Democrats have long struggled with communicating their core issues to the base American electorate. New polls and general anecdotal evidence are showing that it has started happening by default. Democrats now control the agenda on issues that are truly important to Americans, and it is due in large part to an unlikely ally – traditional Republican base voters.
This poll details something Dick Armey was talking about on MSNBC the other day. He went on a few shows to discuss the following remark:
The Republicans are talking about things like gay marriage and so forth, and the Democrats are talking about things people care about, like how do I pay my bills.
The problem the Republicans are currently having stems from the desire to establish what they refer to as a “permanent majority.” The use of the legislative floor for shucking and jiving about gay marriage or any other moral issue couldn’t go unnoticed forever. Now people have started to notice that while the GOP put on the evangelical song and dance, two very important things were not happening:
- They were not seriously fighting for laws that would advance the agenda of the evangelical religious right; and
- They were not passing any other laws that really made a difference to people just generally aligned with conservatism but less ideologically motivated.
The GOP failed at immigration reform, they failed to do anything about Social Security, and they failed to do anything but make a hash of foreign relations and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So, owing to these failures, the GOP has watched as their base slowly began to erode. Security Moms and rural voters are turning away from them, and not for strategic voting reasons – it rarely if ever happens in America that traditional party loyalists will vote for the other guys just a little to teach the home team a lesson. No, people are turning away from the Republican party because for the first time in twenty years, the message isn’t working. There is a disconnect between the GOP voice and the voters they are trying to reach.
So how did this happen? Did the American electorate grow up, or has the political environment shifted enough so that a new set of issues claims primacy? I think it at least in part has to do with fractured leadership on the GOP side – every major leadership figure in the Republican party has some sort of serious problem. Frist and Santorum became to shrill for their own natural constituencies, Hastert has Foley, Bush has Iraq. We see the same thing locally in Texas – Perry, Dewhurst, and Craddick have had an open tab to do with whatever they pleased, and it has only resulted in strident voter dissatisfaction and, hilariously enough, increased property taxes.
Each Republican leader, both statewide and nationally, represents a constituency that places certain demands upon them. The failure of the GOP leadership lies within the collective action of attempting to establish the previously mentioned permanent majority by campaigning against the specter of Democratic immorality and foreign attack on the American way of life while they were at work. The failure of the GOP is that for the last six years, they have been campaigning rather than governing.
I suppose this whole ordeal can serve as a general lesson for everyone about the potential trap of single-party rule, or an electoral machine’s inability to shift gears to actually accomplishing things in government. In some way, political leaders are always beholden to polls and public opinion, but to many citizens even halfway interested in voting, accomplishing nothing of importance is worse than accomplishing something they disagree with.