Author: Ian Mariani
Almost an entire month since the election results came in, the Republican Party is still struggling to cope with Mitt Romney’s defeat. Fingers have been pointed, blame has been assigned and work has begun on what RNC chairman Reince Priebus termed an “autopsy” of the Republican Party. A lot of blame has been placed on the fallen candidate Mitt Romney, but the problems facing the party aren’t so easily explained.
The first and most undeniable point that will sink Republicans is that winning white America does not equal winning the White House anymore. Romney-Ryan captured the white male over-45 voting demographic with ease, but failed to reach key demographics for this election cycle. Understanding how to reach groups like Latinos (the oft-noted fastest growing group in the country) will be the first step in boosting Republican chances in 2016.
Secondly, the Republicans should highlight what and where their strongest tenants are in American politics. A message of low taxes and small government will likely capture the nation’s interest yet again as we crawl, slowly but surely, out of this recession. An embrace of the libertarian side of GOP politics would certainly win some age groups, notably the young voters that have rallied around Ron Paul these last two cycles. Granted, Paul’s much more hands-off governmental approach has always been relatively radical, but that is not to say his entire message was wrong; rather, it didn’t fit the mold of the Republican Party at the time.
As former Governor of Utah and GOP candidate Jon Huntsman said, “[we must] balance the budgets and get out of people’s lives. And you ought build the Party around that because we have strong libertarian roots that go way back to the early days.”
There’s no avoiding the fact that the 2012 campaign was centered around the American economy. But social policy discussions muddied the waters around this central debate, and detracted from a serious discussion about how best to solve the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And that should have been recognized sooner. President Obama had a strong foreign policy record and the poking around the Benghazi attack just allowed Obama the opportunity to put his superior experience on display next to his Republican challenger. If this next cycle is any reflection of that, the GOP should remember to stick to their most important message: that the private market growth will be what fixes the economy, not the government.
Most importantly, after all the dust has settled, the Republican Party needs to realize that it is losing its image as a party for the people. As former U.S. Education secretary William J. Bennett invoked in an op-ed for CNN, the 2012 exits polls showed that Obama won voters who said that having a candidate that “cared about the people” was their most important quality at a margin of 81 to 18 percent.
This problem is more deeply-rooted than the excuse that “Romney wasn’t personable.” The Republican agenda was submitted to the American people for approval, and they staunchly rejected it by electing Obama for a second term. So it is time to refine and resubmit that message to help the American people understand what being Republican is really about: that government should be understood to be a role model of fiscal responsibility, not the people’s ATM.
The question remains whether or not the Republicans can do all this before the election cycle begins again. The midterms in 2014 will be a good barometer for this, but the true test will be the party’s chosen nominee in 2016. While nobody today should be looking that far down the road (for the sake of solving present issues), if the Republicans choose a candidate that misrepresents their party’s idealistic vision, it will again spell disaster for their chances. As Huntsman campaign adviser John Weaver put it, “was Romney our 1968 Humphrey or do we have a McGovern yet to get through in 2016?”
Ian Mariani is a junior DWA major. He can be reached at mariani@oxy.edu.
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