[Long] Dear Republican Party...

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After reading through numerous threads, posts, and news articles (both domestic and foreign), I've come to realized that the GOP may be on its way out unless its leadership makes some drastic changes in its behavior and policies. Somewhere in the last few years, the GOP stopped being a viable alternative to a flawed and patch-worked DNC. In my opinion, Mr. Obama kept his job mainly because people voted against both the Republican party and Mr. Romney.

Below is a long post summing up MY OPINION of the situation as I see it, and some suggestions as to how the GOP might get back on track and remain a guiding force for America's future. But first, here's a look at some of the gaffes that may have also contributed to Mitt Romney's defeat:

1. Todd Akin - Fake Abortions (2008):
Todd Akin gives a speech on the House floor denouncing abortion providers as "terrorists", claiming that they sometimes perform abortions on women who "are not actually pregnant", thus enraging women's-rights groups.

2. Mitt Romney - Firing People for Fun & Profit (January 9, 2012):
Romney's comments that, "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me" and "I'm not concerned about the very poor" brought immediate attacks from his rivals and even a mocking ringtone. The candidate later told the Wall Street Journal that it was one moment that makes him "try and be a little more careful in what I say".

3. Todd Akin - Legitimate Rape (February 18, 2012):
Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) attempts to justify his extreme opposition to abortion by claiming that victims of "legitimate rape" rarely get pregnant.

4. Eric Fehrnstrom - The "Etch-A-Sketch" Speech (March 21, 2012):
Senior Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom caused quite a row when he said on CNN's "Starting Point" that the fall campaign is "like Etch-A-Sketch. You can shake it up and we start all over again." The statement would haunt the Romney camp for the rest of the campaign as both his primary challengers and the Obama team pounced on the statement as proof of Romney's flip-flopping on issues.

5. Mitt Romney - The 47% Who Don't Matter (May 15, 2012):
In one ill-fated fundraiser, Romney managed to offend Palestinians, Latinos and nearly half of American voters, some of the same people he's counting on for support at the polls. A surreptitious recording made during a private fundraiser at the home of Sun Capital executive Marc Leder was leaked on September 17 to the media and included, among other comments, Romney refering to the government-assistance dependent this way: "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what ... My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." Romney's ratings immediately dropped in the polls.

6. Mitt Romney - Overseas Offensive (July, 2012):
Despite his earlier pledge to watch what he says, Romney made verbal gaffes in questioning London's ability to host the Olympics to angering Palestinians by suggesting Israel's culture played a role in its economic success. The ensuing fallout lent a disastrous air to the remainder of his trip to Europe and the Middle East.

7. Clint Eastwood - The Empty Chair Act (August 30, 2012):
Actor and director Clint Eastwood's baffling monologue to an empty chair at the Republican National Convention caused no small amount of head scratching, late night talk show jokes and social buzz. His chair routine also upstaged Romney, who gave his convention speech later that night.

8. Mitt Romney - Binders Full of Women (October 16, 2012):
In the second debate, Romney's comments about using "binders full of women" while Massachusetts governor to help diversify his cabinet led to Internet quips and criticism.

9. Mitt Romney - Geography Lesson (Oct. 22, 2012):
During the third presidential debate, Mitt Romney stated, "Syria is Iran's only ally in the Arab world. It's their route to the sea." In fact, Iran and Syria do not share a border and Iran has direct access to international waters through its large coastline on the Gulf.

10. Richard Mourdock - Rape, Pregnancy, & God's Intent (October 23, 2012):
Mourdock declares during a public debate that pregnancy resulting from rape is "something God intended to happen". Mourdock also said pregnancies resulting from rape should not be an exception to an abortion ban.

Now for the main article...

Campaigning & Election Night

The Romney campaign and the Republican National Committee entered Election Day boasting about the millions of voter contacts they had made in all the key states.

GOP volunteers had made their contacts using an automated telemarketing VOIP-system, allowing them to dial registered voters at a rapid clip and punch in basic data about them on each phone's keypad, feeding basic information into the campaign's voter file.

But these volunteer callers were met with angry hang-ups and answering machines, as well as other anti-telemarketing tactics, just as much as actual voters on the other end of the line. It was a voter contact system that favored quantity over quality.

Obama organizers, meanwhile, were already deeply embedded in small towns and big cities, and focused their persuasion efforts on real, live, face-to-face, personal contact. Not only did Obama team get their supporters to the polls, they found new voters everywhere, most of whom seemed delighted that they could put a friendly face on an otherwise bitter campaign.

After the dust had cleared, the GOP field operation, which had derided the Obama operation and gambled on technology to push them over the top, seemed built on a house of cards.

