In the course of writing a column for TPMCafe arguing that GOP “Establishment” wins in this year’s Republican Senate primaries disguised the broader Tea Party influence over the party, I decided it was time to step back and sort out what we all mean when we talk about “battles” and “wars” on the Right these days. Here’s how I sought to do that at the Washington Monthly today:

I’ve been pretty outspoken for years now in arguing that aside from foreign policy, the main “battles” within the Republican Party have been over strategy and tactics, not policy or ideology. Now strategy and tactics do matter, as last year’s government shutdown and the incessant obstructionism that is the congressional GOP’s default position demonstrate. But the main function of the Tea Party Movement has been to intensify and defend a rightward movement in the Republican Party that’s been underway for decades but has gained hellish momentum since the 2008 elections, regularly overwhelming the efforts of GOP elites to instill some “pragmatic” caution. In that sense, the Tea Folk are winning “the war” even if they lose a number of primary “battles.”
If you look at the rhetoric and positioning of many of the “Establishment” winners in this year’s Senate primaries, it’s like the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest all over again. There’s remarkable near-unanimity in favor of hard-core positions on fiscal matters, the economy, cultural issues, and immigration–and above all a violent resistance to the idea that government can play a positive role in national life other than at the Pentagon. “Pragmatic outsider” David Perdue of GA won his runoff in no small part by going Medieval on “amnesty,” just like Mitt Romney did during the 2012 primaries. “Establishment” icon Thom Tillis of North Carolina won his primary by branding himself as leader of a “conservative revolution” in his state (much as Romney called himself “severely conservative”), and identifying with “base activist” hostility to the poor and minorities (much as Romney went over the brink with his “47%” comments). Joni Ernst of Iowa, initially vulnerable in her primary for having supported a gas tax increase in the legislature, cozied up to every conservative activist in sight, indulged in harsh Obama-bashing, and endorsed a “personhood” amendment.
This rightward movement of the GOP remains the most important political phenomenon of our time, and despite all the “rebranding” talk after the 2012 presidential defeat, it’s still happening. So whereas no one should exaggerate the differences of opinion among Republicans at present, the rightward pressure based on real and threatened primary challenges is an important factor.

Perhaps in using military language in talking about intramural conflict on the Right, we should talk about a “Cold War”–one in which it’s reasonably clear who is on the offensive and seems likely to prevail. It’s not any sort of “pragmatists.”

This week House Republicans have tied themselves in knots trying to pass a “border crisis” bill, in part because conservatives are demanding that any such legislation be accompanied by efforts to restrict or even repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, under which the president suspended deportations for DREAMers. You’d think to watch them that placating the nativist wing of the GOP was the only factor that mattered. But as I pointed out today at the Washington Monthly, a big price will be paid among Latino voters:

I would assume that Republicans are at least dimly aware that the anti-DACA provisions they are toying with to get conservatives on board a border refugee bill will come at a political cost. If not, they should check out this reminder from the polling firm Latino Decisions:

The push to dismantle DACA will significantly alienate Latino voters according to recent surveys carried out by Latino Decisions. President Obama’s 2012 administrative order on DACA, which provided temporary relief to more than 550,000 undocumented young people was overwhelming supported by Latino voters. In our June 2014 poll with the Center for American Progress, 84% of Latinos said they would be more enthusiastic toward the Democratic Party if DACA was renewed by President Obama in 2014. This high level of enthusiasm cuts across all segments of the Latino electorate….
DACA was a defining issue in 2012 for Latino voters and it continues to be a policy of utmost support. If Republicans wish to woo Latino voters, ending DACA is a severely misguided strategy as history proves. Back in 2013 the GOP already voted to defund DACA and in a July 2013 survey, we asked how favorable or unfavorable Latinos would feel toward the Republican Party if House Republicans voted to cancel all funding for the DACA program. In this survey, 75% of Latinos said they would be less favorable toward the GOP than they already were. Favorability also dropped significantly among likely GOP supporters: Evangelicals by 75%, political Independents by 73% and among Latinos who had previously voted Republican by 66%.

Messing with DACA is a really bad idea for a party that’s already struggling to cross the threshold of credibility with a Latino demographic that’s only going to become more important every year.

Political parties often face choices between strategies that create (or promise to create) a short-term advantage, and those that address long-range challenges. One of the GOP’s problems right now is that it is developing a real habit of sacrificing the long game to immediate opportunities. I briefly discussed five recent examples today at the Washington Monthly:

The first example involves the many, many lies told by GOP pols and affiliated gabbers about the alleged horrific impact of the Affordable Care Act on old folks. These ranged from deliberate mischaracterization of the Medicare “cuts” in the ACA (raised to an infamous art form by Paul Ryan in 2012), and ranged on up to the amazingly effective if completely fabricated “death panel” meme. As a short-term strategy, this made sense, and certainly helped solidify the GOP’s sudden new dominance among older white voters, a key factor in 2010. In the long term, though, aside from the risk of hellfire, the tactic undermined the GOP’s simultaneous commitment to “entitlement reform,” the linchpin of its fiscal strategy.
A second choice of short-term versus long-term strategies has been the War on Voting, which has risked generational alienation of affected young and minority voters in exchange for dubiously effective electoral advantages. This is an ongoing choice, which only Rand Paul has (temporarily) seriously questioned.
A third, emphasized just today by Ross Douthat (though the critique has always been a staple of so-called Sam’s Club Republicanism), was the decision to make the 2012 economic message of the GOP revolve around the needs and perspectives of business owners, presumably to reverse the advantage Democrats had slowly gained since the Clinton years among several categories of upscale voters. This approach played right into Democrats’ new openness to populist messages, and while conservatives like Douthat are arguing for policies that appeal to the economic interests of middle-class voters, the shadow of Mitt Romney still looms large.
A fourth, which is also ongoing, was the sudden and almost universal embrace by the GOP of a “religious liberty” argument that identified the party with very extreme positions on birth control and same-sex marriages, undermining years of careful antichoicer focus on late-term abortion and reversing an implicit party decision to soft-pedal homophobia. Those who led this campaign in 2012 probably had visions of it serving as a wedge into the Catholic vote (which even some Democrats feared), which just didn’t happen.
And fifth and most definitely ongoing example is the decision to follow an immediate shift to the right in Republican and to some extent independent attitudes towards immigration reform in the wake of the refugee crisis on the border, even though Republicans know they’ll pay a long-term price in credibility with Latino voters.

Taking a snail’s-eye view of strategic opportunities isn’t an inherent Republican vice. But it’s becoming habitual right now, in part because any long-range strategy would require ideological concessions, and we can’t have that, can we?

The “enthusiasm gap” as a predictor of electoral outcomes is one of the Pew Research Group’s less valuable contributions to political analysis. So I took a few shots today at Washington Monthly at Pew’s latest offerings on this subject:

Pew is back with its latest estimates of the GOP “enthusiasm gap” at this point in the midterm cycle. Here’s the relatively good, or perhaps relatively not-so-bad, news for Democrats:

Today, the Republicans lead on a number of key engagement indicators, though in some cases by smaller margins than four years ago. Currently, 45% of registered voters who plan to support the Republican in their district say they are more enthusiastic about voting than in prior congressional elections; that compares with 37% of those who plan to vote for the Democratic candidate. The GOP had a 13-point enthusiasm advantage at this point in the midterm campaign four years ago (55% to 42%) and the Democrats held a 17-point advantage eight years ago (47% to 30%).
However, as many voters who support the Republican in their district say they are “absolutely certain” to vote this fall as said this in June 2010. Three-quarters of Republican voters (76%) say they are absolutely certain to vote, compared with 67% of Democratic voters. Four years ago, 77% of Republican voters and 64% of Democratic voters said they were absolutely certain to vote in the fall.

As regular readers have heard me say on many occasions, voter “enthusiasm” is an inherently questionable metric for likely voter turnout, insofar as “enthusiasm” beyond that needed to get one to the polls is wasted unless it’s somehow communicated (e.g., via volunteer activity).
Another thing to keep in mind when trying to compare this midterm to the last two is that in 2006 and 2010 the party with the least “enthusiasm” was grossly over-extended, particularly in the House, thanks to prior victories in marginal territory. That’s certainly not true of House Democrats today, though you can certainly make an argument Senate Democrats are over-extended in the South.
In any event, these type of surveys are really just a placeholder until late-cycle polls begin to get a grip on the universe of “likely voters.”

So Republicans excited about the “enthusiasm gap” should curb their enthusiasm. And Democrats should focus on the hard, practical work of getting people to the polls who will vote for the Donkey Party, with or without high levels of “enthusiasm.”

While most of the meager national attention paid to yesterday’s Georgia primary runoffs was devoted to David Perdue’s upset win over Jack Kingston for the U.S. Senate nomination, there were significant contests also held in the three heavily Republican districts vacated by House members running for the Senate. Remember back in May when people talked about ridding the House of hard-core wingnuts Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun, who finished fourth and fifth (respectively) in the Senate primary? Well, their successors are in the same mold, as I noted at TPMCafe today:

Gingrey, never the sharpest tool in the congressional shed, will be replaced by state senator Barry Loudermilk, a more disciplined ideologue who crushed former congressman and 2008 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr in a sign of how far right Barr’s former district has drifted. Broun’s successor as Republican nominee is a worthily wild candidate, Baptist minister and radio talk show host Jody Hice, famed for homophobic outbursts, and for billboards he put up in an earlier race that replaced the “O” in the president’s name with a hammer-and-sickle.
Kingston will not be succeeded by the similarly colorful “constitutional conservative” in his own House district, Dr. Bob “Christian Conservative” Johnson, who lost the runoff yesterday (probably due to elevated turnout attributable to Kingston’s campaign) to state legislator Buddy Carter despite support from the Club for Growth and Sarah Palin. But presumably Carter would follow Kingston’s lead into movement-conservative repositioning if he were ever to run statewide. That’s how Georgia Republicans roll.

Those who like to talk about the GOP “moderating” via “pragmatist” candidates crushing the dying Tea Party Movement need to start taking notice of what’s happening below the headlines.