Posted on 12/14/2006 8:37:44 PM PST by neverdem
The Republicans handed libertarian votes--and the elections--over to the Democrats.
At the Democrats’ official election night party in Washington, D.C., all eyes were on Florida—for about 10 seconds. At 8 p.m. network exit polls confirmed that Rep. Katherine Harris, for this crowd the arch-villain of the 2000 election, was lopsidedly losing her bid for a Senate seat. The partygoers cheered the news. Then they turned their attention to races that carried at least a whiff of suspense.
They shouldn’t have dismissed Florida so quickly. Less than two years earlier, the Sunshine State had shown the first symptoms of the malady that would defeat the GOP in races from California to New Hampshire. Republicans had convinced themselves that socially conservative “values voters” were the key to maintaining and extending their power. It was in Florida that the strategy started to crumble, reminding any politician who cared to listen that a lot of voters just want the government to leave them alone.
The town of Pinellas Park, not far from Harris’ old House district, contains the hospice where Terri Schiavo died. The battle between the brain-damaged woman’s parents, who wanted to keep her on life support, and her husband, who wanted to remove it, had bubbled up into Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature before. But in March 2005, emboldened by the GOP’s 2004 victories, Tom DeLay’s House and Bill Frist’s Senate elbowed into the controversy. President Bush broke off a stint in Crawford, Texas, to sign emergency legislation to keep the feeding tube attached.
It was one of the worst political miscalculations of the decade. Immediately after the Schiavo push, approval numbers for Bush and his party started to plummet. Polls showed not just Democrats but Republicans and independents opposed to the Schiavo intervention. Republicans responded by assuming the polls were wrong. The country had re-elected them, hadn’t it? Of course voters were foursquare behind the idea of legislatively re-attaching a feeding tube to a brain-dead woman.
The president’s ratings reeled into the 40s, then the 30s, and never really recovered. The numbers for the GOP Congress fell even further. And on election night, voters turned out the most socially conservative Congress in decades while taking a two-by-four to socially conservative initiatives in the states. A ban on all abortions was defeated in South Dakota. Missouri legalized stem cell research. And while seven states passed gay marriage bans, Arizona became the first state ever to reject one. In most of the states where the bans did pass—South Carolina and Idaho being the exceptions—voters elected Democrats to major statewide offices anyway. The ballyhooed effect of gay marriage bans on conservative turnout, credited by some for George W. Bush’s 2004 victory in Ohio, fell utterly flat.
These defeats wouldn’t have come as a surprise if not for the consensus, minted hours after the 2004 polls closed, that Republicans were building a permanent majority on the backs of conservative evangelicals. The TV networks’ exit poll showed 22 percent of voters naming “moral values” as the key to their ballots. In the hands of a Republican caucus defined by the born-again Tom DeLay in the House and the big-government conservative Rick Santorum in the Senate, this was a mandate; it encouraged them to indulge their invasiveness on privacy and other civil liberties issues. The party didn’t just support national ID cards and warrantless wiretaps. With impunity, it campaigned against Democrats for opposing those measures.
Early in the 2006 cycle, Democrats spotted the opening they’d been given. They recruited candidates for every Republican seat in districts that had voted for John Kerry over George W. Bush, and they started to criticize the conduct, and sometimes the very fact, of the Iraq war. They got multiple adrenaline boosts from the GOP’s scandals, starting with the corruption allegations against DeLay, which the leadership took pains to overlook until he was actually indicted. They maintained leads as the incumbents cupped their hands over their eyes and ears and refused to consider any shifts in their approach to Iraq.
That strategy ended on November 7, with the defeat of many hot-button ballot measures and with heavy losses in House, Senate, and state races. The liberal Northeast was scrubbed almost clean of Republicans: From Pennsylvania through Maine, the Democrats picked up nine or 10 House seats. (At press time, one race in Connecticut was going to a recount.) And the rout continued in the Midwest and the Plains. Four years earlier Kansas had elected an ultra-conservative attorney general named Phill Kline, who used the power of his office to snoop into the medical records of patients at abortion clinics. He was crushed, 58 percent to 42 percent, by a Republican who switched parties to challenge him. And while Kline went down, Republicans lost an eastern Kansas House seat in a district that had voted for Bush over Kerry by 20 points.
There were lessons in the races the Republicans did win too. In the Mountain West, Republican candidates had their margins slashed dramatically. Idaho’s 1st District, which gave Bush 70 percent of its vote, handed only 50 percent to a doctrinaire conservative. Wyoming’s sole House seat gave its Republican incumbent a win by less than 1 percentage point. In state after state, Republican support plunged.
