Republican Rebranding

Some would have it that we are witnessing the collapse of the conservative movement in the United States. Bloggers and pundits are talking about a predicament akin to the one faced by the British Conservative Party after Labor’s 1997 landslide – reduction of the party to a radical right-wing rump, resulting a decade or more in the wilderness. It would certainly seem that the Republicans are in trouble – they got hammered in 2006 and 2008, and 2010 probably isn’t going to go so well for them either. President Bush has left no obvious successor, and the financial crisis has made nonsense of the Reagan revolution. To make things worse, America is finally, finally, tilting to the left, or so we are led to believe.

The suggestion, though, that the Republicans of 2008 are in the same boat as the Tories of 1997 rests on shaky ground. For one thing, Barack Obama beat John McCain only by about 7% – a far cry from the 13% lead that Labor won over the Conservatives in ’97. The Conservatives lost about half of their seats in the House of Commons, in the end amounting to a little more than 25% of MPs. By comparison, Republicans will hold about 40% of the seats in both houses of the 111th Congress, and denied Democrats a much-craved 60-seat majority in the Senate. A defeat it was, but 2008 was not a rout.

Needless to say, if the Republicans have not yet been reduced to a rump of right-wing old White men, they are certainly a party at risk. The demographic groups that voted for McCain include: Whites, over-60s, the most-religious, and rural voters. Those demographics don’t look good. To top it off, the Iraq War could well have cost Republicans an entire generation of voters.

Again, many people have been looking to the Tories for a model of how the Republican Party can beat the demographics and make itself electable again. Under leader David Cameron, the young, charismatic former PR exec who has been running the party since 2005, the party has supposedly reinvented itself, tackling environmental issues and climate change head-on, dropping opposition to gay rights and civil partnerships, and generally promoting what Cameron, channeling George Bush, refers to as “compassionate conservatism.” The result has been a thumping lead over Labor in opinion polls for quite some time. While the credit crunch has reduced the trend to some degree, the Conservatives are still polling about 9% ahead of Labor, enough to give Cameron the air of a Prime Minister-in-waiting.

The problem, though, with the Tory model is that it would be ill-suited to today’s Republican Party. The Republicans have long been much further to the right than their Conservative cousins across the Atlantic, and are cemented to their Evangelical Christian base, for whom a moderate position on issues like gay rights and abortion is quite literally heresy. To abandon this base would be electoral suicide. A little-known fact is that overall turnout in 2008 was almost the same as it was in 2004. This is because the enormous numbers of enthusiastic, new Democratic voters were canceled out by all of the disappointed Republicans who decided to stay home. Compare this to ’04, where George Bush won almost entirely on the basis of his get-out-the-vote effort among the most conservative Republicans, and you’ll see the problem the Republicans face.

The page the Republicans should take out of the Tory playbook, however, is their populist fiscal policy. One of Cameron’s first promises as opposition leader was that any Conservative government would match Labor’s spending plans – meaning no cuts to popular social services like the National Health Service. Bush’s big-government failure can mostly be chalked up to the creation of the behemoth that is the Department of Homeland Security; the unpopularity of his fiscal policy is traceable more to his attempt to privatize Social Security and dismantle Medicare. A socially conservative, fiscally populist Republican Party will be friendlier to minorities and the urban poor, and can appeal not just to Whites and conservative Christians, but also to Hispanics and even, conceivably, Blacks. This, indeed, was the coalition that defeated Prop 8 in California (a state Obama won by 24 points). 2008 changed America, but it didn’t change it that much. Perhaps social issues like abortion and gay marriage will hold less water in future than they have in the past, but a general social conservatism has long characterized the United States, and offers the Republicans the broadest appeal across all demographics.

Sure enough, conservatives are now seeing their greatest chance of reinvigorating the party to be the wrangling over President-elect Obama’s future Supreme Court nominees. Moreover, it is much safer for the Republicans to jettison their fiscally conservative wing than their socially conservative wing – in point of fact, it has practically happened already. Once that’s over and done with, all the Republicans may need is a little bit of rebranding.