This was always the Karl Rove offense: you only need 50%+1, so the move is to get your base fired up beyond all reason while simultaneously turning off marginal voters. The point isn’t to grow your base, it’s to shrink the field so that your base becomes 50%+1 of the turnout. Thus the flood of anti-gay-marriage amendments in 2004, to ensure that the holy-roller faithful would show up to the polls. This time out, the plan was taken to its logical conclusion: actually make it difficult for the other side to cast its ballots. Shorten up early-voting, limit vote-by-mail, reduce the overall level of participation. Simple. One loose-lipped GOPer even said that Pennsylvania’s voter-ID laws would deliver the state for Mitt Romney.
Whoops.
If there’s one word to carve on the tombstone of GOP2012, let it be this: “Unskewed.” When polling numbers didn’t synchronize with their expectations, the Republican brain trust decided that the flaw was not in the expectations, but in the polling, and they promptly re-ran the numbers with the turnout/participation figures they expected, rather than the ones reported in the polling. They chose to believe in their own reality. And they got shellshocked.
Now the fears and doubts commence. Some Republicans (noted airhead Sean Hannity springs to mind) are swearing that all they have to do is say something good about immigration to make nice with Latino voters and everything will somehow be all right. Many rightists, quite predictably, are blaming the nominating of Multiple Choice Mitt and saying the answer is (surprise!) selecting a true-believing red-blooded conservative instead of some Massachusetts squish. And everyone is convinced that if they just find another Reagan, somebody who will put a sunny face on what they already believe, they will be just fine. Maybe within four years Jeb Bush can get his name changed!
And a few – a tiny few – are starting to question how much longer the GOP can survive as the party of the Confederacy, by the Confederacy and for the Confederacy. Check out some of the maps that count up racial epithets on Twitter Tuesday night and you’ll see why the Supreme Court has no business even calling Article V of the Civil Rights Act into question. Meanwhile, teatards in Texas are already slinging around the age-old re-secede argument (as if anyone in the US needs to sign a free-trade agreement with Texas – wishful thinking, dumbass). There are Republicans who recognize that America is changing and that the old ways won’t work forever – but so far not enough to drag the party away from the same Nixonland cliches that have carried them for forty years.
Because that’s what it comes back to, in the end. Creating your own reality at Presidential election time has proven to be a losing strategy for the GOP in the absence of a terrified populace, and even then, Bush’s stronger second win wasn’t a match for Obama’s weaker one. Until the Republican party learns to cope with the world as it is, it’s going to be a long road back to the White House – and at the moment, the House gerrymander seems to be the only thing between the party of Lincoln and firsthand experience as a minority.