Tailor-Made
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The GOP needs to do a better job of reaching out to Hispanics, blacks, Jews, Muslims, women, and young voters. That doesn’t mean we need to compromise our principles, but it does mean that we do need to stop writing off these groups and giving up before we get started. The truth is that the Republican Party is a better fit for every one of those groups than the Democrats, and we can make that case. But to do that, we need to tailor our message to each group and make a real, consistent, long-term effort to bring more people from these groups into the fold instead of making a halfhearted effort, saying “they’ll never vote for us anyway,” and giving up. ~John Hawkins
The determined attitude is admirable, even though the proposal is still pretty bizarre. I would be fascinated to know what tailoring the current GOP message to Jews and Muslims in different ways would look like. Except perhaps for blacks, those two groups stand out as the most improbable targets for winning a lot of new voters, and it’s not clear to me how you tailor your message to one without flatly contradicting it with how you tailor it to the other. Social issues offer a good example of what I mean. Jewish voters are predominantly liberal or very liberal on social issues, and Muslims are typically much more conservative. Indeed, back in 2000 Bush won the Muslim vote thanks in part to some shared social conservative views, but it was also depended heavily on Bush’s public rejection of the use of secret evidence against Muslim suspects. What are the odds that the GOP is now going to become the vehicle of civil libertarian protest against the security state? After everything that has happened in the last eight years, it is absurd to think that the GOP can regain the goodwill of voters that it has consistently and deliberately alienated with its policy choices. My point here is not even that these policy choices were wrong, though I think most of them were, but that you cannot keep hanging on to all of the policies that brought you into the wilderness and expect to turn things around.
There is a constant tension in these six or ten or twelve-point plans for GOP revival. There is always some standard statement that no principles will be compromised, which effectively means that no policy positions will be changed, but there is some idea that the “message” can simply be restated in a pleasing way such that the target audience will forget that it doesn’t actually agree with the policy or just doesn’t like the messenger. The GOP has retained some marginal advantage among married women, but it suffers from a huge deficit with single women, and it is not remotely clear what “tailoring” could be done to the message that would not alienate core constituencies that the GOP can still reliably bring in. It is probably the case that the things that make the GOP attractive to half of married women in most elections are the things that make the party seem unappealing to single women, and the same problem will apply with middle-aged vs. young voters.
There is always the constant danger that the message will be “tailored” in a way that is essentialist and driven by stereotypes of what a certain constituency wants, and this tendency will be exploited by those forces inside the GOP coalition that already want to change policies in a certain direction. Pro-choice Republicans will say, “Oh, no, I guess we’ll have to modify our position on abortion to win over more women voters–strange how this is what I’ve been saying we should do for decades!” Pro-amnesty figures will say something similar about immigration and Hispanics, and on and on. The trouble is not just that this sort of policy change might come across as empty pandering or insulting stereotyping, but that Republicans have long since lost their ability to craft policies that actually serve voters’ interests rather than making generic appeals to their “values.” If they can’t even serve the interests of the constituents they have right now, why are other voters going to be inclined to support the party in the future? The party’s hostility to economic populism is just one part of this, but it is an important part.
For most, if not all, of the groups Hawkins mentions the tailoring would have to be closer to radically re-designing the entire concept, and that would mean sacrificing or at least risking support of existing constituencies to win over new ones. The track record of GOP outreach efforts in the past, as I have said before, is not reassuring as a matter of politics or policy. In principle, expanding a voting coalition is the right idea, but I have yet to see a proposal along these lines that does not sound like a call for a new marketing strategy, which fundamentally misunderstands why the GOP does not win the support of these voters.
Filed under: politics
Tailor-made politics simply will not (cannot!) work in an information age. Too easy to call out the hypocrisies such methods would inevitably entail.
That’s true. It might have been easier when communication was more difficult and news coverage was not as constant and extensive, but even in an era when newspapers and telegraphs ruled it would have been hard to put out two opposing messages to satisfy different constituencies. I still don’t understand how you could “tailor” a message in which the “war on terror” and everything associated with it is good and right–which is more or less the GOP message when it comes to such things–and make most Muslims (or most Jews, who I imagine oppose many of these policies as well) find it appealing.
This is the John Hawkins of Right Wing News, right? What a joke. That guy was one of the biggest of the war mongering, the “Islamofascists” are out to kill us all unless we bomb them first, anti-Muslim hysterics. He specifically attacked Ron Paul for his non-interventionism. How on earth does he plan to tailor a message to Muslims? Join us so you can help us demonize and bomb your kin? Give me a break.
No animals were injured in the making of this twelve-point program.
Yes, the days when minority groups lived in their own ghettos and relied on community go-betweens for political information are long gone.
But on the topic of groups who actually should be voting with the right but don’t, what about East Asians? It’s always amazed me that Chinese and Japanese Americans tend to vote for the Democrats. It’s particularly odd that the Japanese vote for the party of Roosevelt, who interned them.
Politically, East Asians have several excellent qualities. They are generally affluent, educated and willing to engage in communal enterprise. They have “Confucian” values of thrift, work, and orderliness. Many (most?) are Christian and believe in what we now call family values. While immigration and dual loyalty may be a stumbling block issues I don’t think they are necessarily a deadly one. The issue of hidden university admission quotas is very much on their minds at the moment.
