Republican Base is too Extreme to Win National Elections

Update 10/01/2013:  Looking at this post that is well over a year old is enough to make most American’s sad by the increasing extremism since it was written. The theory continues to prove true as now the Tea Party controlled Republican Party has shut down the United States Government. It seems the GOP didn’t learn from the 2012 election, which leaves an opening for democrats to take back Congress in 2014.

UPDATE 08/20/12: Disagree with the post title? Give additional thought to Todd Akin’s comment that is apparently a common belief inside the republican base bubble… a belief that the GOP nationally has been able to keep quiet until now.

Related: Beyond 2012: What now?  Easing Political Polarization.

The roll out of Mitt Romney’s pick as his his VP running mate for 2012, Paul Ryan has proven that the Republican base is officially too extreme to ever win a national election. It is impossible to please the Republican Party “base” without alienating the winning majority of the country.

We’re even forced to re-define what “the republican base” even means now. Any cable news viewer hears the term countless times every night, but “the base” of the republican party that is called such by both news outlets and both political parties is basically extreme both fiscally, and socially: no taxes yet increase defense, and socially legally enact Christian, evangelically defined, social standards. In the republican base, the separation of church and state ought not exist, and that is sour to both religious and non-religious Americans.

Progressively over the last decades, the Republican Party has been pulling policy and state laws to the right, more and more so with every election and large policy debate. But now it has gone too far, and the national reaction to Paul Ryan as Romney’s VP choice has proved it. The Mitt Romney campaign has been scurrying to offset two major problems with Paul Ryan that have never made it into the Fox News and Rush Limbaugh world: ending Medicare, and personhood bills, that Paul Ryan sponsored, that force trans-vaginal probes and make many forms of contraception (as well as fertility treatments, which two of Mitt Romney’s sons have used) illegal… under Paul Ryan’s beliefs, Mitt Romney’s sons should go to jail.

In politics, the two parties in the United States have a stuggle: cater to their base, while being just moderate enough to capture enough of the middle to win an election. It is now impossible for the Republican Party to make its extreme base happy, while not losing the middle, therefore, Republicans will never win national elections without either cheating (voting restrictions, and citizens united), or moving its policy back towards the center.

Ever since the Mitt Romney campaign announced its pick of Paul Ryan as the CP running mate people who normally don’t pay attention to policy have been discovering more and more about how extreme Paul Ryan is, and how many times Mitt Romney has publicly voiced his support of Ryan’s policy positions (budget, medicare, personhood amendment, etc.). Moreover, Republicans who are running for Congress and the Senate are scared (which is ironic since they are the most extreme of the lot) because they know that being part of a full ticket that is THAT extreme will make it more difficult for them to also win independents and even democratic party voters.

With extremism you can win small elections where the voting populous is homogenous by district gerrymandering. That’s how Republicans can control states… but national elections where the population is diverse, they cannot win with the level of extreme right policy positions they have taken. Sadly, the way our country works, if Republicans run the states then they can stack the deck for national elections, which we have clearly seen since the 2010 election.

Watching the Mitt Romney campaign try to say “we like Paul Ryan’s budget” while simultaneously saying that he doesn’t support it is comical. As always, Mitt Romney is being über-vague when asked any questions; refuses to even say if his stance on medicare is the same as his VP pick… that’s a REALLY important policy matter on which they need to agree… or at least talk, which Romney is now saying he still has to do with Paul Ryan (?????).

This roll out of the republican pick for VP has proven that it is impossible to make the base happy while also not… well, freaking out the rest of the country’s voters. Since it’s too late to change policy, the only hope republicans have to win in 2012 is to restrict voting in democratic areas as much as they possibly can (which they are doing nation-wide on a state-by-state level with all the new state houses that they won in 2010), and join that voter rights destruction tactic with billions of dollars in advertising to convince people who don’t pay attention that President Obama is evil. That’s the only thing they can do, and it’s what they are doing.

Pray that Americans are smart enough to see through it.

And for the future: Republican Party: it’s time to get out of the extreme wings, and start being normal human beings again.