How To Win In 2016: Debunking The Five Myths That Will Lead to Republican Defeat Read online

  The GOP masterminds have a plan to win the 2016 election. Their plan, as always, requires ideological sacrifice on the part of the members of the base; cash from the so-called establishment; a souped-up technological plan; and the Democratic nominee to be caught in bed with a promiscuous horse. If the Democratic nominee is a Clinton, that promiscuous horse will have to be underage in order for the scandal to take effect.

  Republicans are at a decided disadvantage when it comes to presidential elections. Unlike off-year elections, in which only the most motivated voters show up to the polls – and of late, with a Democratic president, the most motivated voters tend to be Republican – presidential cycles bring out the casual voters who desperately want their sticker and the warm, sticky feeling of good citizenship. Never mind that uninformed voting represents the opposite of good citizenship – Americans have been told that voting represents their civic duty, no matter their level of involvement in politics and policy. That’s why more Americans show up for presidential elections, and that’s why those of us – like me – who foolishly attempted to argue with 2012 polls showing Barack Obama in the lead, relying on 2010 cross-sections, ended up dead wrong.

  And the Republican conundrum goes further than presidential election year turnout. While pundits routinely bring up states like Florida, Virginia, and Ohio as the swing states, 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney could have won all three states and still lost the election handily. Any candidate must win only 270 electoral votes to win the White House. Democrats typically lead off with 225 electoral votes before a vote is cast. Republicans, by contrast, start with just 180 electoral votes. Here is the basic breakdown, state by state, including Washington, D.C. Every state granted to one party or another has been won by that party in four straight presidential elections:

  State

  GOP

  Democrat

  Swing States

  Alabama

  9

  Alaska

  3

  Arizona

  11

  Arkansas

  6

  California

  55

  Colorado

  9

  Connecticut

  7

  Delaware

  3

  D.C.

  3

  Florida

  29

  Georgia

  16

  Hawaii

  4

  Idaho

  4

  Illinois

  20

  Indiana

  11

  Iowa

  6

  Kansas

  6

  Kentucky

  8

  Louisiana

  8

  Maine

  4

  Maryland

  10

  Massachusetts

  11

  Michigan

  16

  Minnesota

  10

  Mississippi

  6

  Missouri

  10

  Montana

  3

  Nebraska

  5

  Nevada

  6

  New Hampshire

  4

  New Jersey

  14

  New Mexico

  5

  New York

  29

  North Carolina

  15

  North Dakota

  3

  Ohio

  18

  Oklahoma

  7

  Oregon

  7

  Pennsylvania

  20

  Rhode Island

  4

  South Carolina

  9

  South Dakota

  3

  Tennessee

  11

  Texas

  38

  Utah

  6

  Vermont

  3

  Virginia

  13

  Washington

  12

  West Virginia

  5

  Wisconsin

  10

  Wyoming

  3

  TOTAL

  180

  225

  133

  This does not include states that lean. When we include states that went Democrat in three of four election cycles, we must add New Hampshire, Oregon, Wisconsin. The swing states that went Republican in three of the last four cycles are Indiana and North Carolina. Our new calculation: Democrats 246, Republicans 206. That means Democrats must win just two swing states or Florida to win the presidency. Republicans must win Florida, Virginia, Ohio, and another state in order to win the presidency. If Republicans lose Florida, they must sweep every other non-Democratic-leaning swing state. All of them.

  This, to put it mildly, is an uphill battle. And it’s only going to get worse for Republicans over time, as demographics change. As Aaron Blake of the Washington Post points out, if Democrats and Republicans show up at the same rate to vote in 2016 as they did in 2012, Democrats will win 347 electoral votes to 191 for Republicans; if voters split their vote as they did in 2004, thanks to demographic changes in the electorate, Democrats would still win 291 electoral votes.

  So, what can Republicans do to win?

  Republicans can dismiss five myths that will undoubtedly lead to defeat, and instead embrace the facts that could lead them to victory.

  Myth #1: Republicans Can Win By Drawing Hispanic Votes

  Karl Rove and the other establishment geniuses of the right believe that Republicans can only win by duplicating George W. Bush’s 2004 Hispanic vote percentage. There simply aren’t enough white votes to keep Republicans competitive, they say. As Rove wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2013, “To have prevailed over Mr. Obama in the electoral count, Mr. Romney would have had to carry 62.54% of white voters. That's a tall order, given that Ronald Reagan received 63% of the white vote in his 1984 victory, according to the Congressional Quarterly's analysis of major exit polls. It's unreasonable to expect Republicans to routinely pull numbers that last occurred in a 49-state sweep.” Instead, Rove suggested, Republicans should aim for a Romney-esque 60% of the white vote and 35% of the Latino vote, rather than the 27% Romney actually won.

