress - Clinton and Reagan were famous for this, Bush and Obama not so much. And if they came from outside, they'd have even less of a working relationship with Congressional leaders than anyone in recent memory.

 

So can anyone explain what the end goal of the Republicans currently is? Or what the hell is going on with their party? Maybe Mr44 since you got mad when I originally said that "Republicans" were threatening a government shutdown/default if Obama wouldn't defund Obamacare.

 

They're imploding. A shutdown would be bad, a default, catastrophic. They think Obama will get the blame, but that isn't how it's going to go down.

Peace,

V-03

 

The problem Merk, is that the RWSM (like my abbreviation?) tends only to convince one group: the right wing.

See "Election, 2012"; the machine spun harder and faster than a whirl-a-gig at a boardwark carnival, yet somehow, Obama still won. People who tend to be convinced by their tactics are already on their side; it's everyone else they have to dupe, and based on public polling at the moment, nobody's buying it.

The thing that gets me is everytime a GOP congressman/woman is on a talk show, they keep repeating how they are representing their "constituents." No talk about the "country", just their districts. It's as if the rest of the US doesn't even exist, or what happens "out there" won't affect them. It's fantasy, and very dangerous.

Peace,

V-03

 

They're doubling down on this childish strategy of "we're not the ones shutting down the government, you're the ones shutting down the government". This is the hostage-taker putting a gun to the hostage's head and proclaiming, "I'm not doing this, you're doing this". As has been pointed out, this isn't going to work on an audience whose critical thinking skills have progressed since kindergarten, but the Republican base will continue to eat it up.