Earlier this year, the Republican National Committee put
together a team of experts to pore over what lessons there were to learn
from the GOP's electoral defeats in 2012. Together, they compiled
what is officially termed the "Growth And Opportunity Project," but what has become colloquially known -- due to its thanatological study of the corpse of Mitt Romney's campaign --
as the "RNC autopsy." Call it what you like, the RNC insisted that it was "
the most comprehensive post-election review" ever undertaken, and at 100 pages, we're not inclined to quibble.
Over the course of those 100 pages, the report’s authors offered up a
number of urgent “bottom line” thoughts on the state of the party after
2012. One of the most firmly stated admonitions cautioned against
insular thinking: “The Republican Party has to stop talking to itself.”
Indeed, that’s solid advice for anyone who’s been long trapped in the
bubble of “This Town.” But the question, one year on from the
publication of this report, is whether or not the Republican Party has
started listening to its own advice.
Those who produced the after-action report definitely took a
soup-to-nuts approach, devoting their energies to matters both
philosophical and practical. The RNC got deep into the weeds on how to
operate better in the modern campaign finance environment, took on the
tremendous deficits the party endured in terms of campaign technology,
and made a critical dissection of the party's entire primary process.
There was also tremendous emphasis on reaching out to demographic groups
that have lately found it all too easy to spurn the GOP's advances.
Now that we've reached the end of the first post-autopsy year,
however, it may be worth it to take a look back and see how the
Republican Party is doing, following the strictures set down in the
"Growth And Opportunity Project." Let's just pull one especially
urgent-sounding order out of the autopsy, totally at random, shall we?
As stated above, we are not a policy committee, but among
the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond we must
embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our
Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.
We also believe that comprehensive immigration reform is consistent
with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and
opportunity for all.
Oh, hey, whoops, I guess?
Here's a fun fact: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was, at one point,
thought of as a top prospect for a 2016 run. The RNC autopsy, in fact,
quotes him as a wise elder high up in the report: “What people who are
struggling want more than anything is a chance -- a chance to make it in
life.” After a year of suiting up in a flak jacket to confront
right-wing radio talkers who opposed Rubio and his "Gang Of Eight" on
immigration reform, it's Rubio whose chances are diminished. Remember
how Texas Gov. Rick Perry made an impassioned case for treating
immigrants humanely, based on years of practical experience as a border
state governor, only to get repeatedly kicked in the teeth for it?
History repeats itself.
As we come to the end of the year, the future of comprehensive
immigration reform looks as uncertain as ever. House Republican
leadership continues to sit on the comprehensive bill passed by the
Senate, and while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is
suggesting that House Speaker John Boehner is close to caving,
all the chit-chat out of Boehner's camp is indicating that he'll likely
stand pat against anything other than a piecemeal approach. Meanwhile,
this year's thorn in Boehner's side, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, is
urging his fellow Republicans to block any immigration reform efforts.
Cruz, who's criticized his fellow Republicans for
training "cannon fire" at one another even as
he's kept his own howitzers warm,
has been a one-man wrecking ball against the efforts of the RNC's
"Growth And Opportunity Project." Even as he's served as the vice chair
of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, he's raised the profile
of the Senate Conservatives Fund and used that perch to harangue his
colleagues for what he's perceived as a lack of purity. He hasn't even
endorsed Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the head of the NRSC, who's facing a
primary in Cruz's home state!
This isn't what the RNC wanted after 2012. The "Growth And
Opportunity" report goes on at great length about the need for the RNC
and its "Friends And Allies" (by which the report means right-aligned
third-party groups) to forge a more positive working alliance. "The RNC
is the only entity that can effectively lead on issues and messaging,"
says the report.
Those "Friends And Allies" didn't get the message. All year, outside
groups like Heritage Action and Club for Growth have laid down their own
law in terms of messaging, leading the GOP into one morass after
another. Things finally came to a head in mid-December, when Boehner --
hoping to shepherd through the budget deal wrought by House Budget
Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R) and Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman
Patty Murray (D) --
finally hit the roof.
It's hard to fault Boehner for his reaction. As
HuffPost's Sabrina Siddiqui reported,
"Heritage Action and Americans for Prosperity stated their opposition
to the Murray-Ryan budget deal before it was even announced, while Club
for Growth urged members to vote against it moments after the deal was
made public." That flew in the face of one of the RNC's big
recommendations: "Republican organizations need to understand that all
of this will work better if they will all participate in these
discussions and play their respective roles." At the end of 2013, it's
pretty clear that this spirit of participation and discussion has failed
to take root.
Of course, it would be inaccurate to suggest that the GOP hasn't made some not-insubstantial progress in righting the ship. As
CNN's Peter Hamby reported,
the RNC has an entirely new vision for the primary process that
includes fewer debates, a more tightly disciplined state primary process
and an early convention to help save its future presidential candidate
from operating at a financial disadvantage. After the wretched excesses
of the 2012 primaries,
these are reforms worth welcoming. Though
the law of unintended consequences still applies:
Will the new process limit the effectiveness of grassroots-driven
campaigns like the one Ron Paul ran in 2012? Will there still be enough
debates for a low-budget candidate, like Rick Santorum, to have a
puncher's chance at the nomination?
And when a nominee is crowned, will the candidate benefit from
cutting-edge campaign mechanics? That was one of the RNC's under-sung
goals in developing this post-2012 plan -- the need to build a smarter,
data-driven, reality-based campaign with top-flight digital
infrastructure. Around the same time the RNC was putting its report
together,
The New York Times' Robert Draper was making the rounds
of disaffected GOP campaign technologists and pointing out how
downright surreal it was to ponder the sort of talent that the
Republican Party
left on the sidelines in 2012.