Apart from mere political opportunism there is a real case to be made for an alliance between East Asians and Caucasian Americans.
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
Daniel: you are just about the best most clear eyed conservative/Republican opinionater out there today. And now after that bit of boot licking it only remains for me to endorse your thoughts. All the “Communication” we see coming from conservatives today divides into two neat piles. On one side we have increasingly strident messages from Pence, Rove, Limbaugh, Cantor, Kristol et al constantly asserting the rightness of each and every policy position that we and the country have become very familiar with over the past eight years. Furthermore, any attempts to deal with the widely perceived consequences of these policies by Obama and the democrats must be resisted at every turn at whatever the cost to the American people. And btw why hasn’t Obama brought universal world peace in three weeks as he promised. If all this wasn’t stupid enough we then have Steele and assorted luminaries creating the other communication pile by essentially saying the problem is not the policies it’s the way we’re selling them. As Tom Davis famously pointed out it aint the labels that are the problem it’s the dogfood that the dogs don’t like. I don’t know how long it’s going to take for the GOP to tell the difference, maybe they never will. At best it’s going to take a long time for the simple reason the party has been taken hostage by social/nationalist movement conservatives. They are married to a set of beliefs that is supported strongly by only about 30% of the electorate. In elections they can count on another 10-15% of the electorate who still votes Republican out of habit, tribalism or whatever. Even worse where their support is strong, it’s concentrated both geographically and demographically. This is the elephant in the room. I see no leaders on the horizon who have the ability to break this model and remake conservatism with the possible exception of Jeb Bush and his name is lets face it toxic. For the rest they are and come off as either doctrinaire conservatives or time servers like Steele. The country is facing huge structural economic problems and need to manage its relative decline over the next 50 years but conservatism and the GOP isn’t beginning to address them.
Gordianus: “But on the topic of groups who actually should be voting with the right but don’t, what about East Asians? It’s always amazed me that Chinese and Japanese Americans tend to vote for the Democrats. ”
There’s this thing, it’s called ‘non-white’. The GOP has worked very, very hard to be the Party of White Men; this has had some obvious effects. Notice that the GOP is well along in the process of p*ssing off Hispanics, which was the one ‘non-white’ group it had a chance to break parity in.
IMHO, this is due to a multi-decade strategy of concentrating on a base which was more and more narrow, in a country which was slowly growing more and more diverse.
“It’s particularly odd that the Japanese vote for the party of Roosevelt, who interned them. ”
That would be because the Democratic party is the party of civil rights, while the GOP is the party of laughing at Gitmo, enthusiasm about torture, and sh*tting on the Bill of Rights.
BarryD, in many years of GOP political activity, it’s odd that no one every actually said that to me. Not even in the most private discussion did anyone ever say “ours is the party of white people.” Maybe I just wasn’t in the room when all the bigots spoke up.
But seriously, I’ve heard plenty of people say that the Democratic Party was the party of, or for, Blacks, Hispanics, Gays, etc. The GOP became the party of Whites by default. Now some, like the folks over at Vdare say that the GOP should become the party of the Whites in fact. The GOP has had outreach to non-whites for years. Perhaps it’s hopeless, but it’s not for want of trying. It is a fact that the GOP represents the interests of East Asians better than the Democratic Party.
“Politically, East Asians have several excellent qualities.”
I haven’t seen a potentially more tone deaf statement ever written, and it smacks of the kind of “target audience” nonsense that marketing (and in this case, political consultants) use to cash big checks while their clients make an ass of themselves. Stating that X is already an ideal conservative voter, but just doesn’t know it, is simply an excuse to get on the “the message, not the meaning, is the problem” bandwagon. After all, if everyone is a secret conservative and doesn’t know it, we don’t really have to change anything do we?
“It is a fact that the GOP represents the interests of East Asians better than the Democratic Party.”
Clearly it isn’t, and trying to lead off a conversation with an individual, let alone a segment of the population, by pointing out their idiots isn’t fruitful. It’s why Democratic rhetoric that talks about “people voting against their own interest” falls flat so often, and one reason why, semantically, Obama tried to pivot away from it (with the exception of the clinging to bibles and guns statement that fell like a ton of bricks).
What we do know, as a FACT, is that Democrats do represent East Asians better. After all, they do seem to continue voting for them. Is it possible that they’re all secretly yearning to get that subliminal message from the RNC, and turn on into Republicans? Maybe. But I’m guessing most of them are fairly rational, and are voting for their interests, even if their “interests” aren’t what people have assigned them.
And to contradict what the original blog author stated, oddly enough Democrats have started winning both the Jewish vote AND the Muslim vote. Certainly some of the accusations of pandering ring true in the case of Democrats, but with a majority of Jewish politicians on the federal level being Democrats, and the only two federal level Muslims being Democrats, something must be working for them.
The point of the original post is that the *GOP* cannot win over two different groups of voters when its agenda appeals to neither their values nor their interests. Democrats win majorities among both these groups because those voters see the Democrats as representing them and their interests. I would have thought it would be clear that Democrats have always enjoyed strong support from Jewish voters, and has gained strong support from Muslims in the wake of post-9/11 Bush-era policies. It was not necessarily a given that Muslim voters back the Dems.