GOP Not Ready to Breakout in the Northeast
It's probably a good thing that Parker Griffith's party switch and Rudy Giuliani's announcement about 2010 happened around the same time, because both stories are actually part of the same story.
The story is this: the Republican Party in 2010 will probably be expanding via "in-fill". Opportunities will continue to be missed in places like New York, and opportunities will continue to be found in longtime Democratic districts in the South and elsewhere. And that's not because of the national party structure: it has to do with the states themselves.
New York Republican politics has always been tough. It's a very liberal, high-tax, big-government state, so small-government principles are hard to even articulate, let alone implement. Upstate New York continues to lose population, creating what the insurance companies call a "death spiral"; Low-cost New Yorkers leave, solidifying the position of high-cost New Yorkers, thus raising the per capita cost of living in New York even further, causing even more low-cost New Yorkers to leave, and so on.
That's the obvious part. Less obvious is how the New York Conservative Party structure may not be helping conservatives much, by segregating away talent from the dominant party of the Right in New York. Think about it: if no Conservative Party existed, do you think the make-up of the backroom that selected Scozzafava in the 23rd Congressional District would have been a little different? Would it have been more or less likely to have selected her? (HINT: It came down to one vote.)
Finally, there is perhaps the most insidiously subtle problem; the problem of New York Republicans with a national profile not wanting to run against people with the last name of "Cuomo". Look, the same thing happened with the late Jack Kemp, who passed up a run against Andrew Cuomo's dad back in 1990. When the primary news organ in the country is the New York Times, New York Democrats who can string a sentence together will always be bathed in a beatific light, they will always have a national profile, and it will always be a tough race. That does not mean that they are unbeatable per se; George Pataki managed fine in 1994. Still, no Republican stars ever want to take the plunge, it seems, and that is too bad.
None of this is fixable in the slightest. Okay, none of this is fixable by extremely infrequent Northern Virginia bloggers like myself, or by the national Republican Party, or by the Club for Growth, or by anyone but the remaining New York Republicans and conservatives. Basically, they need to wait for their Chris Christie -- and their Jon Corzine.
Meanwhile, the best opportunities to pick up seats will remain outside the Northeast, in places like the 5th Congressional District of Alabama, where Parker Griffith just calculated that he'd have a better chance in a Republican primary then in a general election against a Republican. That particular congressional district makes for a good example: like the New York 23rd, it was a Democratic district for approximately forever. Unlike the New York 23rd, the party didn't have to keep surreptitiously moving it around the state to keep a hold on it, but set that aside. Simply put, the parties have changed a bit over the last century or two, the American people seem to be in an anti-incumbent mood, so it's time to take a second look at whose districts are really whose. That is what the word for 2010, "in-fill", is all about. Picking off longtime-Democratic districts and Democratic senators in Republican states is not as heartening a thing as a big win in a Democratic state. Arguably, New York needs a Republican/conservative revolution on the state level, for the whole country's sake, even more than John Boehner needs to be Speaker of the House. However. both would be nice, but the latter is more achievable in a world of limited resources, and ultimately, a good year for Republicans will be a good year for Republican New Yorkers.
Merry Christmas to all.