“The libertarian West,” Hotline Editor Chuck Todd wrote in a post-election column, “is a region that is more up for grabs than it should be. And it’s because the Republican Party has grown more religious and more pro-government, which turns off these ‘leave me alone,’ small-government libertarian Republicans.”
The decline isn’t entirely the Republicans’ fault. They just created an opening for their opponents to exploit. The Democrats in the libertarian West, tenderized by the wipeouts of the 1990s, reassessed their positions on the Second Amendment, public land, and taxes, and reintroduced themselves to voters. In the Bush years, they gave stronger support to civil liberties than most of their Republican competitors. At one Montana debate, GOP Sen. Conrad Burns lambasted Democrat Jon Tester for wanting to “weaken” the PATRIOT Act. Tester shot back that he didn’t want to weaken it: “I want to repeal it.” Tester won the election.
Of course, the PATRIOT Act isn’t a “social issue.” That’s part of the point. The Bush-Rove iteration of the Republican Party, with its tight focus on social issues and its coordination with religious groups to turn out votes, fell dramatically short with an electorate for whom other subjects had more salience. In future elections, that skeptical segment of the country will only grow larger. The libertarian states of Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada are growing as the Deep South and the Rust Belt stagnate. And young professionals in Republican killing fields like Virginia and Ohio are getting more socially liberal, not less.
Election-night spinners tried to argue that the new congressional class consists of “conservative Democrats.” But while the newly elected Democrats include several relatively libertarian supporters of the Second Amendment, even their most conservative members, such as Pennsylvania’s senator-elect Bob Casey Jr., support the morning-after pill and some stem cell research.
The GOP’s fundamentalist myopia, combined with its sorry record on spending and corruption, has made Grover Norquist’s “Leave Us Alone Coalition” a bloc that’s up for grabs. In Norquist’s formulation, the coalition includes “taxpayers who want the government to reduce the tax burden, property owners, farmers, and homeowners who want their property rights respected.” Voters like these are now willing to entertain alternatives to a Southern-dominated, religious GOP.
They proved that in Pennsylvania, where Casey felled Rick Santorum—the only senator who actually flew down to Florida to join the Pinellas Park circus—in an 18-point landslide. On Election Day, the Philadelphia Inquirer found a voter willing to explain why Santorum lost. “I don’t know what happened to him,” said Roby Lentz, a Republican. “He quit representing me when he showed up at Terri Schiavo’s bedside.”
David Weigel (dweigel@reason.com) is an assistant editor of Reason.
Republican Incumbents Who Lost in the House:
Jim Ryun (KS) - ACU rating 98
J.D. Hayworth (AZ) - ACU rating 98
Richard Pombo (CA) - ACU rating 97
Chris Chocola (IN) - ACU rating 95
Gil Gutknecht (MN) - ACU rating 94
Charles Taylor (NC) - ACU rating 92
Mike Sodrel (IN) - ACU rating 92
Melissa Hart (PA) - ACU rating 91
John Hostettler (IN) - ACU rating 90
Don Sherwood (PA) - ACU rating 87
Anne Northup (KY) - ACU rating 86
Clay Shaw (NC) ACU rating 82
John Sweeney (NY) ACU rating 77
Jeb Bradley (NH) ACU rating 71
Charles Bass (NH) ACU rating 71
Curt Weldon (PA) ACU rating 70
Sue Kelly (NY) ACU rating 65
Mike Fitzpatrick (PA) ACU rating 60
Nancy Johnson (CT) ACU rating 47
Jim Leach (IA) ACU rating 43
Vacated Republican seats lost
DeLay (TX) ACU rating 95
Beuprez (COL) ACU rating 93
Green (WI) ACU rating 88
Nussle (IA) ACU rating 86
Ney (OH) ACU rating 86
Foley (FLA) ACU rating 78
Koly (AZ) ACU rating 74
Boelert (NY) ACU rating 40
Democrat Incumbent seats lost
None.
+++
Republican Incumbents Who Lost in the Senate:
Burns (MT) - ACU rating 91
Allen (VA) - ACU rating 92
Santorum (PA) - ACU rating 88
Talent (MO) - ACU rating 93
DeWine (OH) - ACU rating 80
Chafee (RI) - ACU rating 37
Democrat Incumbent seats lost
None.
Those are some rather impressive American Conservative Union ratings for libertarian Republicans.