How is the progress on that front? As
Real Clear Politics' Adam O'Neal reported last week,
progress is being made, but the GOP is still essentially "playing
catch-up." The lag was especially prominent in this year's Virginia
gubernatorial race:
DNC spokesman Mike Czin told RealClearPolitics that though
he has “no doubt that Republicans are making investments and really
spending time trying to figure out how to do this,” they are still
lagging behind.
Czin pointed to the Virginia gubernatorial race as proof that GOP
investments in this effort have not yet paid off. A few weeks before the
election, Republican Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign sent out an e-mail
asking those interested in volunteering to reach out again because
“sometimes things fall through the cracks.”
“That tells me that whatever investments they’re making weren’t being
used by the biggest targeted, competitive race of the year,” Czin said
of the contest won by Democrat Terry McAuliffe.
Of course, the race for Virginia's statehouse cast more of the
problems cited in the GOP autopsy in sharp relief. After all, the
Republicans ended up with a pair of radical weirdos -- Virginia Attorney
General Ken Cuccinelli and conservative pastor E.W. Jackson -- on the
top of their ticket. Both of those guys became the GOP's standardbearers
in Virginia as a result of the state party's decision to make their
nominations at a state convention instead of through a primary --
something that the autopsy specifically warned against: "It would be a
mistake to circumvent voters and hand-pick our nominees ... voters when
given choices will pick better candidates."
If we can linger a little longer in the Commonwealth of Virginia and
on its governor's race, which the GOP surmised was an eminently winnable
thing given the quality of the Democratic candidate, you can see
multiple examples of urgings from the autopsy that went unheeded:
Already, there is a generational difference within the
conservative movement about issues involving the treatment and the
rights of gays -- and for many younger voters, these issues are a
gateway into whether the Party is a place they want to be.
Women are not a “coalition.” They represent more than half
the voting population in the country, and our inability to win their
votes is losing us elections.
So yeah, maybe the fact that the Republicans' high-profile candidate in Virginia
championed transvaginal ultrasounds and the criminalization of sodomy should be seen as something of a setback.
Efforts are being made to improve the GOP's standing with a lot of
demographic groups that have shunned Republicans of late. We've learned,
for example, that aides to GOP incumbents are
getting trained on how to speak to women.
It's not clear that this necessarily involves eliminating from their
collective unconsciousness the sort of weird beliefs that caused
Missouri Rep. Todd Akin's Senate ambitions to founder or just becoming
savvy enough to never enunciate those beliefs out loud, but it is, one
supposes, a start.
Or if you prefer, a start among fits. After all, it was the RNC that
declared racism to be over in a tweet commemorating Rosa Parks this
year, despite the autopsy's admonition that the Republican Party needed
to do more to engage with the African-American community in a manner
that spoke to a "mutual respect." It would also help if the GOP would
curtail some of its more flamboyant efforts to keep the African-American
community from voting. A lonely Wisconsin Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner
might lead the way on that, if his party would let him.
The RNC's report also rather forcefully called for a populist
retrenchment: "We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and
its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left
unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of
dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a
meaningful raise in years." One might scoff at that a little louder were
it not for the fact that well-heeled Democratic groups like Third Way
have lately urged their party to kick the middle class to the curb.
Overall, these Republican outreach efforts remain
a work in progress,
and the ironic thing is that 2014's political realities may leave it so
for the near future. After all, as dire as this report was in
characterizing the deficits that undercut the GOP's 2012 efforts, the
Republicans are nevertheless in healthy shape, fundamentally speaking,
going into the 2014 midterms. Post-Census redistricting and the tendency
of Democratic voters to congeal in large populations in urban
districts, combined with the Democratic Party's traditional troubles in
turning out the vote in midterm elections, make the possibility of a
"wave" election that would undo right-wing hegemony in the House of
Representatives extremely remote, and it will take a substantial effort
just for the Democrats to maintain a slim majority in the Senate.
As the Democrats' 2014 message starts to take shape, it's hard to see
anything in the offing that might catalyze a shift in these
fundamentals. Right now, the White House and its Democratic allies are
banking on Obamacare functioning as planned come the fall of 2014. It's
an open question whether or not it will, but at this point, they're
all-in on their Obamacare wagers. Should they pay off, Democrats will
look back at 2013 -- the bungled rollout, President Barack Obama's poll
numbers -- as simply "paying the cost to be the boss."
Elsewhere, Democrats are whistling about an approaching dawn in
America's economic conditions, in the hopes that they might get credit
for something that ends up feeling, authentically, like being out of the
woods. It's something to hope for, but as they say, hope is not a plan.
If you cast your mind back to
the last time anyone spoke of a "Recovery Summer," it was ahead of the 2010 midterms. How did those work out again?
All of which is to say that, for the moment, the Republican Party
doesn't even need to heed the recommendations of the RNC report. As
noted above, Ted Cruz is essentially characterizing the effort to
mitigate the problems of 2012 as something
that would squander the tremendous opportunities the GOP might reap next year.
The question, of course, is whether or not running the sort of
ideological campaign that Cruz might prefer in the midterms would make
it harder to win in 2016, when the fundamentals of the Electoral College
arguably flip in favor of the Democrats. One of the costs of tea party
domination in 2010 was that by the time the presidential cycle had
rolled around again, the GOP's brand was so far to the right that many
of the party's most talented candidates stayed out of the game, rather
than get mixed up in their party's extravagant extremes. That's a factor
that the RNC did fail to grapple with in its "autopsy." It remains the
largest potential reason that Republicans may have cause to pen another
one. Which won't need to be heeded either.
Updated: 12/31/2013 10:53 am EST