The GOP's Bleak Future

In an interesting column today, Bill Kristol notes that 72% of Republicans say they are conservative. His prediction that conservatives will continue to dominate the GOP seems right, but this might not be good news for the GOP itself.

Interesting column today by Bill Kristol in the Washington Post.

[F]ully 72 percent of Republicans say they're conservative. ...

The implications of this for the Republican Party over the remaining three years of the Obama presidency are clear: The GOP is going to be pretty unapologetically conservative. There aren't going to be a lot of moderate Republican victories in intra -party skirmishes. And -- with the caveat that the political world can, of course, change quickly -- there will be a conservative Republican presidential nominee in 2012.

That seems right. But one addition to the math: Since only about 20% of Americans currently identify as Republicans, Bill's numbers imply that conservative Republicans currently constitute about 14.4% of the population.

So while Bill's predictions of continuing conservative/populist dominance within the GOP look accurate, the future looks much bleaker for the GOP itself. As Bill himself acknowledges:

In last week's Post-ABC News poll, a plurality of respondents disapproved of Obama-type health-care reform. In other words, they agree with the Republicans in Congress. But when asked how much confidence they had in congressional Republicans to make the right decisions for the country's future, only 19 percent of respondents expressed much confidence in the GOP -- well behind the confidence levels in congressional Democrats (34 percent) and Obama (49 percent).

Bill's own analysis, in other words, suggests that the current trajectory of the conservative movement is less "onward toward victory," and much more, "a growing fish within a shrinking pond."