What is the future of the Republican Party (serious question)?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm not predicting the death of the Republican Party but where is the party going to be in 10 or 15 years given the demographics. The people who go to the GOP convention just don't represent the demographics of the people who live in this country

The GOP will continue to stay white and rich. The future of the Republican party is to gerrymander and make it impossible for people to vote. The GOP wins when they can reduce turnout. They already had a lot of success with this strategy.

My guess is that you'll see the Republicans lose the popular vote by 8mn but still retain the House. Their future is diluting minority and lower income voting power - gerrymander them into majority white districts, sharply restrict voting dates & times, more ID laws, increase cost of attaining identification, move state elections to off-year cycles to reduce turn-out, etc.

We are going back to the Jim Crow era, IMHO. But instead of it affecting only blacks, it's going to affect everyone who isn't upper middle class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The party has a war to win. The war is to jettison the social agenda and return to a party of limited government. The convenient overlap between social conservatism, limited government, and interventionist foreign policy has ended. Of the three, the social conservatism is the one which loses them the most long term voters.

So you are saying that the GOP has to come together to decide which one of those 3 prongs to jettison - social agenda is your pick. Good point. But given the current philosophical demographics of the part, how does that get done?

That is a good question.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The party has a war to win. The war is to jettison the social agenda and return to a party of limited government. The convenient overlap between social conservatism, limited government, and interventionist foreign policy has ended. Of the three, the social conservatism is the one which loses them the most long term voters.

So you are saying that the GOP has to come together to decide which one of those 3 prongs to jettison - social agenda is your pick. Good point. But given the current philosophical demographics of the part, how does that get done?

There is no issue of which. The center of American politics is what they need in order to grow, no two ways about it. Limited government has broad appeal. And no one has yet proven that foreign policy isolationism would win a lot of votes, like it did for Republicans prior to WWII. Ron Paul tried to push it and got nowhere with that message.

But social conservatism alienates the center, alienates the left, and is barely tolerated by many Republicans. It only energizes the far right, the evangelicals, etc. But in the end they will always vote Republican. There is nowhere else to go. After a period of low turnout, they will return.

It is never easy to change course. But sometimes it has to be done. The transition is painful, but the alternative is failure.