When it became clear about midnight that President Barack Obama was safely on the way to re-election, a handful of cranky and inebriated Republican donors wandered about Romney's election night headquarters, angrily demanding that the giant television screens inside the ballroom be switched from CNN to Fox News, where Republican strategist Karl Rove was making frantic, face-saving pronouncements about how Ohio was not yet lost.

Many delusional people, led by Donald Trump, are now calling for the Electoral College to betray their commissions and constituents, and put Mitt Romney into the White House.

Education

While education did not seem to be a main issue in this campaign, it became obvious that some Republican leaders had little or no understanding of how human reproduction actually works, and what happens when a woman is raped. Educated people - especially women - cringed at the realization that at least part of the GOP platform is based on a centuries-old myth.

Otherwise, it is not unusual for a medical or engineering student to amass a quarter of a million dollars in debt from the principle and interest on tuition loans. Only the wealthy seem unconcerned with this, and the GOP gives the impression of favoring only the wealthy, leaving those deeply in debt for their educations to turn away from the Republican party.

GLBTs

The GOP should stop thinking that the American family is made up only of a mom and a dad and two-point-three kids. The American family is also made up of a lot of two-parent families where both parents are of the same gender. Gender-neutral policies with regard to civil partnerships (and maybe even same-sex marriages) and the associated inheritance and insurance laws would go a long way toward establishing support within the GLBT population.

Hispanics & Blacks

Hispanics, the nation's fastest-growing group, have bristled at Republican attacks on illegal immigration, which some people consider a slap at all Latinos, legal or not. But Hispanics also seem to perceive the GOP as a party favoring only the rich, and that Republicans are selfish and out only for themselves at the expense of "La Raza".

The national exit polls tell the story. Latinos are the fastest growing-segment of the population. Their share of the vote expanded from 9% in 2008 to 10% in this election. The president won 67% of the vote four years ago. He increased that to 71% this year.

The percentage of black voters who voted for Romney is at or close to zero. This is a dire fact, as it reveals so much. One of the reasons African-American voters do not support Romney is that they see the Republican Party's treatment of Obama, from the first weeks of his presidency, as an assault on a kind of racial collective dignity. This includes remarks such as GOP trash-talker John Sununu's description of the first black president of the United States as "lazy" after his poor debate performance.

Jobs

For months, the Obama campaign touted the taxpayer bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler, and the bailouts were given prominent prime-time placement during the Democratic National Convention in early September.

Mitt Romney opposed the bailout and the Obama campaign and other Democrats have attacked Romney over his opposition to the federal intervention, which aided the companies through their eventual bankruptcies. By aiding these companies (Ford managed its own bailout), the Obama administration kept their rank-and-file workers employed, and gained the support of the United Auto Workers union -- a very powerful ally, indeed.

It seemed to work. Nearly six in ten Ohio voters said they approved of the federal government's role in helping the troubled domestic automakers, and according to exit polls, the president won a full three-quarters of those voters.

Wealth

As more wealth accumulates to fewer people, the GOP has come under control of a narrowing field of supporters with an inherently narrowing field of interests. While money does play a large part in campaigning, it is the final tally of the popular vote (and the subsequent rubber stamp of the Electoral College) that determines who gets elected president. All the money in the world means nothing once disgruntled voters cast their ballots.

Whites

The Republican Party relies overwhelmingly on white voters, a steadily shrinking share of the population.

Obama's share of the white vote dropped from 43% four years ago to 39% this year. But that was negated by the shrinking of the white vote from 74% of the electorate four years ago to 72% now. Some GOP strategists said that the white vote needed to be 74% for Romney to win.

Women

The party gives people the impression that opposing abortion is its top women-related issue, with an associated contempt for the large population of single moms trying to make ends meet and keep their children in decent schools.

With women comprising about half of the aggregate voting public, this impression is a big shot in the foot of any GOP candidate.

Youths

According to national exit polls, voters in the 18 to 29 year age bracket increased in numbers from 17% to 18% of the electorate from 2004 to 2008. They made up 19% of the electorate this time around. That jump in size from four years ago made up for the president's drop in capturing the youth vote, from 66% in 2008 to 60% in 2012.

Summary & Conclusion

The Republicans are well on their way to becoming a permanent minority party unless it starts becoming more moderate and appealing to a wider political base by attracting more GLBTs, Hispanics, African Americans, Asians, women, and other diverse comunities. This problem will only continue to get worse for them in the future as the numbers of minorities grow due to a higher birth rate and illegal immigrants gaining citizenship.

Being identified solely with wealthy white males may have worked in their favor before the Civil Rights Movement and Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, and may have even made a favorable impression during the Reagan and Bush administrations, but this identity has now become an embarrassing burden for the Grand Old Party.

They must also downplay their fundamental Christian roots in order to appeal to a growing, if not already dominant, voting population of non-Christians, Agnostics, and Atheists.

