WP: The Party of Tomorrow
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009; A13
The message sent over the weekend may have been unintentional, but it was nonetheless powerful. While the candidates to chair the Republican National Committee prepared for a debate held yesterday by the Reagan-era group Americans for Tax Reform, the Democrats leaked word that their next national chairman would be Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia. The message: While Republicans are looking inward and focusing on appeals to the party's activist base, President-elect Barack Obama wants Democrats to concentrate their energies on recently acquired political terrain and the new converts who were central to his party's sweep last year....
Republicans seem less focused on how to expand their party's appeal than on hunkering down to preserve ideological purity....
Structurally, it turns out to be much easier for Democrats than Republicans to reach out to moderates because Democrats are the more ideologically diverse party.
I asked Jon Cohen, director of polling for The Post, to use the 2008 media exit poll to break down November's electorate by party and ideology. In one sense, Republicans have the larger core base -- 21 percent of voters called themselves conservative Republicans, while only 15 percent of voters saw themselves as liberal Democrats. But there are many more moderate Democrats than moderate Republicans: 18 percent of all voters considered themselves moderate Democrats, while only 10 percent thought of themselves as moderate Republicans. (Five percent of voters called themselves conservative Democrats and only 1 percent called themselves liberal Republicans, who, sadly, are a dying breed.)
Thus, when Democrats try to broaden their appeal, they are also addressing middle-of-the-road voters in their own party. Republicans who want to reach out have to fight their party, which is overwhelmingly inclined to stick with the true conservative faith.
Republicans would do well to pay attention to another trend: The young are leaning left. Voters under 30, according to the exit poll, are the only age group in which liberals outnumber conservatives, by 32 percent to 26 percent. And the last four years of the Bush presidency clearly turned this generation off to the GOP. In 2004, 18- to 29-year-olds tilted only narrowly Democratic, 37 percent to 35 percent. In 2008, 45 percent of the under-30s called themselves Democrat; only 26 percent called themselves Republican.
Right-wing loyalists can talk all they want about how President Bush's problem was that he wasn't "conservative enough," but the numbers show they are misunderstanding their party's problem. Obama and Kaine are appealing to a moderate country moving gradually in a progressive direction and have a party behind them prepared to grapple with the realities of politics now. Whoever takes the helm of the GOP will have to persuade a very conservative following that we are not living in Ronald Reagan's America anymore.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/05/AR2009010502344_pf.html
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