Schwarzenegger Model is Disaster for GOP

Marvin King, a political scientist who blogs at King Politics, published an interesting essay Sunday at the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi: "A Shrinking GOP Needs Plans for a 'Comeback'."

Marvin suggests three routes for a GOP comeback: A "Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee" path; the "Grover Norquist/Club for Growth" path; and a route that "goes west," that is, a move "in the direction of Arnold Schwarzenegger":

While the California governor can never run for president, he epitomizes the moderate wing of the Republican Party, and a template for winning in Blue America. Schwarzenegger works with unions and business alike in trying to create a pro-business climate.

Likewise, he avoids divisive social issues. Not because he does not care; instead, he recognizes that a single-minded focus on social issues is not conducive to developing a bipartisan working environment. He is not as conservative fiscally as Norquist, nor as conservative socially as Palin, but Arnold knows how to win elections.

I've written previously that the GOP has a demographic problem and will need to appeal to the political center in future elections, but the "Schwarzenegger path" is not what I had in mind. The best evidence of this is today's news that Governor Schwarzenegger has announced his support for the same-sex marriage activists who are currently mounting statewide protests against Proposition 8. As today's Los Angeles Times reports:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Sunday expressed hope that the California Supreme Court would overturn Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that outlawed same-sex marriage.

I can't stress this point enough: While there are a number of things the GOP must do to claw its way back to power, capitulating to the angry mobs storming the barricades to overturn the vote of a traditional California majority is not one of them.

Seventy-percent of black voters in the state supported Proposition 8, and this is California, a bastion of progressive politics and Democratic Party hegemony. Governor Scharzenegger's a dramatic exception to the rule, and for Republicans to seek a "Schwarzenegger model" at the national level will likely mean the literal break-up of the post-Goldwater GOP coalition. Simply put: Some combination of social policy conservativism with innovative economic policies attractive to the stressed middle class will be the ticket to a revived conservatism.

At the presidential level, Barack Obama took every single demographic category except voters older than 60 years-old and white voters over the age of 30. That's it. Frankly, 2008 heralds a demographic realignment to the Democratic Party. Whether this vast bloc coalesces to resemble Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal Coaltion - which endured well into the 1960s - remains to be seen. It's almost certain, however, that Republicans won't be able to win social moderates by aping the interest group liberalism of the Democratic-left.

Note something else about the electoral demographics of Propostion 8 in California: Jasmyne Cannick, an urban civil rights activist in Los Angeles, argues that opposition to Proposition 8 was dominated by affluent white liberals indifferent to the real needs of African Americans - needs which include jobs, safe streets and schools, and remedies to continuing inequalities ("driving while black"). Moreover, the black Yes on 8 vote was grounded in the social justice and spiritual meaning that marks the religion of the black church. That faith-based motivation is naturally antithetical to the secular humanism that drives the left-wing agenda of today's Democratic Party.

Then there's the Latino vote this year: Nationally, Latinos formed the crucial bloc of voters in key states like Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia. Colorado and Virginia have turned out reliably for the Republican Party for decades, and there's nothing that's particularly permanent about Latino support for the Democrats this year. In 2004, George W. Bush took roughly 44 percent of the national Latino vote, and in states like Texas, the GOP ticket secured a whopping 59 percent of the Latino electorate. This year, John McCain took just 31 percent of the Latino vote nationally, down almost 15 points from the GOP's share of that demographic in 2004.

Yet, there's a large Protestant and Catholic bloc of Latino voters who are attentive to the political and cultural attractions of the Republican Party. Perhaps the most careless and self-destructive agenda for the GOP going forward will be to further alienate the country's Latino voting constituency.

As Scott Rasmussen reports today, public opinion polling shows that 55 percent of Americans believe that tax cuts are good for the economy, and Rasmussen notes that Barack Obama won the presidency by promising tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans. The problem for an Obama administration is that the Democratic Congress hopes to spend billions of dollars on social programs and infrastructure - a new Works Progress Administration is being proposed - while maintaining the deployment of American troops in two ongoing conflicts abroad.

Financing such an agenda will likely require an increase in tax rates beyond the top, high-income marginal hikes already proposed by the Obama campaign. Combine this with the super-progressive social agenda the marks today's Democratic Party, and we can see the contours of a conservative opposition-paradigm taking shape.

In all likelihood, the Schwarzenegger model will be the least attractive program for the emerging post-2008 GOP. A more serious challenge will be to find an alliance of conservative activists among the Palin-Huckabee factions and the Club for Growth cohorts that offers an atttractive economic model while not alienating racial and religious moderates and the fast-growing demographic groups likely key to a Republican Party resurgence.