The signs of desperation inside the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center on Election Night were symptomatic of a Republican Party now standing at a crossroads, with not much road left in sight.

The Republican Party must find a way to temper the hard-line talk about such topics as abortion, jobs and the economy, and immigration without infuriating conservatives who oppose compromise, and who will not even consider anything other than strict conservative policies. They have to figure out what kind of policy changes must be made for the GOP to remain a viable alternative to left-leaning and moderate philosophies.

Unless there are drastic changes within the GOP resulting in a wider and more favorable appeal to the aggregate voter, the GOP is doomed to become a third-party relic of the past, much like the Whigs that they replaced.

I told you it would be long. Thank you all for your time and bandwidth.

Interesting take on it, and I agree with a fair chunk of it. I may or may not take the time to properly go through and comment on individual tidbits later on.

Here are some thoughts.

Education:
It is not an education issue. It is a theological position that needs to be destroyed and never resurrected. You can't educate the functions of reproduction to people whose theological positions will always come first. The Democrats won't deal with the Unions who are a blight on our education system. They won't tie performance and spending, and oppose any system to continually test for progress.

African Americans and Hispanics:
Hispanics I have hope for. African Amerians I don't. There is nothing to be hopeful with regards to them. They vote 90% of the time for the Democrat despite being the slowest group to move into the middle class. It is inexcusable, and are plagued by problems that everyone else has seemed to have been able to deal with. They are almost hopeless. I am speaking specifically of American born blacks who have been here for many generations, who share in the black-slave experience. Blacks from Africa who've come recently are enviable, they take nothing for granted, are very entrepreneurial, and have far far less issues with upward mobility then most ethnic groups in general. The GOP cannot lower themselves to the level of the Democrats with regards to Blacks, just concede them as a group and go only after hispanics.

Jobs
The UAW would have supported Obama even if Obama had not bailed them out. Obama bailed the UAW out as he did Unionized state and federal workers, to the tune of several hundred billion dollars. It is their third most loyal constituent behind blacks and single women, and one whose interests are taken very seriously by his administration, despite the fact that they make up such a tiny portion of the electorate.

Youth, Women, Whites, and Wealth:
Money is only important if you have the right candidate with the right message. Meg Whitman, Guiliani, Romney, Mcmahon, and a good number of other Republicans have lost despite of the wealth they've put into their campaign. The white % of the electorate might be dropping because less whites are not showing up to the polls.

The women vote is not something the GOP can help, they are more then often college educated, liberal to begin with, so the GOP should only target working single moms that are high-school educated with an agenda that is friendly to them.

The Youth cannot be won without many many years to undo the left ward bias and framing of the world that has framed their view of the world. If they come around, ever, it'll be in their 30's or later. My generation, the echo-boomers, is a lost cause.

the key difference between the two parties is quite simple. The GOP is pretty straight backed on being a party of fiscal policy, while the democrats of being a party to cover every "liberal" minority group. Because of the democrats action all of those oposing the liberal side go to the republicans. Giving it the conservative backing. Problem is that conservative backing just isnt enough to combat 10000000000 special interest groups and the people that go to vote just for a minor singular issue. Too worried about things the gov shouldnt even have the power to uphold to vote for the side thats willing to let local gov do its job on those issues

The solution for Republicans is to moderate themselves on some issues(Abortion, Gay marriage, land-use laws, gun rights), Reform on others (Energy, Entitlements, Education, Economy). I guess I'm on the reform end of the party, the issues that compels to the polls are the ones that need considerable reform. Immigration is an issue that the GOP needs to both moderate on, and reform - I support amnesty in full and funding even more serious efforts to patrol the border.


And most importantly of all... control the way the issues are framed, and answer every critique. An old talmudic saying: "Silence is agreement" -- and that couldn't be more true from an independent observers point of view.

As long as the Republican party remains hijacked by Christian Crazies they will never moderate their position.

ruveyn

I agree, I've always thought social issues should be understood by locals as a local issue for their state to determine.

The problem is that the federal government spends money to prop up institutions who take one side of the social war, ie planned parenthood, instead of sending that money to the state level and having states determine whether its taxpayer base should be subsidizing women's abortions via planned parenthood subsidies.

The things that the federal government should be concerned with is entitlements, defense, immigration, energy policies, education, the economy, etc.

And we can't win without them either.

The GOP has always been a big tent, the Democrats are not a big-tent party, they don't have this issue because their diversity is only skin deep -- the overwhelming majority of them do not break with the Left's Race, Gender, Class, and Environment doctrines.

The GOP has the diversity that counts: Ideological diversity. But that gives us the present issues we have. The crazies are destructive and we may have lost a few generations because of them.

