Here is what JD thought back in 2012 ... (long b/c the dude is long-winded)
"When the 2008 election was called for Obama, I remember thinking:maybe this will teach my party some very important lessons. You can’t nominate people, like Sarah Palin, who scare away swing voters.
You can’t actively alienate every growing bloc of the American electorate—Blacks, Latinos, the youth—and you can’t depend solely on the single shrinking bloc of the electorate—Whites. And yet, four years later, I am again forced to reflect on a party that nominated the worst kind of people, like Richard Mourdock, and tried to win an election by appealing only to White people. The 2008 election, it seems, taught Republicans precious little.
At no time was this more obvious than last Tuesday. During the weeks before the election, conservatives I spoke to were confident—even hubristic—that Mitt Romney would win. ... And then reality intervened. Nate Silver, that political hack from the Times, correctly predicted that Obama would win 332 electoral votes. Dick Morris, a conservative pundit on Fox News, was left apologizing for the Romney landslide that didn’t materialize.Conservatives lost, they lost big, and now it falls to the party’s leaders to explain why.
,,,
The Elephant in the Room--Demographics
The party's problems start with an inability to connect with non-white voters. The Republicans electoral confidence depended on their belief that a lack of enthusiasm from Democrats would push turnout among white voters to 2004 levels. But this was a pipe dream: Blacks and Latinos are growing segments of the population; whites are shrinking,and the racial composition of the 2004 electorate is a thing of the past. To win, the Republicans must turn the tide with non-white voters.
The unfortunate reality is that attracting non-white voters is about far more than communication—political ads in Spanish are great but won’t move the dial absent fundamental platform changes.
Republicans lose minority voters for simple and obvious reasons: their policy proposals are tired, unoriginal, or openly hostile to non-whites.Take tax policy, for example. A good friend recently told me that he was becoming more liberal because he just didn’t believe in“supply-side economics” anymore. I was almost speechless. Supporting supply-side economics is like supporting Soviet containment—it’s anachronistic to the extreme.
Reaganomics was a response to a particular phenomenon—an over regulated, overtaxed, and sluggish economy in the 1970s. It was never meant to become party orthodoxy,and during the Bush years, supply-side economics produced median wage stagnation and growth that was either illusory (as in the housing sector) or extremely concentrated (as in the financial sector). To the average Latino or Black voter, one party speaks about education reform while the other repeats platitudes that have long outgrown their use. Is it any wonder that they support the former?
On immigration, Republicans are similarly tone deaf. I became a conservative in large part because I felt that the Right was far more honest about the real state of the world. Yet a significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or “self deporting” them). Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens.The notion fails to pass the laugh test. The same can be said for too much of the party’s platform.
The Way Forward
Despite all the depressing things I’ve read in the past few days,there is one shining exception: the increasing popularity of Florida Senator Marco Rubio.
Rubio is an almost perfect politician—young,handsome, articulate, thoughtful—but he is also the first popular figure to question the party’s approach to immigration. And his career has shown a very keen interest in the promise of the American dream and the nature of social mobility.
But there are dangers to putting all of my (or the Republican Party’s) eggs in the Rubio basket.
For one, no single man is a panacea to the problems of an entire political movement.
The way forward then, is primarily about a new approach to policy, one that need not abandon conservatism, but apply it to a changing world.
... It remains an open question, however, whether conservatives will embrace the obvious or continue droning on about makers, takers, and the collapse of the American dream.
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Labels:Author: JD Vance
