Over 20 years ago, I was elected to the Republican City Committee for Virginia Beach. The party then was a very different organization and sane moderates were still in the majority despite efforts by Christofascists to infiltrate and hijack the party. Now, the moderates are gone and to be in the GOP one needs to be either (i) a far right Christian extremist, (ii) an open racist, or (iii) driven by greed and a desire to deny benefits to the poor and destitute and allow the nation's infrastructure to collapse. Not surprisingly, fewer and fewer voters in high turnout elections find the GOP agenda appealing. Yet do those in the leadership of the Virginia GOP believe they need to change the party agenda? Of course not. They are such fanatical ideologues (and so beholden to the extremists at The Family Foundation) that they simply need to "be more unified." The fact that their agenda is viewed as poisonous and that the state's demographics are changing don't register in their warped minds. A piece in the Richmond Times Dispatch looks at the Virginia GOP's ongoing circular firing squad. Here are excerpts:
Without a victory in a statewide race since 2009, the Virginia GOP would have to overcome increasingly challenging demographics to deliver the state to Republicans in the 2016 presidential election.
Republican Party of Virginia Chairman John C. Whitbeck, elected in January to serve out the term of retiring Pat Mullins, has made it his mission to modernize the party without diluting its conservative principles. “We don’t need to change who we are, we don’t need to reform our belief system and our platform. That’s not going to happen,” Whitbeck said in an interview.
The big challenge for the Virginia GOP, should it opt for a convention, is to represent the range of opinions within the party, said Stephen J. Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington. “From the point of view of creating a broad-based party with a lot of public support, conventions really don’t get you there,” Farnsworth said. “A few thousand people who participate in a convention are going to be far more ideologically extreme than the much larger population that would participate in a primary.”
UMW’s Farnsworth said the convention-versus-primary debate is just one indicator that the conflict within the Virginia GOP is not just a difference of opinion between candidates, but a more permanent cleavage. "The idea that Eric Cantor was not conservative enough to win a Republican nomination is a significant departure from were the RPV stood 10 years ago,” Farnsworth said.
Whitbeck rejects the notion that a conservative candidate cannot appeal to mainstream voters.
Beyond fundraising, Virginia Republicans face another daunting numbers game. State voter turnout spikes above 70 percent in presidential elections, which maximizes Democrats’ advantage in Virginia’s increasingly diverse population centers of Northern Virginia, greater Richmond and Hampton Roads.
In 2008 Barack Obama carried Northern Virginia by 234,079 votes. He ran basically even in the rest of Virginia, winning the state by 234,527 votes. In 2012 Obama again swept the four counties and five cities in Northern Virginia, this time by a total of 231,244 votes. Republicans improved their vote totals in rural sections of the state, but Obama still carried Virginia by more than 149,000 votes.
In 2016, if the Democratic presidential nominee — presumably former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — again comes out of Northern Virginia with a cushion of more than 200,000 votes, the Republican nominee will be hard-pressed to offset the margin.
The population centers that hold the largest segment of the state’s voters continue to grow more diverse. For instance, the state’s most populous locality — Fairfax County, with more than 1.1 million residents — was 69.9 percent white in 2000 and 63.6 percent white by 2013. In that span the county’s Asian population rose from 13.1 percent to 18.4 percent. Its percentage of Hispanic residents rose from 11 percent to 16.2 percent.
While aware of the state’s voting patterns in recent presidential elections, Whitbeck says Virginia Republicans do not need to reconsider their message. “It’s all about our presentation, that is the issue.
When your agenda is anti-black, anti-Hispanic, anti-gay and anti-women, its hard to see how you change your "presentation" so that the voters you attack and malign - and seek to disenfranchise - are going to vote in support of your policies. The Kool-Aid continues to be consumed by the gallons at RVP headquarters and city and county committees across Virginia. A form of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting somehow to achieve a different result. Until the GOP, and especially the Virginia GOP, decides to move into the 21st century and face demographic change, I hope their losing streak continues and come the next census, many of their gerrymandered districts will dissolve.
No comments:
Post a Comment