The Way Back By Tom Davis
TOM DAVIS
Republicans must be wondering: Can it get any worse? As late as 2006, we held the White House and a majority in both houses of Congress. Come January, all three will be in Democratic hands – with a near-filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
As chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee for two of its most successful cycles, I’ve seen our party in much better shape. But I’ve seen it in worse shape as well.
Republicans rebounded from landslide losses in 1964 and 1974 that were more devastating than this year’s. Our presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., received 46 percent of the popular vote this year. He carried 22 states and came within a few thousand votes of carrying four more.
He did as well as could be expected considering the circumstances. He was outspent 4-1 as he carried the banner of a party whose two-term incumbent had lower poll numbers for a longer period than any president in American history, had involved the country in an unpopular war and had seen the economy collapse in October. No other Republican could’ve come close to those numbers.
But let’s not kid ourselves, our party is broken. In no small way, we’ve been victims of our own success. We fought communism and won. We fought stagnation brought on by high taxes and restrictive government policies. Today, voters take low taxes as a given, and the burden of proof – even in the wake of the financial crisis – is on those who would regulate, not those who would remove regulations.
With the heavy lifting out of the way, we indulged in more trivial pursuits – and this led to trouble. We talked to ourselves and not to voters. We became more concerned with stem cell policy than economic policy, and with prayer in schools rather than balance in our public budgets and priorities. Not so long ago, it was easy to paint the Democrats as the party of extremists. Now, they say we’re extremists, and voters agree.
As a result, we’ve seen our support erode. Urban centers remain under Democratic control. Exurbs and rural areas remain under Republican dominance. But in the battleground that lies between – the suburbs -- we were winning them; now we’re not. Our candidates are safe in a swath that extends from North Texas across to North Alabama and up through Appalachia. Elsewhere, we are on the run. Almost every voter who can be convinced – who sometimes votes Democratic, sometimes Republican – now votes Democratic.
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