US Republicans face crisis of identity and credibility

When voters lose trust in a political party, its leaders usually chalk it up to a lack of discernment. The Growth and Opportunity Project, convened by Republicans to chart a way forward after their abysmal performance in the last US election, does better than that. Its 100-page report concludes Republicans are not diverse, not technologically sophisticated and not nice. If the party does not change, the report warns, “it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future”. Changing as the report recommends, however, may render it not just difficult, but impossible.

The report treats electoral problems as engineering problems — as if, by tweaking platform positions and conveying them through various new media, the party could reach the hearts of the fast-growing ethnic minority groups and women who find it uncongenial. But Republicans have been trying this approach for a long time.

In 1996, Bob Dole chose as his running mate congressman Jack Kemp, the only white Republican with broad approval among black people — and was rewarded with 4 per cent of the black vote. It is half a century since Republicans took as much as 15 per cent of it. Where the Democratic party has an intimate, respectful (if at times uneasy) relationship with this group, the Republican party treats it instrumentally. At election time, voters can tell the difference between a marriage proposal and a wolf whistle.

US demographics are more complex than two decades ago. There are new immigrant-descended groups, in various stages of assimilation and electoral eligibility. Voters also now perceive their identities differently. For the first time, there are as many unmarried as married women. Republican candidate Mitt Romney won the marrieds by 11 percentage points, but President Barack Obama appealed to the unmarrieds with appeals on abortion rights and won them by 36 points. As with ethnicity, Republicans still find it hard to disguise interest in gender and age as anything but a targeted vote pitch. One of the report’s clumsier recommendations is to work with “demographic partners” through a “growth and opportunity inclusion council”.

When the authors speak of a party “marginalising” itself, the verb connotes extremism. The implicit message is that Republicans must change their views, however superficially, on issues important to swing groups. This includes ethnic minority-candidate recruitment as tried by Prime Minister David Cameron in the UK, immigration reform and gay rights, because “for many younger voters, these issues are a gateway into whether the party is a place they want to be”.

Romney won Americans over the age of 30 by 1.8 million votes, but lost the under-30s by 5 million. The report urges these ideological changes not because it is right, only because it seems a good way to harvest votes. So it will not work. Simply borrowing rhetoric never does. The US does not need a less sincere version of the Democratic party.

When Republicans look at Democrats, they see a party that has prospered thanks to cute slogans and mastery of new technologies of bamboozlement. That is how the Democrats of the 1980s saw the Republicans, who in the Reagan era held an advantage in direct mail and television advertising. Today’s Democrats are more adept than their rivals at exploiting social media, video and market-research data. The report’s authors therefore call for the hiring of a “chief technology and digital officer”.

Yet the Republicans, however unwittingly, are on to something. Their demographic problem is their technological problem. The demographic shifts in question concern class as much as race or gender. At one revealing point, the report calls on the party to foster an “environment of intellectual curiosity”. Republicans seem dumb, even to themselves. They seem uncool. And there is a reason for that.

The roots of their predicament lie in the way Democrats came to dominate government bureaucracies, foundations and universities, leaving Republicans to ‘traditional’ corporations. The sectors Democrats dominate helped spawn the high-technology industries that are the main drivers of US growth and prestige, creating a Silicon Valley plutocracy that gives the Democrats most of its backing. Republicans’ only connection to this group is to call, bizarrely, for the lowering of its taxes. This is the party’s larger problem. It is confused on whom it represents. After a century and a half leading the charge of the ‘better elements’, it now finds itself at the head of a scattered army of the downwardly mobile.

— Financial Times

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.