Four year ago, as we Democrats were on the short end of a Republican trifecta, we had to engage in soul-searching similar to what Republicans face now. The conclusion Democrats arrived at was that our problems were mainly non-ideological and related to strategy and infrastructure. This conclusion could be seen with the DNC's election of Howard Dean on a fifty-state strategy platform, in the papers produced by NDN with their New Politics Institute, and also in the netroots as perhaps best exemplified with Crashing the Gate. The Democratic soul-searching conclusion of late 2004 and early 2005 was not that our ideas were either wrong or unpopular, but rather that we faced organizing and structural deficiencies that allowed Republicans to eke out 50% +1 victories through fundraising, media, grassroots activist, message packaging, and strategic resource deployment advantages.
Republicans seem to be reaching similar conclusions now. The post-election Pew survey shows they think they should move in a more conservative direction by a large 60%-35% margin. Further, according to Democracy Corps, two-thirds of Republicans think that McCain and their congressional candidates lost because of the media, and the same number think that McCain wasn't aggressive enough in his attacks on Obama. (This latter conclusion strikes me as particularly difficult to justify, given that McCain and the RNC went 100% negative with paid media during the final five weeks of the campaign.) Further, in their description of how to rebuild the Republican Party, The Next Right seems to be repeating what Democratic netroots activists said back in 2004: run a fifty-state strategy and build up media and grassroots infrastructure. The over-riding Republican conclusion seems to be not that their ideas are wrong or unpopular, but that they need to improve their organizing, get more aggressive with Democrats, become more conservative, and destroy the mainstream media.
So, Republicans seem to be reaching the same conclusions Democrats did four years ago: we are neither wrong nor unpopular, simply out-organized, out-strategized, and facing structural deficits. While the Democratic conclusion was quickly proven correct as Bush's approval rating dropped below 50% and then suffered a long, slow decline over the next four years, the Republican conclusion seems largely untenable. This is because, as I describe in the extended entry, the Republican deficit is much larger than the one Democrats faced four years ago. Further, it arose out of a more damaging source: Republicans have become highly unpopular in 2008 because of how they governed, while Democrats were unpopular four years ago because of their image.
More in the extended entry.
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