True. I should've referred to them as those opposed to the Republican Party's social policies.
Denial is not a river in Egypt.
I agree. I'm so sick of these political theatrics.
"they erred in not articulating"
They erred in not articulating anything. Period. Republicans, at least those who are conservative, wrongly assume that truth and what is right is apparent to most. They forget that most of the American public no longer knows right from wrong because we now have 2 generations of moral relativists.
I read an opinion piece this week on President Bush being the worst president in American history. What the Associated Press journalist who wrote the piece will refuse to recognize is that President Bush has overseen the worst, most ignorant, nastiest citizenry in American history.
I don't agree with the President on some issues, but in considering the mentality of the voters themselves, I really fear for this country.
ndt wrote: "So forgive me if the "democrats are going to be worse" mantra falls a little flat."
I think that's an excellent point. I'm old enough to remember this country under Democrat control. However, many voters were children or not even born during the reign of Tip O'Neill. And, we older voters COULD be mistaken. The Democrats might do a good job, but I'm highly skeptical. The point is, the argument that "Democrats are going to be worse" is not one that means much to many voters. The Republicans needed to give voters something worth voting for than simply claiming the other party was worse.
Thanks for the ratings & links.
Uh...it appears to have worked rather well for the Democrats.
I guess the libertarians have no interest in stopping murder. Protecting Schiavo was not supposed to be a political calculation, it was supposed to be stopping a murder - some call that good government, you can call it political if you like. The worst part was how half-a$$ed the republicans acted in the Schiavo matter!
ndt wrote: "Despite the historical alliances, the value voters and the libertarians really do not have that much in common."
Not true at all! As a religious fundamentalist who associates with other, very conservative Christians, I can tell you we share a great deal with the libertarians. Our differences are very minor. Please don't fall into the MSM depiction of religious fundamentalists as people who want to use the power of the federal government to force everyone to submit to our religion. I'm sure a very, very small minority of Christians would try it, but the vast majority of us believe in letting you make religious decisions for yourself. That gay-bashing church everyone constantly hears about in the news is NOT representative of 99.99% or more of Christians (they aren't even Christian in my book). If you doubt me, attend some Bible-believing churches and see for yourself if they put their faith in government over God.
I do too.
Well, I for one am so glad that there haven't been any more Terri Schiavo type cases in the nation since Terri died, or at least I think that no one has had their life support pulled since then, 'cause surely all those politicians and media people would have been all over those cases too just like they did in Terri's case.
Right?
/sarcasm
Dolphy wrote: "The real question, the one lost between the socialists who look forward to making life and death decisions and the religious zealots, was is how the government decided Schiavo's wishes."
The religious "zealots" were also aware of the issue of how the government decided to follow Schiavo's wishes. Just because we feel it's morally wrong to murder someone (that's what it was if she didn't want to be killed), doesn't mean we don't also understand the political implications of "right to die" cases. We DO have the capability to think beyond simply quoting the Bible.
Getting back to the article...what difference does it make if I wanted to save Terri because I thought killing her was morally wrong, and you wanted to save her because of the political implications?
I agree. I am a Libertarian - the 100%, card carrying, stay-off-my-lawn type. I vote a Libertarian/Republican ticket, and likely always will. Democrats have none of my values in common with me. I should know, my sister is a card carrying-Democrat.
They didn't, RINOs did, on the whole. In fact, libertarians now occupy more seats in local municipalities than we ever have. Moderate principles lose elections, that's the way things work - No one wants a candidate who can't decide where they are. And RINOs are in no way adherent to Libertarian priciples. Economically strong and socially strong conservatism wins elections.
LOL you thought wrong.
Social issues should be fought at the state/local level. The 2008 election is all about economic & foreign policy conservatism. The GOP needs to return back to it's Calvin Coolidge economic roots and McKinley's muscular foreign-policy pro-American approach.
Oh really?
Gonna leave Conservatives behind?
Good luck Ross.
Speaking as a 'l'ibertarian, I would have a lot more reason to support the Republican party if we had ever seen any of those phantom budget cuts. Ironically from a budget perspective we seemed to do the best with a Republican congress and a democrat in the White House. Not that I'd want to go back to the days of the assault weapons ban and selling our nuclear secrets to the Chinese, but it would be very nice to see more welfare reform and spending cuts.
I think that's the real reason the Republicans lost. After decades of promising to cut the size of government, when they finally controlled both houses of congress and the presidency they did exactly the opposite and expanded it like European socialists.
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