Galileo spoke of the bible as the book of God's word, and that, of course, the bible is inerrant - however, any text can be misinterpreted, and we must be sensitive to the possibility that that is the case. I think Christians need to return to the old testament and square Jesus's words with the Jew that Jesus was.

Considering all the damage the Dems did in the first half of Obama's first term when they had a supermajority. It'll be a cold day in hell before we let a single party have that much power again.

Considering that Christianity is decreasing in the US and atheism is increasing, I seriously doubt that Christianity is the solution to the problems facing the GOP. Why bet on an eroding voter base?

I'm not quite sure.

The christians not only have the numbers, they also are the only group of Americans reproducing at or above replacement rates whereas the secular folks who are gaining in numbers are not reproducing at replacement rates... well below it actually. So they will take their ideas to the grave,... but not before ruling and shaping the landscape for a few decades.

We can't get around the fact that over 20-30% of the electorate are conservative evangelical or conservative christian of some kind. That is why we have to take the battle to them and challenge some of these silly doctrines that make a mockery out of God.

Yep. but by pining interests for small groups the large gov can then get more votes AND control its people more strictly. win win for them. lose lose for the people

As the human race advances, it will forget its superstitions. There is no avoiding that. The Greek and Roman gods have been forgotten. The Pagan gods have been forgotten. Ahura-Mazda has been forgotten. One day, God will be relegated to the same "man, people used to believe this?" pile of discarded religions.

Humans have been living in cities and communities for 10,000 years. That is when the agricultural mode became dominant compared to the hunter-gatherer mode. In that time people are still praying to unnatural beings and hoping that the deity of their choice will suspend the laws of physics just for them.

The superstitions are wired into our genes and we have to work damned hard to over ride them.

ruveyn

http://www.pewforum.org/Unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx

The Republican Party is still alive and well in local and State level elections, but it appears the party is dead in the race for the Presidency for the future. The Party cannot change their position on abortion without the potential of losing it all. Because of one factor, religion. This is the determining factor that most religious affiliated supporters will not budge on. I amazingly heard a right wing talk show host today, state that the party should bend on gay civil unions, away from the ban initiatives, conceding that the republican party has to do something to adapt to the changing United States demographics. Others are just conceding it's the end of the world as we know it, which it likely is as far as another Republican President going into office.

http://allendowney.blogspot.com/2012/07/secularization-in-america-part-seven.html

And in graphs provided from the link above the increase in the level of internet usage is correlated almost directly with the drop in religious affiliation in the last decade.





It is interesting in the graph that while protestant participation, part of the loyal core of the Republican Party, has dropped 10% since 1995, Catholic participation has remained relatively stable, obviously as a result of the increasing Latino population, but not increasing which is an indication that without the Latino influence the Catholic participation would be decreasing, as well.

It's interesting that both protestant participation and crime in other widely available graphs both started their drop in the early 1990's which has continued to the present day. Religion was once the opiate of the masses; it is becoming clearer that other stronger widely available avenues for the "opiates" of the masses are taking it's place, and likely, in part, changing almost everything in culture, including religious and political demographics, crime statistics, and reduced rates of reproduction.

However, to address the point made in one of the previous posts, about religious people reproducing, 75% of religiously unaffiliated youth, from the Pew Research, were identified as coming from religiously affiliated families. Popular culture appears to be a larger driving factor than influence of upbringing in church. There is no doubt though, that developing countries will continue to lead the world in fertility. The internet appears to potentially be another driving factor of birth control, along with the general decrease in religious affiliation.

The Republican party will remain alive and well in rural vs. metropolitan leaning localities and states with low demographics of ethnic groups and higher rates of religious affiliation, to retain the potential for a majority in the house of representatives for years to come, but the potential for the senate is lower, and the potential for the Presidency is becoming statistically impossible. Obama is the most hated Republican candidate on record; this was likely the Republican's last chance of putting a republican President in office, because of the evidenced changing US demographics.

So, to use a sarcastic analogy, Al Gore might have lost his election, but the invention of the internet was potentially a precipitating factor for the eventual downfall of the potential for any Republican President, and a more egalitarian mix of a nation. Obama, the man and the President, is an icon of change in American History. But, he didn't build all of that. Nerds like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Obama, Al Gore (I realize he didn't really invent the internet), Steve Jobs, and their colleagues, had and have a huge impact on the future of the world. The ultimate revenge of the nerds.

http://nerdsforobama.org/about-us

Not necessarily a good thing though, if and when it gets to the point that the house, senate, and Presidency are always in control of one party, as the country would lose a balance of power, that it always has had to date, potentially resulting in a substantial part of the population, disenfranchised from feeling properly represented by elected officials, at the national level.

Revenge of the Nerds. Gawd, I love it! I feel it is payback for all the grief the NT bullies laid on me when I was a kid.

ruveyn