How the Tea Party is Killing the GOP

In an important piece, Jonathan Rauch describes a GOP trapped between winning back Tea Party voters while trying not to alienate the general public.

Jonathan Rauch has written an urgently important, data-intense piece for National Journal on the changing shape of the Republican Party. On first read, it sounds like a pollster-stamped endorsement of the tea party movement as good politics, if not good government.

Over the past decade or so, the country has grown more conservative but less Republican. Why? Pew’s eight-category breakdown of the public by both party and ideology suggests the answer. Independents’ market share has increased at the expense of Republicans’. And, since about 2006, the leading growth category has been conservative independents. ...

What’s up with these right-wing refugees from Republicanism? Pew’s data allow us to compare these voters with partisans and other independents, first in 1997 (or in one case, 1995), when Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution was playing out, and again earlier this year. ...  On the question of whether the government gives short shrift to the middle class, partisans and independent-leaners have all moved in the direction of disenchantment. But on the five other questions, which ask, in various ways, about the size and scope of government, a different and distinctive pattern emerges. First, the lines spread out—and they spread to the right. From 1997 to 2010, opinion among Democrats and Democratic-leaners changed only a little, and not in a consistent direction. Non-leaning independents grew a notch more conservative. Republicans and Republican-leaners, however, grew much more conservative. The result is a wider range of opinion, and with it greater polarization, driven largely by conservatives’ movement away from the center.

But as Rauch notes, this sharpening of conservative ideology - and (as other numbers show) the surge in conservative intensity - threatens to push the Republican party as an institution to the electoral margins.

Republicans’ problem is that core conservative constituencies— particularly white working-class and Christian voters—are shrinking as a share of the electorate. Core center-left constituencies—minorities, left-leaning women, professionals, and socially liberal Millennial Generation voters—are growing. The demographic trends appear to require Republicans to expand beyond their conservative base just to keep from losing ground. But debranded Republicans, unlike ordinary partisans, demand purity in exchange for their votes.

All in all, a nasty dilemma. FrumForum has asked some of our regular contributors to assess and reply. We'll be posting the answers over the next hours and days.