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 COVER STORY
The Grim Truth
Republicans face a calamitous political situation; but they can act to avoid it
RAMESH PONNURU & RICHARD LOWRY
Pessimism can be self-fulfilling, especially in politics. There’s a reason every candidate who has even a slight shot at victory tries to project a serene optimism about its inevitability. Volunteers, donors, voters: No one likes a loser. And there’s so much pessimism about the Republican party’s prospects in 2008 that it’s understandable that some party officials and conservative pundits feel an urge to tilt the other way.
But for all the understandable natural resistance to pessimism, it has its uses. Fear can be nature’s way to get us to realize that we’re in danger and to take appropriate action. Consider Iraq. If more supporters of the war had been willing to admit that the war was going badly in 2005–6, we might have undertaken the surge and switched our strategy earlier. Only after the Bush administration made that concession was it able to begin making progress on the ground.
Republicans shouldn’t lurch into a paralyzing hopelessness about 2008: They retain the power to change the national political environment in their favor. But neither should they content themselves with false reassurances that the environment is better than it looks. The plain truth is that the party faces a cataclysm, a rout that would give Democrats control of the White House and enhanced majorities in the House and the Senate. That defeat would, in turn, guarantee the confirmation of a couple of young, liberal Supreme Court nominees, putting the goal of moving the Court in a more constitutionalist direction out of reach for another generation. It would probably also mean a national health-insurance program that would irrevocably expand government involvement in the economy and American life, and itself make voters less likely to turn toward conservatism in the future.
This outcome is avoidable only if Republicans understand the sources of their unpopularity. Conservatives tend to blame their travails on Republican politicians’ missteps and especially on their inability to communicate. But the public’s unhappiness with Republicans goes much deeper than any such explanation. A mishandled war, coupled with intellectual exhaustion on the domestic front, has soured the public on them. It is not just the politicians but conservative voters themselves who are out of touch with the public, stuck in the glory days of the 1980s and not thinking nearly enough about how to make their principles relevant to the concerns of today. Unforeseen events could yet change the political environment radically. As it stands, Republicans are sleepwalking into catastrophe.
Even if the party were in good shape, it would face a daunting task in retaining the White House for a third term in a row. In the past 50 years, a party has won the White House three times in a row only once, when the first George Bush succeeded Reagan. Reagan then had an approval rating in the mid-50s. Bush is stuck some 20 points lower, at about freezing — territory where only Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter have been in recent memory. (David Frum’s forthcoming book Comeback notes that no president has been so unpopular for so long since Hoover.) The other four times a party tried to follow up on two terms, it lost.
An unpopular president isn’t the GOP’s only woe. Pollster Scott Rasmussen has found that the percentage of Americans who consider themselves Republicans declined steadily from 37.1 in the 2004 election to 30.8 in May of this year. It has rebounded slightly since then to 32.6 in September, but Republicans still trail Democrats by about 5 points. Other polls have had more ominous numbers. In a Pew Research Center poll earlier this year that asked people which party they identified with or leaned toward, Democrats led Republicans 50 to 35 percent. Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute explains that the Reagan years saw a surge in Republican-party identification, and it has now washed away.
The political calendar and map are also conspiring against Republicans. In the Senate, Republicans have to defend 21 seats and Democrats only 12. They face tough races to retain seats in Minnesota, Maine, Oregon, New Hampshire, Virginia, Colorado, and New Mexico, while vulnerable Democratic seats are hard to find.
In the House, Republicans have to pick up 16 seats, at the same time they are defending 14 seats (so far) where incumbents have retired. According to Rasmussen’s latest poll, taken in early October, Americans prefer Democratic congressional candidates to Republicans 48 to 36 percent. It was the third month in a row that the Democrats enjoyed a double-digit advantage.
Election analyst Stu Rothenberg sees a 2- to 6-seat Republican loss in the Senate, with the House projecting somewhere in a band between a draw and a 12-seat Republican loss. That seems a very reasonable guess. Even a draw would be a serious setback. A lot of freshman Democrats won in squeakers in 2006. Next year is the best chance Republicans will ever have to unseat them. (Even Dick Gephardt’s House Democrats took back a quarter of the seats they lost in 1994 at the next election.) If they do not even make progress in regaining a majority, we may be looking at a Democratic Congress for many years to come.
Democrats will be able to fight on this favorable terrain with more resources than Republicans. The RNC has done well against the DNC, outraising it $63 million to $40.5 million, with a cash-on-hand advantage of $16.5 million to $3.3 million. Otherwise, Democrats are winning the money race going away. Democratic presidential candidates have raised a stunning $200 million, 70 percent more than the Republican candidates. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee leads the National Republican Senatorial Committee 2 to 1. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had $22.1 million on hand as of August, the National Republican Congressional Committee only $1.6 million (it started the year $16 million in debt).
Throughout the Clinton and Bush years, the Republican campaign committees had a fundraising edge. Money helped Republicans hold on to Congress in difficult years such as 1996, and softened defeat even in 2006. In 2008, House Republicans could have just as many retirements and just as tough a national environment as last year — but with much less cash.
The NRCC is still collecting PAC money, even though business is now hedging its bets. (USA Today reports that Democratic presidential candidates have raised nearly twice as much as Republicans among the 20 top-giving industries.) But two sources of cash have dried up.
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