Another report, this time on the view of young Republicans (Full report), another round of hilarious conundrums faced by the GOP:
TMP — Uncommitted young voters may not be enamored with the Democratic Party but they have a terrible opinion of the GOP.
“In the focus group research conducted in January 2013,” the report said, “the young ‘winnable’ Obama voters were asked to say what words came to mind when they heard ‘Republican Party.’ The responses were brutal: closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned.”
‘Couldn’t Care Less’
“We’ve become the party that will pat you on your back when you make it, but won’t offer a hand to help you get there. This has to change in order to have a shot with young voters.” The GOP’s focus on low taxes and pro-business policies has left young voters thinking “they will only reap the benefits of Republican policies if they become wealthy or rise to the top of a big business.” The GOP is at risk of being seen as the “fend for yourself” party.
Latino voters in particular “tend to think the GOP couldn’t care less about them,” the report said.
I’ve learned not to count these clowns out. No matter how absurd their positions or how hot the internecine warfare, they have a robust system powered by cold hard cash to keep the lights on and the press releases humming. But they are in a real bad position.
To make substantial change, the kind of changes encouraged by the young Republicans report, the GOP has to figure out which of their groups to throw under the bus. To review, there have been three traditional legs holding up the conservative stool: business who want lower taxes, lower labor costs, and less regulation, the religious right who want to tell everyone else what to do, especially on things like marriage and birth control, and defense, who love them some expensive bloody wars, cold war is good, a nice bite sized hot one in the middle east better still. A few years ago a newer group emerged from the shadows; the xenophobes, in the form of the various Tea-party’s. Xenophobes are made up of a loose intersection of neo-confederates, nationalists, and misogynists whose most uniform defining and useful characteristic is they hate the fictional caricature of Obama and gleefully spread that venom into the political corpus as far and wide as possible.
Who gets thrown under the bus? Answer: I don’t know. Because it seems like the modern GOP needs all these guys to win complete power, and ironically each of them are responsible in their own way for the present plight of the Grand Old Party. Any effort is hampered again and again by what has been a source of strength in the past. Especially what cost them the last election, i.e., the GOP has perfected the art of generating the wrong answer if its the answer the paying customer wants to hear.
So far, they can’t even agree on how they change, in the words of Eric Cantor, they don’t need to change the pizza, only the box. My guess is that’s wishful thinking, an example of the wrong answer mentality. If they have to reject one of three of dough, cheese, or tomato sauce, what would be left to call a pizza?
While I agree in general with what your wrote, I do have a slightly different perspective on the groups.
I see the business and defense groups as the primary driver of the policies (and I, personally, would put them in the same group…they are both driven by money). This means that they can’t be thrown out since those are the only 2 groups that actually matter to the GOP.
The religious and xenophobes are needed purely for the wedge issues. They can only be thrown out if suitable replacements are found that are willing to be strongly associated with business and defense. And, ideally, the GOP is looking for additional groups to be added to the mix in lieu of replacements.
Overall, I don’t think the GOP is looking to throw any of the groups under the bus. I think they will likely look to either add messaging (the public doesn’t seem to understand or care about conflicting messages…the existent of Faux News is proof of that) or finding a group where a wedge issue within that group can change their shape (e.g. christians in this country seem to think that Jesus’ primary messages were about abortion and gays at this point).
In any case, it will be interesting to see where the GOP goes.
I tend to agree, the money is the last thing to get thrown. It’s funny when you read that report, they do everything they can to basically pretend that changing how people get their info will help, or how hitting facebook with more ads will help. Blissfully ignoring that the people in that study are already quite well informed and simply do not like the social conservative policies and much of the fiscal & defense policy.
Nice metaphor. It’s always fun to use someone’s words against him. Or her.
At risk? Aren’t Republicans proudly exclaiming that they are, in fact, the “fend for yourself” party?
When the contents of the package are unpalatable, advertise the package. So Canotor’s plan is taken right from big business. Look at Coor’s, that bland yellow pee-water. when was the last time you saw a Coors commercial that wasnt about some fancy color changing can with a big mouth and turbulance resisting opening and was actually about beer?
There’s plenty of ways to make pizza without cheese and tomatoes. Going with your analogy, in the US, the democrats are dough-cream-onion pizza? Are we going to give meaning to black and green olives here?
Leaving out the rotten tea-party tomatoes is crucial I’d say. They should go cream base, and not overdo it with the cheese.
a couple of my friends are Republican, sort of from the older variety (Reagan, Goldwater). They told me after the last election that they are disgusted with the way the GOP has been dragged down into this swamp. they told me that the party has shifted far too much to a borderline extemism (depending on your definition). My friends have laid the blame at the feet of the teabaggers.
They believe the teabaggers are not only homophobic, xenophobic and misogynistic – as if that weren’t bad enough already – but they behave like delusional, paranoid headcases in public, concoct the most absurd theories about the President and those they dislike, spread that paranoia as truth, and refuse on any level to compromise on any of the very difficult issues the country faces.
i think the businesses with the money will be kept. it appears the teabaggers need to be sacrificed instead.
I really don’t think the xenophobes and racists are that new, they’ve just been better hidden for a few decades, as they were fine voting for Republicans in the dark before Obama came along.
The GOP won the stronghold of the South by pushing black individuals to the Democratic party and then demonizing them for it. The Southern Strategy benefited them for a long time, but the rotten pizza has finally started to smell to the rest of the nation.
-pianoman
Did they give any explanation as to why they are still Republican? With President Obama being pretty similar to many moderate Republicans of a few decades ago, why don’t your friends make a clear statement of dissatisfaction and switch parties?
Jordan – up until this last election, I don’t think they believed the GOP would sink like this. But as they are also not enamored of the Dems either, their strategy has been to simply vote for a 3rd party or write-in candidate. I asked them if they saw this as a throwaway vote but the answer I got was that it was more principled than the 2 guys their parties propped up.
They always tell me Clinton promoted Reublican policies while in office.
@4.Deen : ” At risk? Aren’t Republicans proudly exclaiming that they are, in fact, the “fend for yourself” party?”
That’s what I would’ve thought and said too.
‘Grand Old Party’? So that’s what GOP stands for! I always thought it was ‘God’s Own Party’! Shows how wrong you can be.