Republicans Are Not Going to Go Away – The Republican Party Might

The Republicans are not going to go away but the Republican Party might. At the local level, the Republicans are still a vibrant, contending political force but because the national party is so dysfunctional their party's very existence is in doubt.

The national Republican Party is destroying itself with ideological tests about how conservative a candidate has to be.

At the national level, the Republican Party is close to collapse. The misbegotten campaigns and candidacies of John McCain and Mitt Romney left the national Republican Party in tatters. Neither of them had, nor did they deserve, the willing support of party regulars. Their campaigns became a source of ridicule, profitable only to Saturday Night Live, The Colbert Report and TV stations in battleground states..

The Republican leaders seem hell-bent on ignoring reality. They thought they were winning, even after they had lost. They thought they had a good chance to win the Senate and did not even come close.

The national Republican Party, at this stage of its evolution, is an unwieldy amalgamation of hyper-conservatives (the tea party types), evangelicals (abortion and gay marriage), moderate conservatives (old, white guys), Wall Street (lots and lots of money), billionaires (even more money), the US Chamber of Commerce (anti-labor) and libertarians (otherwise homeless). Each of these groups comes to the table with a set-in-concrete agenda, little of which is shared even by other Republicans.

None of these groups is willing to reach across the ideological and color divide. The Republican Party seems unwilling to accept that it cannot win if it carelessly alienates Hispanic, black, young and women voters. The demographics in these groups are probably the most serious problem facing the party of old, white guys.

Choosing a candidate acceptable to all of these constituencies is impossible because each has an ideological veto power. As a result the Republican candidates engage in a cynical flip-flopping that is offensive to everyone. And so they have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. The party is doomed to go into each election with a crippled candidate and a shrinking constituency.

At the local level, the opposite is true, the Republican Party is not just vibrant, it is ascendant. These differences are a real Republican morale booster.

The Republicans hold 30 governorships, the Democrats 20. The Republicans have both Houses in 28 states, the Democrats in only 18. The redistricting after the 2010 Census left a gerrymandered mess of a political map that strongly favors Republicans for the next 10 years. That is the fruit of winning local elections.

The Gallup poll reports that 31% of voters say they are Democrats and only 28% Republican, with 38% saying they are independents. But when you ask the independents which way they lean, the result is a 45/45% tie. Obviously, the Republicans are not about to disappear.

So, why doesn't that local accomplishment and success trickle up? Because the national Republican Party cannot handle the diversity and compromise that is essential at the local level. When nominating and voting, major constituencies impose an ideological test on House, Senate and presidential candidates.

To be nominated at the national level, candidates have to be, as Romney put it, "severely conservative."  No one can meet that standard and be acceptable to all the other constituencies in the party. No one would claim that Romney was ideologically correct, he merely outlasted all the others in a thin field.

The "severely conservative" constituencies are, we have to fear, digging in for the long run. While their successes have been overblown, they have proven dangerous to moderation and to the success of the national party. The broadly acceptable candidates like Tim Pawlenty or Jon Huntsman were vetoed early on for not being conservative enough. If all Republican candidates at the national level have to be severely conservative, the national Republican Party's existence is clearly in danger.

That doesn't have to be. Half of Americans consider themselves conservative so a broadly acceptable Republican platform is feasible. Of course, demographics are a problem but fixing the immigration position is not that difficult, as Jeb Bush is apparently doing. Similarly, without Obama on the ticket the black vote will shift. And it should be possible to shut off language offensive to women.

If, however, the "severely conservative" continue to veto all the moderates, the Republicans will not win national offices. At some point, the local constituencies will have had enough. A realignment will take place where these groups will join with dissident or centrist Democratic constituencies to form a new party.

It is now likely that in the next 10 years, the Grand Old Party will go the way of the Whigs. Local party members will merely change the name and emblems to something new and go on as before fighting for small government, low taxes and less spending as they always have. The new national party, whatever it is called, will avoid ideology and learn to live with diversity and compromise.