10

ACCEPTANCE

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

—Reinhold Niebuhr

In the wake of Mitt Romney’s embarrassingly lopsided 2012 defeat, the Republican National Committee commissioned a blue-ribbon panel of establishment insiders to perform what some have dubbed an “autopsy.” A more positive way to look at it was as an intervention. And the GOP needed it. So how did the party hit rock bottom? You might be familiar with the narrative. As long as the party was “functional”—as long as it could keep up appearances, put on a clean suit, and act like everything was okay—the party could still fake it. At some point, though, the Republican Party became delusional. It lied to itself—and then it lied to us. Rather than accept reality, the party even said some pretty unbelievable things like, “The polls are skewed.” Then, the GOP started hanging out with a bunch of hangers-on and charlatans. And if you dared to warn the party that something was wrong, you’d quickly find yourself on the outs. You only hurt the ones you love, right?

How does the party get back to its glory days? Going cold turkey won’t work. Just like a person who’s fallen into a harrowing cycle of dependency and addiction, the party needs a program. For those looking for help, my hope is that this book provides a path to the straight and narrow. And, as is always the case, the first step toward recovery is to accept reality. And the reality is that just 32 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of the GOP, according to a July 2015 Pew Research Center poll. (In fairness the Democrats had only a 48 percent approval rating—not exactly something to brag about, but still dramatically better than the GOP.) The good news is that this is somewhat of an improvement. One 2013 Gallup poll showed the GOP was viewed favorably by just 28 percent of Americans—the lowest rating for either party since Gallup began asking the question in 1992.

Sadly, many Republicans refuse to take the vital first step of accepting reality. It’s easier to make excuses. Here’s one: It is common for conservatives to hearken back to Ronald Reagan as an example of the last guy who ran as a conservative and won. It is then suggested that Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney lost simply because they weren’t sufficiently conservative. (George W. Bush presents a harder example; it is generally explained that he won because he ran as a conservative, even if he didn’t govern that way.) The real answer, I suggest, is to look to the Reagan model—but not in a way that looks backward or assumes nominating a hard-core conservative is a panacea. Reagan looked to the future, and so should we. We simply cannot afford to pretend that things aren’t—haven’t—changed. The notion that we could—or should!—want to turn back the clock to the 1950s (or even the 1980s) is a misguided fool’s errand. The idea is not to be nostalgic for some magical past time when things were better, but to use the accumulated wisdom of the past to make our future even brighter. But again, this requires taking action now. As Margaret Thatcher might say, “There is no alternative.”

Here’s why: if demographics are political destiny (and they usually are), then continuing to be the party solely of white, non-college-educated, married Americans—living in rural areas—is unsustainable. But don’t take my word for it. South Carolina representative Mick Mulvaney told a group of conservative South Carolina activists in May of 2015,85 “The largest voting demographic group in the 2016 election will be people between the ages of 18 and 30. The fastest growing demographic group will be Hispanics.” But the rise of Hispanics and millennials is far from the only challenge confronting Republicans.

If you don’t believe Mulvaney, then consider the following statistics:

•  The white share of the electorate is declining. In 2012, Mitt Romney won whites by the same margin Ronald Reagan did in 1980⁸⁶—and by a larger margin than George W. Bush in 2004. The problem is that in 1980, whites were 88 percent of the electorate, but in 2012, they accounted for just 73 percent of the voters.⁸⁷ What is more, assuming voting patterns continue to track census changes, the white share of the electorate will continue to decline.⁸⁸ In fact, the white vote has fallen an average of 2.75 percentage points in each presidential election since 1996.⁸⁹ It’s important to note that the danger for Republicans is not just that whites will be replaced by Hispanic voters. In 2012, Barack Obama garnered 71 percent of the Asian American vote,⁹⁰ the fastest-growing racial group in the U.S.⁹¹

•  Rising educational attainment. Although whites tend to vote Republican, those who attend college are much less likely than non-college-educated whites to do so. Putting this trend in perspective, when Reagan was elected in 1980, only about 14 percent of Americans had a college degree. Today, it’s closer to 30 percent.⁹² What is more, according to the Cook Political Report, “Non-college whites—by far [the GOP’s] best-performing cohort—are slated to fall three points to 33 percent as more college-educated millennials supplant conservative seniors who didn’t attend college.”

•  Smaller share of married voters. Unmarried Americans—especially unmarried women⁹³—are much less likely to vote Republican. Marriage rates continue to decline, and people are waiting longer to get married (for women, the median age is now over twenty-five—for men, it’s nearly twenty-eight, according to the US Census Bureau). When Reagan was elected, about 70 percent of eligible voters were married. Today, the percentage of married and unmarried eligible voters is essentially 50–50.94 Perhaps this is why a Republican running for president hasn’t won the collective female vote since 1988.⁹⁵

•  Fewer rural voters. Michael Dukakis won more counties in 1988 than Barack Obama did in 2012. It wasn’t even close. Dukakis, who lost by ten points, won 819 counties. Conversely, Barack Obama, who won just 690 counties, won the popular vote by four points.⁹⁶ It’s easy to conclude that densely populated regions are gaining voters, while sparsely populated regions are losing them. In 1980, Republicans won nearly half the vote in the one hundred largest US counties. By 2012, that had shrunk to just 38 percent.⁹⁷

•  Republican voters are dying at a faster rate. A look at exit polls and mortality rates suggests that about 2.75 million of the people who voted for Mitt Romney will be dead by 2016.⁹⁸ Of course, some Obama voters will suffer the same fate (some fear, however, that many—especially in Chicago—will still be allowed to vote). But the numbers suggest about 453,000 more Romney donors will have died by the time the next presidential election rolls around. Do people start voting Republican when they get old, or is there something unique about today’s elderly that makes them skew toward the GOP? The GOP had better hope it’s the former and not the latter.