  Whit Ayres, president of GOP polling firm North Star Opinion Research, mirrors Rove’s argument, stating, “if the Republican nominee only manages to hold Mr. Romney’s 17% among nonwhites, then he or she will need 65% of whites to win.” That means Republicans would be better served by “nominating a candidate who can speak to minorities, especially Hispanics.”

  There’s only one problem: the math doesn’t work. Using Byron York’s calculations, had Romney won some 70% of the Hispanic vote, he still would have lost the election, because a huge majority of Hispanic voters are located in Texas, California, and New York, none of which are swing states, according to Pew Hispanic. There are some swing states with heavy Hispanic populations: New Mexico (46.7%), Florida (22.8%), Colorado (20.9%). Ohio (3.4%) and Virginia (8%) have Hispanic populations too small to achieve margin of victory for Republicans in those states.

  Nonetheless, some of the wisest Republican commentators have embraced the notion that Hispanic votes are key to Republican victory – and more importantly, that Hispanic voters would be natural Republican voters if not for the dastardly immigration positions of leading GOP candidates. Days after the 2012 election, Charles Krauthammer, for example, wrote, “They should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community religiou
s, Catholic, family-oriented and socially conservative (on abortion, for example). The principal reason they go Democratic is the issue of illegal immigrants.”

  This isn’t true. As I pointed out in 2014:

  An April 2012 Pew Hispanic Poll showed 81% of Hispanics want bigger government with more services. Only 41% of Americans overall want bigger government with more services. Just 12% of Hispanic immigrants want smaller government with less services. Exit polls in 2012 showed that 61% of Hispanics wanted Obamacare expanded or left as is….53% of Hispanic children are now born out of wedlock. According to 2012 exit polls, 59% of Hispanics wanted same-sex marriage legalized, and 66% abortion should be legal in ‘most or all cases.’

  Hispanic voters aren’t Republicans waiting for a soft position on immigration. They’re generally Democrats who agree with Democrats on a variety of issues, including immigration reform. In a poll taken slightly before the 2014 election, 66% of Hispanic voters said they wanted immigration reform passed as a top priority; 45% blamed Republicans in Congress for delays in immigration reform, while 34% blamed Democrats. Overall, Hispanics voted 62% for Democrats nonetheless.

  Fact: Republicans Must Drive White Voter Turnout

  The real reason Republicans lost in 2012 sprang from a massive drop-off in white voting. That alone wouldn’t have driven Romney to victory, but increased white turnout along with normal rates of minority turnout would have made the race a toss-up. Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics.com writes that somewhere around five million white voters simply didn’t show up for Mitt Romney. Trende states, “If these white voters had decided to vote, the racial breakdown of the electorate would have been 73.6 percent white, 12.5 percent black, 9.5 percent Hispanic and 2.4 percent Asian -- almost identical to the 2008 numbers.” Trende characterizes the missing voters as “downscale, blue-collar whites.” Had those voters shown up and voted disproportionately for Mitt Romney, and had that increased vote count been accompanied by a decreased black vote county and a slightly uptick in the amount of black Republican or Hispanic support, Romney would have won the election.

  Further, Trende points out, Republicans may hit a ceiling with minorities, but Democrats have yet to hit a floor with white voters. He explains:

  The diversifying parts of the country have shifted toward Democrats, as has the Northeast. But far overlooked is the movement in the heavily white interior. This really does matter: It wasn’t that long ago that states like West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri were places where Democrats could win regularly at the local level, and be competitive at the presidential level. Nineteen states have moved at least a point toward Democrats, while 25 have moved toward Republicans by a similar amount. If you weight the shift in each state by electoral vote, it actually works out to a slight shift toward Republicans overall.

  Trende concludes, “Democrats liked to mock the GOP as the “Party of White People” after the 2012 elections. But from a purely electoral perspective, that’s not a terrible thing to be.”

  So, the question becomes simple: do Republicans have a better shot at dramatically increasing their vote share of Hispanics in swing states, or do they have a better chance of increasing their vote share among a population group that already votes Republican? The first strategy was favored by Democrats briefly after their defeat in 2004; they quickly dumped that strategy in favor of Barack Obama’s aggregation of high-turnout minority groups. Obama has been the most successful politician in terms of shifting the voter turnout model in American history.

