Last Tuesday was a promising loss. It should prompt a reckoning that would have come in 2016 anyway—an acknowledgment that the nation’s demographics are changing, its culture is changing, the Republican base is staying in place or shrinking, not growing. The GOP was going to face trouble at some point, why not face it now?
The loss was also a two-part shock to the system—a shock to the Republican political establishment and to the Republican base. Good things can happen after a shock. Old ways can be shattered, new ones emerge.
The establishment will have to start doing politics differently. For one thing, the GOP operative class’s assumption for 30 years now has been every election is about turning out the base. That’s over. Every election now will be about expanding and broadening the base. That means persuasion—friendly persuasion, arguments, interesting approaches—will have to take the place of the standard old approach, which is get the base excited about its issues, whatever they are, and get them to the polls.
The national party apparatus has grown too top-down in the way it does politics. It raises money up here, from the very wealthy, from Super PACs. It creates ads up here and drops them down there. The ads are created by people who haven’t lived a normal American life in two or three decades, or longer. Republican presidential campaigns now look like the famous picture of George W. Bush staring out the window of Air Force One at Katrina below. But campaigns can’t be done at 30,000 feet anymore. The Obama campaign just showed they’re won from the bottom up as well as the top down: not just with ads but with on-the-ground organization, real get-out-the-vote efforts, personal outreach and engagement.
The disaster called ORCA—the Romney campaign’s failed get-out-the-vote app—was top down. Boston conceived it, arranged it, kept it under wraps. Local volunteers tried desperately to work with it, and then gave up. The general attitude behind ORCA seemed top down—you tell us who’s voted, we’ll find out who hasn’t, you call them and tell ‘em we need ‘em. But what does that have to do with what motivates human beings? Isn’t Election Day a little late to tell people you need them?
The base in turn will have to yield up candidates who can be elected. They won’t be able to say anymore, “We like him and that’s enough.” Because it isn’t enough. They’ll have to say, “We like him but our knowledge of the state suggests they will not. We better consider someone we like just a little less but whose election by the entire state is just a little more likely.” Or else the Republican base will continue to lose, and if they do that they’ll be endangering the country they honestly, passionately love.
That would be strange, to do that.
Bottom line the Republican political establishment is going to have to become more human. The base is going to have to become more professional.
Their great, shared subject is: how to make the Grand Old Party grand again.