Are Republicans Throwing Away Their House Majority?

While implementing the Affordable Health Care Act, a/k/a Obamacare, has had a difficult  - maybe even disastrous roll out - the Republican Party seems to be putting all of its eggs in the Obamacare basket and hoping that it will blind voters to all else, even though that did not save Ken Cuccinelli's batshit crazy ass here in Virginia.  And this blindness to reality is especially prevalent in the Kool-Aid drinking Christofascist/Tea Party base of the GOP.  Hence the continuing push by the GOP base to nominate extremists like the trio of crazies nominated by the Republican Party of Virginia at its coven meeting convention last Spring.  A piece in Think Progress looks at new analysis that suggests that the drift towards extremism in the GOP may backfire and aid the Democrats in gaining seats in the House of Representatives.  Here are highlights:

Call it the Todd Akin effect: nominating an extreme candidate can halve a party’s chance of holding on to a House seat, according to a brand-spanking new political science paper. It’s a finding that has important implications for the future of the increasingly-polarized Republican Party and the often-contentious debate over gerrymandering.

Andrew Hall, a graduate student in Government at Harvard, developed a measure based on who donates to a given candidate. . . . . Hall found an enormous effect: when an extreme candidate wins a House primary in either party, there’s “a 11-13 percentage-point decrease in the party’s share of the general-election vote, and a 38-49% decrease in its probability of victory.” The more extreme the candidate, the more towards the higher end of these estimates you’d expect the extremism penalty to be.
 
Once a party has taken a seat because of their opponents’ extremism, it’s gone for a long, long time. Incumbency confers huge advantages on House members, which means that the extremism penalty isn’t just a one-election thing according to Hall’s data: “the nomination of an extremist today continues to cause an equally large decrease in the party’s expected probability of victory and vote share even four terms, or eight years, later — the farthest downstream that redistricting allows us to examine.”

Halving a party’s chance to win a House seat for years is an insanely large effect and, unsurprisingly, Hall finds that it has implications for what happens in Congress down the line.
[I]f he’s [Hall's] right, there are two interesting implications for American politics. First, they point to yet another way that the Republican Party is playing Russian Roulette with its political future. It’s well-established at this point that, while both parties have gotten more ideological in recent years, the Republicans have gone way further off the deep end. . . .

The extremism penalty is unlikely to offset the GOP’s geographic advantage on its own, but combined with unfavorable long-term demographic trends, it could play a role in weakening the GOP’s stranglehold on Congress’ lower body.

Which brings us to the second point, gerrymandering.  . . . . The gerrymandering and extremism argument may be tough to parse, but Hall’s research suggest it’s critically important to understanding the future of the Republican Party and, by extension, American government.