Media Myths About Republicans

The media probably won’t do much better than that unless they are prepared to revise the clichés and myths about Republicans they’ve been propagating for years, namely: 

The party is being dragged down by its extremist base. This is actually a more telling critique of Democrats. In August 2012, the New York Times commented on Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential selection by noting that “a long history of social extremism makes Paul Ryan an emblem of the Republican tack to the far right.” If Paul Ryan is emblematic of GOP extremism, you can say for sure that this alleged GOP handicap has been wildly oversold.

On the other hand, Democratic social extremism is very real but barely discussed. The party has no high-profile dissenters on abortion rights, and its fealty to the abortion lobby proved to be damaging in the election. After crowing for years about turning Texas blue, Democrats nominated state senator Wendy Davis to run for governor. Davis’s chief recommendation as a candidate? She had become a media darling for launching a filibuster against proposed restrictions on late-term abortions (which later passed). Democrats bought into the hype, even though late-term abortion restrictions are broadly popular, well, everywhere. (Even Sweden has more late-term abortion restrictions than Texas.) Davis ran an embarrassing campaign and lost by 20 points, despite raising a staggering $30 million—money that might have tipped a few close races elsewhere had Democrats distributed their donations more wisely.

After the media unfairly pilloried the entire GOP for waging a “war on women” in 2012, this time around key Republicans came prepared. In Colorado and North Carolina, Senate candidates Cory Gardner and Thom Tillis blunted attacks by campaigning to make birth control available over the counter, as did Maryland’s incoming Republican governor, Larry Hogan, who pulled off a stunning upset. Planned Parenthood, an organization whose foundational mission is expanding access to birth control, actually came out against these GOP over-the-counter proposals—probably because of its loyalty to Democrats and because over-the-counter birth control would cut down on use of its clinics. As a result, the Democrats’ attempts to use contraception as a wedge issue looked preposterous.

Finally, the Democratic party’s extreme stance on climate change and environmentalism hurt them at the ballot box. The White House’s “war on coal” boosted Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, who won by 15 points in a supposedly close race. Coal voters were also a big factor in flipping West Virgina’s legislature as well as the GOP’s Senate pickup in the state. And they help explain why Ed Gillespie came within a point of picking off Senator Mark Warner in Virginia.

A Pew survey earlier this year found that Americans ranked climate change 19th out of 20 “top policy priorities.” Yet, it was the number-one issue for Democratic megadonor Tom Steyer. The postelection headline at Slate: “Tom Steyer spent $57 million to get voters to care about climate change. It didn’t work.”

The “gender gap” is killing Republicans. There’s been a lot of angst over the GOP’s problem with female voters. While Republicans tend to carry married women, Democrats have made scaring single women, who vote largely Democratic, a regular part of their campaign toolbox (see the Obama 2012 campaign’s touting of birth control activist Sandra Fluke and the “Life of Julia” talking points). But the effectiveness of this approach seems to be diminishing. Wendy Davis actually lost women voters by 9 points.

National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar noted that in Colorado, Senator Mark Udall’s war on women campaign succeeded in turning out single women—to no avail. Udall got 5 points more support from single women in Colorado than Romney in 2012, and single women made up a larger slice of the electorate in 2014. But Udall still lost by 2.5 points. What that reveals is that Udall—who ran such a female-oriented campaign he was dubbed “Mark Uterus”—had a real problem getting enough male voters. After years of anguishing over the GOP’s lack of female voters, it seems high time to ask some questions about the Democrats’ corresponding gender gap among men.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for the mainstream media to weigh in. David Brock, perhaps the most obsequious of Hillary Clinton’s supporters, commissioned a poll purporting to prove that her many campaign appearances helped boost female turnout. Time uncritically ran with it under the credulous headline “Exclusive: Women Turned Out for Hillary in the Midterms.”

Demography dooms the GOP. In 2012, Democrats were crowing they had a lock on the “coalition of the ascendant”—young people, minorities, and college-educated whites—whose ranks would eventually overwhelm the aging, downmarket Republicans. However, Obama’s winning coalition has so far turned out only for him.

