The Tea Party Minority
The estimable Ross Douthat writes the following this morning:
The Tea Party marries fringe concerns (repeal the 17th Amendment!) to a timely, responsible-seeming message about spending and deficits. Which is why, for now at least, it’s winning over independents in a way that movements like the Birchers rarely did.
This is one of those sentences that - while completely true in itself - creates a mistaken impression, and probably reflects a mistaken impression in the mind of the author.
It's important to understand that the "independent" bloc of voters is increasingly composed of ex-Republicans, "debranded Republicans" as Jonathan Rauch has astutely termed them.
Rauch:
Far from being wishy-washy, in 1997 Republican-leaning independents were about as skeptical of government as were Republicans. In 2010, they became, if anything, even more conservative. Today, your average Republican-leaning independent is at least as anti-government as your average Republican. Why? Probably because self-identified Republicans include moderates and even a sprinkling of liberals. Republican-leaners seem to be less diverse ideologically. They look like not just Republicans in exile; they look like conservative Republicans in exile. The seepage of Republican debranding has been from the right edge of the party.
Rauch notes the following facts:
1) The country has turned more conservative since President Obama took office: conservative identification has risen to all-time peak of 42% of the electorate.
2) At the same time, Republican partisanship has actually declined, to post-Watergate levels of 25% of the electorate.
3) Within the category of "independents," the fastest growing group are conservative independents, conservative non-Republicans. Conservative independents now make up 12% of the electorate. These are the people to whom the tea party most strongly appeals.
4) Thus, while it is literally true that the tea party is calling independents to Republicanism, it is an illusion to imagine that tea partyism offers the basis for a national political majority, at least not in a presidential year.
5) This is the point that people like me and Ross (et tu, Ross?) have been pounding for half a decade: The Fox News audience is not the nation. The Tea Party message -- cut taxes and preserve Medicare -- does not make sense in policy terms and only appears to work as politics because of (1) low turnout in a congressional year and (2) the anxieties created by recession.
You hear a lot of comparisons to past elections: 1994, even the historic Republican landslide of 1894. The question Republicans should be most seriously considering is whether the real analogy isn't 1946.
The Congress elected in 1946 did important work, and redirected the country away from the wilder edge of New Deal and wartime controls.
But that Republican majority lasted only two years. When the big presidential electorate voted in 1948, it redirected the redirectors. The Republicans lost 75 seats in the House of Representatives, 9 in the Senate. Republicans had to learn painfully: the New Deal could be contained and reformed, but it would not be overturned. Four years later, Dwight Eisenhower was offering Americans a "modern Republicanism" very different from the Republicanism of 1946.