The Republican Death Spiral Is Not Dead Yet

The Republican Death Spiral, you'll recall, was Nate Silver's idea, conceived the day after a full no Republicans in the House voted for the stimulus, that the Republican Party is stuck in a trap:

Thus the Republicans, arguably, are in something of a death spiral. The more conservative, partisan, and strident their message becomes, the more they alienate non-base Republicans. But the more they alienate non-base Republicans, the fewer of them are left to worry about appeasing. Thus, their message becomes continually more appealing to the base -- but more conservative, partisan, and strident to the rest of us. And the process loops back upon itself.

Since the name of this hypothesis is the "Republican Death Spiral," something that sounds similar to the predictions of 40 years of Democratic domination, etc. etc., that have just supposedly been rejected by, well, a massive electoral victory by Republicans, it would be easy to say, no, that didn't happen. But I want to make the case that the Republican Death Spiral is alive and well, and that the Republicans are still very much in danger of spinning rapidly down it.
We all know the story of George W. Bush's approval rating: it hovered around 52% for his first year, then shot up to 85% on September 12th, 2001, and then gradually fell all the way down to around 25% by the time of the 2008 election. But I have noticed a curious phenomenon. If you draw trendlines to Bush's approval and take the derivative, it behaves according to a fairly simple rule: exponential decay. The whole time, Bush's approval seemed to function like an exponential decay function, where the rate of losing support was proportional to the amount of support he had. So, in the months following 9/11, his approval rating fell fast, from 85% in September of 2001 to 65% in September of 2002. Over the same period six years later, his approval fell only from 31% to 25%, a six-point decline much smaller than he lost in the year after 9/11. That's right: Bush was losing support at the fastest rate of his Presidency right after September 11th. In fact, the two declines in question are very similar in percentage terms, with Bush losing 24% of his support in the year after 9/11 and 20% of his support in the year before the 2008 election. The rate of loss was slightly slower pre-9/11, but not categorically.

Bush's approval rating started at around 54%. It constantly behaved like an exponential decay function, losing about a fifth of his support each year. So how in the world could he come close to winning the 2004 Presidential election? He should've been around 25% approval by then. Well, of course we all know the answer. He was gifted 30 points of approval on September 11th, history's largest dead cat bounce. And it took a while for that bonus approval to wear off, though it was constantly trying to do so. The lesson? A long-term trend can be momentarily obscured by an external masking factor.

And of course, my argument is that the same thing happened yesterday. The economy sucks. In recent decades, changes in disposable income explain almost all of Presidential performance. The Republicans, in a sense, had this midterm election gifted to them by the bad economy. Now, they may continue to thrive in the bad economy, because they have the power, now, to prevent anyone from doing anything to improve the economy, and forcing that to backfire on them will be a tall order for Obama, especially post-Citizen's United. But all of this, fundamentally, I think, obscures the long-term trends, even if it does so in the medium run rather than just the short run.

Remember the argument of the RDS: the Republicans get more extreme, so their base/primary electorate gets more extreme, so their leaders get more extreme, so their base/primary electorate gets more extreme, etc. Has this stopped happening yet? Not particularly. Now, sure, the idea is that at each step the Republican electorate also gets smaller. But there's a difference between those who voted Republican yesterday and those who will compose the 2012 Republican primary electorate. Suppose for a second that Rep. Darrell Issa, incoming chair of the Government Oversight Committee, discovers something he thinks is impeachable in the next year or two, and brings impeachment charges against Obama. Can you imagine any Republican who votes against those charges winning a Republican primary? Really? Remember, a lot of establishment-style Republicans lost primaries this year, not for any crime of moderation but simply for presenting themselves in a slightly groomed way, as opposed to the over-the-top crazy that Angle, Paul, Buck, Miller etc. brought every day. I can imagine lots of Republican incumbents losing primaries over not supporting impeachment charges. Or over voting against a government shutdown. Or voting to raise the debt ceiling. Can't you? With what happened this past year, it just seems so possible.

And by the way, Olympia Snowe is powerless in the face of this trend. I don't think she has a prayer of winning her Republican primary, and I'm skeptical about Scott Brown, too. It'll be interesting, with Snowe in particular, if she spots this trend ahead of time and gets out, pulling either a Jeffords or a Specter.

So what? Republicans have come this far on crazy, you say; why think they can't keep going? Well, they might be able to. It's even possible that, by keeping the economy depressed, they beat Obama in 2012, in which case we're in for a long national nightmare. But eventually this will backfire, and it will backfire for two reasons. One, I just have to believe that there is some limit eventually to how much Americans will really continue not caring about the sheer lunacy of the policy that these people are proposing. Hell, eventually they might get to govern, and then I think there's a good chance they'll be treated the way Bush was in '06, because if you ask people straight-up, they don't like Republican policies. The second reason is, of course, that in a few more decades a minority of this country will be white. And if you can't picture a Republican incumbent losing just because they didn't vote to impeach Obama, don't you think any Republican who votes for anything resembling sane immigration policy will be burned alive in their primary? And of course, we all know that the current crop of young people are well left-of-center in this political culture; if we, and I do mean we, keep that up, the current breed of Republicanism will simply not be able to win in a few more years, once we have all settled into the business of voting. So if Republicans can't get out of their Spiral, I don't see how they win over the Hispanics who will become so crucial to elections in the medium-near future.

And Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, and even Tim Scott and Alan West, black Republicans from the former Confederacy, aren't the solution. To win over the minority voters who will soon be the majority, especially Hispanics and African-Americans, Republicans need more than just faces, they need policies. Both of these groups are intimately tied to a certain set of issues; immigration for Hispanics, civil rights and, yes, poverty programs for African-Americans. All of the above are anathema to the Tea Party. And until the Republicans become a little less xenophobic toward Hispanics and a little less, uh, racist toward black people, they're not going to win those voters over. Remember, African-Americans went 90%-9% for Democrats, and Hispanics 64%-34%, in yesterday's election. Those margins are undiminished, essentially, from 2008. Yeah, Asians and "others" were more narrow, 55-45 leads rather than 2-1. But they're not the electoral powerhouse that the other two minority groups are, and especially that Hispanics will be. The bulk of the shift was simple: whites voted 60-37 for Republicans. But winning whites by 23 points and losing minorities by 52% is not sustainable for Republicans. Stipulate that those numbers stay the same, and mind you, Obama only lost whites by 12%, and he's black. Last night's electorate was 78% white, and Republicans won it by 6.5%. If we lower Republicans to just 70% white, Republicans would have a lead of just half a percentage point, winning whites by a 3-2 ratio!!! And if we make the electorate just 65% white, Democrats are up by 3 nationally, losing whites by a landslide. The lesson? Republicans must, simply must discover how to narrow their margin among non-whites. They are not competitive once a third of the electorate is non-white if that third continues voting against them 3-1. Long-term, they are still screwed.

This was obscured, last night, by a dreadful economy, and an electorate that is still 78% white. These factors might continue to obscure the trend for several more cycles. But Republicans need to narrow their gap with non-whites in order to remain competitive long-term, and their current base electorate will not permit this to happen. As long as the latter condition holds, Republicans are screwed, long-term. This is the Republican Death Spiral. And it is not gone, only hiding.