Hispanic voters, for one group, are not single-issue immigration voters. They’re quite open to a GOP pitch on jobs and economic opportunity. In Georgia, David Perdue and Governor Nathan Deal each won more than 40 percent of the Hispanic vote, despite tough positions on illegal immigration. In Texas, governor-elect Greg Abbott garnered 12 points more than Rick Perry in his last election. Arizona’s incoming governor Doug Ducey captured 10 points more from Hispanic voters than his GOP predecessor. In Nevada, Hispanic governor Brian Sandoval was reelected and improved his standing with Hispanic voters from 33 to 47 percent. (The polling in Nevada isn’t terribly reliable—Jon Ralston, the dean of Nevada’s political press, thinks Sandoval’s share of Hispanics was actually “much higher.”) If the GOP can consistently get 35 percent or better of Hispanics, which is not unthinkable, it blows a big hole in the Democratic coalition.

In another stunning turnaround, the GOP captured a slim majority of Asian-American voters in the midterms. Asian Americans voted 73 percent for Obama just two years ago. Like Hispanics, Asian Americans don’t fit neatly into Democratic identity politics and are primed for GOP outreach.

Finally, the election shows Democrats’ “ascendant” coalition isn’t ascendant enough to ignore working-class white voters. Despite the Clintons’ campaigning especially heavily in their old stomping grounds, Arkansas senator Mark Pryor lost by an eye-popping 17 points—10 more than the final polls suggested. FiveThirty-Eight’s Harry Enten observes that white voters in Iowa without college degrees didn’t vote Democratic this time around. Democratic senatorial candidate Bruce Braley lost them by 14 points. Nationwide, white voters without college degrees break heavily for Republicans, but Iowa has been a stubborn, quirky exception. “If that [Iowa] shift persists, it could have a big effect on the presidential race in 2016, altering the White House math by eliminating the Democratic edge in the Electoral College,” notes Enten.

Republicans are intellectually bankrupt. This is another case where the media myth about Republicans more accurately describes Democrats. Not only did Democrats have to run away from their own unpopular and unsuccessful policies such as Obamacare, they couldn’t even capitalize on the improving economy. That’s largely because the Democratic economic policy agenda consisted of minimum wage increases and talking up inequality. To think that just a few years ago the liberal intelligentsia was bandying about the obnoxious phrase “epistemic closure” to indict the GOP’s supposed insularity and lack of new ideas.

Josh Marshall, one of the few liberal writers to emerge from this election with a potent self-critique, blames the Democratic focus on income inequality. Fomenting zero-sum resentment toward the rich is an abstract concern. “What is driving the politics of the country to a mammoth degree is that the vast majority of people in the country no longer have a rising standard of living,” notes Marshall.

Marshall’s right—and it just so happens the GOP has done better than the Democrats at recognizing this. In a column on “reform conservatism” from May, the New York Times’s Ross Douthat lauded new GOP policy prescriptions for recognizing that “the core economic challenge facing the American experiment is not income inequality per se, but rather stratification and stagnation—weak mobility from the bottom of the income ladder and wage stagnation for the middle class.” Two days after the election, one of reform conservatism’s leading lights, Utah senator Mike Lee, had a lengthy article at the Federalist outlining a detailed GOP agenda along these lines that would increase transparency, fight crony capitalism, and orient tax policy to benefit families and the middle class. The media were not curious but dismissive. National Journal’s headline: “Mike Lee’s 4,200-Word Plan to Fix Congress, Summed Up in Six Sentences.”

The wave election is by no means a reason for Republicans to become overconfident, and recent talk of a “generational majority” is just silly. Progress with female and minority voters can’t be taken for granted. Nor should Republicans rest on their laurels and avoid crafting and pursuing new policies.

It is, however, safe to say that the demise of the GOP has been greatly exaggerated.

Mark Hemingway is a senior writer  at The Weekly Standard.