•  Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, and the Electoral College math isn’t getting any easier. There are eighteen states (plus Washington, DC) that have gone Democratic the last six presidential elections. Assuming this holds, Republicans have to run the table, with almost no foreseeable path to the nomination that doesn’t involve winning both Florida and Ohio. Just days after the 2014 midterm elections—where Republicans took control of the US Senate—RNC chairman Reince Priebus acknowledged this reality. “I think we’ve got to be about perfect as a national party to win a national cultural vote in this country. I think the Democrats can be good and win, but we have to be great,” he said.99

These numbers matter for a lot of reasons. But consider this: Exit polls on Election Day in 2012 asked people which quality was the most important to voters, giving them four options. Surprisingly, Romney won three of the four qualities in the category. On questions about leadership, vision, and values, he won. But he lost big on one question. And that question was about which candidate “cares about people like me.” On that question, 81 percent of respondents answered, “Barack Obama.” (Only 18 percent said, “Romney.”) To be sure, part of the problem was Romney’s wooden personality—but it’s a safe bet that part of the problem was that, for a good chunk of the presidential electorate who are not old, white, or rural, the perception is that the Republican Party doesn’t care about people like them.

Instead of accepting the fact that America is an exceptional and pluralistic society that values ideas and the content of someone’s character over identity politics—or that, frankly, whites are simply not reproducing in numbers required to sustain a flourishing republic—a pretty sizable chunk of the conservative movement appears to want to keep the GOP a party almost exclusively for older, whiter, more rural Americans.

Simultaneously, they want to willingly ignore or otherwise antagonize a bloc liberals refer to as “the coalition of the ascendant.” For Reagan-Kemp conservatives, this is a philosophical and mathematical problem. The mathematics are obvious; these conservatives advocate doubling down on cohorts that are losing population. But I don’t want to skip over why this strays from conservative philosophy and, instead, represents a strain of populism.

In fact, some observers worry the GOP might turn into a European-style Right-populist party fueled by white-identity politics. For example, Ben Domenech, a cofounder of RedState.com who now serves as publisher of The Federalist, warns there’s a danger America might turn into “a new two-party system which has on the one hand a center-left / technocratic party, full of elites with shared pedigrees of experience and education, and on the other a nativist-right / populist party, which represents a constant reactive force to the dominant elite.100

“A classically liberal Right is actually fairly uncommon in Western democracies,” Domenech continues, “requiring as it does a coalition that synthesizes populist tendencies and directs such frustrations toward the cause of limited government. Only the United States and Canada have successfully maintained one over an extended period.”

Whereas I see the world as Right versus Left—and right versus wrong—the scorched-earth populists see today’s political paradigm as us versus them. They believe the defining schism in America is between the blue-collar, working-class whites—versus everyone else (the rich elites, immigrants, etc.). As such, Donald Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is especially appealing. They see efforts to make conservatism more palatable to college-educated urbanites, to attract Hispanic voters, and so on, as not only a waste of time but also as counterproductive, inasmuch as it muddies the waters and postpones the day when the blue-collar union worker throws off the Democratic Party’s yoke and joins the populist GOP.

The problem is that many of these conservatives have no problem with playing white-identity politics. Meanwhile, the demographic trends that are obviously so blatantly suicidal in the long term are much less persuasive in the short term. Advocates of the theory that Republicans should double down on their traditional voters (older, white, rural)—while ignoring the “coalition of the ascendant”—have found comfort in the writings of respected elections analyst Sean Trende, whose work at RealClearPolitics.com seems to buttress the argument that, in the short term at least, the smart move for the GOP is to double down and focus on turning out more white voters.

In the wake of Romney’s 2012 loss, Trende authored a piece titled “The Case of the Missing White Voters,” in which he attributed Romney’s loss “almost entirely…to white voters staying home.” Trende is a respected analyst, and his only responsibility is to get the numbers right—and I have no reason to doubt he has. The problem is that this provides reason to postpone making long-term changes that are vital to preserve the GOP’s future.

Liberal writer Bill Scher (a friend) has a theory that political parties must lose three consecutive presidential elections before they are finally forced to accept reality. He points to the fact that Democrats had to lose in 1980, 1984, and 1988 before they were willing to nominate a “New Democrat” governor from the South named Bill Clinton—who broke from liberal orthodoxy on welfare and the death penalty. I’m not sure if Scher is right that it takes three losses, but I do know that progress often comes only as a result of pain and that acceptance is the first step toward recovery. Only after we accept a problem do we have the motivation and courage born out of desperation to endure a season of change.