  Republicans ought to do the same.

  Myth #2: Republicans Need To Close The Generational Gap

  In 2008, Barack Obama won 66% of voters aged 18-29. In 2012, he did even better, winning 67% of the youth vote. According to the Center for Research and Information on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, somewhere between 22 and 23 million people aged 18-29 voted; had Romney split those voters 50-50 in Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio, he’d have won all four states. The good news for Republicans, according to Gerald Seib of The Wall Street Journal, is that young voters are “up for grabs.” Seib says, “While young voters aged 18 to 34 are often assumed to be a solid Democratic bloc, for instance, the analysis finds many of them unattached to either party…young white women, and women with less than a college education, will be a target audience for both parties, because they don’t show strong loyalty to either one.”

  According to Pew Research, however, young voters are by far the most leftist demographic age group. Members of the so-called millennial generation, those aged 18-33, skew heavily to the left: just 15% consider themselves mostly conservative or consistently conservative, compared with 41% who consider themselves mostly or consistently liberal. A full 50% of millennials identify as Democrats, while just 34% say they’re Republicans. Those statistics move closer to even as voters get older: Baby Boomers (aged 50-68) favor Democrats 46% to 42%, and members of the silent generation (69-86) favor Republicans 47% to 44%.

  Even millennial Republicans seem significantly more leftist than their elders. Fully 64% of millennial Republicans say society should accept homosexuality, another 50% say corporations make too much profit, and 48% say environmental regulations are “worth the cost.” This begs the question as to just why they’re Republicans in the first place. The answer: they’re not big believers in big government to do what it pledges. Just under 60% say government is “almost always wasteful and inefficient” and 68% say “government today can’t afford to do much more to help the needy.”

  The numbers are even worse for Republicans, as you’d expect, among Democrat millennials: 84% say homosexuality should be accepted by society, 74% back increased environmental regulations, 69% say profit is too great at corporations, and just 39% say government can’t do more to help the poor. The only area upon which millennial Democrats appear to be less leftist than their elders is on the issue of race: 53% say “blacks who can’t get ahead are responsible for [their] own condition.”

  Some commentators simply throw up their hands at this menagerie of political positions held by millennials. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic says, “Millennials’ Political Views Don’t Make Any Sense.” He explains: “Millennial politics is simple, really. Young people support big government, unless it costs any more money. They're for smaller government, unless budget cuts scratch a program they've heard of. They'd like Washington to fix everything, just so long as it doesn't run anything.” A poll from Reason Foundation backs the notion of millennial incoherence: 65% said they wanted to cut spending, 58% wanted to cut taxes, 66% said that government is “usually inefficient and wasteful,” etc. At the same time, 42% say socialism is better than capitalism.

  So, will these millennials naturally shift into Republicans over time? Gallup would suggest not. According to that polling organization:

  Although the generations’ ideology has stayed fairly consistent over time, Americans’ ideology as a whole has undergone a gradual shift, with a notable increase in the percentage of Americans identifying as liberal…If these trends largely persist, there should be a continued increase in the percentage of Americans identifying as liberal and decrease in the percentage identifying as conservative in the future, unless the generation born after 2000 emerges as more conservative than liberal.

  By this calculus, Republicans are basically screwed – unless, as always, they sacrifice their core principles. Political consultant Ayres says just that: “We’re headed to the point where a political candidate who is perceived as anti-gay at the presidential level will never connect with people under 30 years old.” Ayres says that dumping this portion of the Republican platform will have no impact on the rest of the Republican vote, since same-sex marriage, for example, is a bottom priority for Republican voters.

  This seems an appropriate time to point out a serious problem with polling on issue choice. Typically, questions are phrased by asking, “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” or �
��Which of the following issues will be MOST important to you when you decide how to vote for president: foreign policy, illegal immigration, health care, terrorism, or the economy?” The economy invariably finishes first in such polls, because if voters are asked to choose the most important issue to them at the moment, it will always be their pocketbook. But the question tells us almost nothing: it says nothing about the voters’ position on the economy. Such polls also elevate temporary priorities over permanent ones: even religious voters, for example, will say “economy” over same-sex marriage, even though they will categorically refuse to vote for a candidate who stands in favor of same-sex marriage. Unless questions ask about passion level on individual issues, separated from comparisons to other issues, they are relatively meaningless.