Posted on 11/10/2012 8:05:19 PM PST by neverdem
It is time to throw the social conservatives out of the GOP. Look at what they got us — Barack Obama. It was the social conservatives who did it. They insisted the GOP support real marriage and children. To hell with that.
I’m getting this, in various forms, from lots of tea party activists. The GOP establishment in Washington is whispering it to each other. They look at Todd Aiken and Richard Mourdock and conclude that they, not Tommy Thompson, Heather Wilson, George Allen, Scott Brown, etc. are the problem.
It is time to get rid of the social conservatives.
What’s really going on here is that the people who voted Republican, but who disagree with pro-lifers and defenders of marriage, have decided it must be those issues. They can’t see how what happened actually happened unless it happened because the issues on which they disagree with the base played a role.
This is a psychological avoidance of larger issues and does not stack up to the data.
Mitt Romney won about a quarter of the hispanic vote and a tenth of the black vote.
Those numbers may not sound like much, but in close elections they matter.
A sizable portion of those black and hispanic voters voted GOP despite disagreeing with the GOP on fiscal issues. But they are strongly social conservative and could not vote for the party of killing kids and gay marriage. So they voted GOP.
You throw out the social conservatives and you throw out those hispanic and black voters. Further, you make it harder to attract new hispanic voters who happen to be the most socially conservative voters in the country.
Next, you’ll also see a reduction of probably half the existing GOP base. You won’t make that up with Democrats who suddenly think that because their uterus is safe they can now vote Republican. Most of those people don’t like fiscal conservatism either — often though claiming that they do.
If you really need to think through this, consider MItt Romney. He is perhaps the shiftiest person to ever run for President of the United States. He shifted his position on virtually every position except Romneycare. Of all the politicians to ever run for office, he’d be the one most likely to come out and, after the Republican convention, decide he’d changed his mind. He’d be okay with abortion and okay with gay marriage.
Had he done that, he’d have even less votes.
Several million evangelicals did not vote for George W. Bush in 2000. His campaign had to work to get them back in 2004.
You may mentally decide, to escape having to deal with the other implications of this election, that if only the GOP would abandon its social conservatism it would do better. But if you do, go find yourself a new coalition because you won’t have half the votes the GOP has now. Good luck with that. In fact, if the GOP really wanted to expand with minorities, it’d keep the social conservatism and throw out the fiscal conservatism.
Richard Mourdock was one of two of the poster children for abandoning social conservatives this year. He was beaten by a pro-life Democrat.
The problem is not social conservatism. The problem is social conservatives have gotten so used to thinking of themselves as the majority they’ve forgotten how to speak to those who are not and defend against those who accuse them of being fringe, most particularly the press. Couple that with Mitt Romney’s campaign making a conscious decision to not fight back on the cultural front and you have a bunch of Republicans convinced, despite the facts, that if only the social conservatives would go away all would be fine.
It’s not time to throw out social conservatives. It’s time to accept that without them the GOP would be even a smaller party even less able to reach out to the hispanic demographic all the smart people say they need to embrace. Addition through subtraction never really works well.
Obama’s brilliant “Romneysia” term stopped Mitt’s momentum dead in its’ tracks, it’s what many of us here feared would happen if he were the nominee, his past history that he tried to suppress would catch up to him.
What the H are you talking about?
Protecting LIFE is the prime purpose of government.
A guy who sucked up to Planned Parenthood and the gay lobby when he ran first time. He said as Prez he would throw the social cons out of the party.
I doubt Heather Wilson ever explained to the people of NM how radical her opponent is. Of coursed, they probably wouldn’t understand if she had bothered to do so.
I think it is now widely understood that we just can’t win elections on a socially conservative platform. That doesn’t make it wrong, just a sign of the approaching end of days. Maybe this will be the last election — maybe politics will soon give way to more dramatic confrontations. I am hearing a lot of rather sinister reverse-racist rhetoric coming from the triumphal left, and this is bound to be met with a reaction. We shall see soon enough where the “revenge election” actually leads.
Kansas GOP now has 32 of the 40 state senate seats and 97 of 120 house seats. GOP Governor and US congressional delegation. WE don't have a GOP problem here!
29 GOP Governors, nationwide. POTUS is overrated. Think of the size the fed should be and what really belongs to the states and that's what the real power of the POTUS - the rest is a paper tiger.
Despite his favor of gaydom though, Obama has never ordered the IRS to recognize these arrangements for taxable purposes. He could have done that on taking office, and the American people for the most part would have been strongly in favor of such “fairness.”
???
Romney was a moderate! He was no in any way "socially conservative" as Governor, he only recently flip flopped.
Running these moderates is the wrong strategy. We need to run real conservatives.
I will not vote for anything less than someone who is conservative socially and fiscally. I think a lot of FReepers are the same way.
It looks like someone from Dummie Underground hacked your account. Conservatives support the constitution, and the constitution guarantees LIFE. Women don’t have some sort of special right to murder their own children. If this is the case, then maybe we should make it legal for husbands to “abort” their future children by beating their wives black and blue during pregnancy?
We may not be able to outright ban abortion, but we can sure as hell make it a much more uncomfortable and unattractive practice for those considering this barbaric practice. It is WRONG. We are the only ones speaking out for those who cannot speak for themselves.
Since only NE went Republican for Senate in those “battleground states”, it is likely that MO and IN would have gone Democrat anyway. There was an anti-GOP trend for the Senate, but not for the House, where both liberals and conservatives stick with their own incumbents though they loathe the House as a whole.
The problem is not the ideas, its the candidates themselves. Today’s politics left and right is populated by ignorant and incoherent practitioners. Compare what you hear in today’s discourse with the rhetoric of the 19th Century. It is shameful. Because some ignorant moron makes a fool of himself we have other morons blaming the ideas. I’m sorry, I can’t escape the truth, I cringe sometimes when some of our own champions speak. The other side, forget about it. Maybe a school of rhetoric should be created to teach our candidates to be able to communicate clearly. It was an essential part of a good education for centuries. If our Founding Fathers watched any debate during the last election cycle, they would cry.
As long as your state House doesn’t elect a RINO tool as Speaker like Texas did
I nominate Mark Levin to be dean of this school.
If it is the women’s CHOICE then why do men pay child support? That doesn’t make any sense. If the woman chose to have them, then the women should be responsible for them.
It’s one thing to be pro-life, but they ventured where most pro-life politicians don’t even dare to venture ...RAPE
The media set an obvious trap and these lemmings walked right into it . Aiken was bad , but Mourdock is beyond daft for seeing what happened to Aiken and then one-upping him ...
Couple these morons with RINO (baby huey) Christie and we took it from both ends and lost . Thank these three amigos for four more years of hell!
The problem is people who are stupid with their mouths. Their mouths are the problem, not their views. People in even liberal districts will vote for strong conservatives who are competent legislators and won't embarrass us. Pro-life candidates have won in the social liberal Philly suburbs of all places.
Which major social conservative issues do we get to protect, entirely?
BS on abortion. BS. If there's one issue that the younger generation IS conservative on, it is life. I stomached Romney only because of Obama, but I will not vote for a pro-abortion candidate.
Candidates are stupid with their mouths because they have no core beliefs, they are actors playing the role of a conservative because they think that’s the best way to get elected, so they have to think, “Ok what can I say that will get conservatives to like me?”.....and so you get statements like Akin and Mourdock’s, and Romney’s incredibly politically tone-deaf “47%” comment.
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