I’m Still Working on “Old”

This week I return to the subject of this February column on the future of the Republican Party.

Here in Minnesota, we are saying farewell to our outgoing party Chair in the midst of the campaign for his replacement.  It’s tough to have a gathering of more than two Republicans without a seminar breaking out on what to do next.

At the national level, the party is going through a self-evaluation of what went wrong in 2012.  The Republican National Committee (RNC) issued a 100-page report, a post-mortem of the last election.  Much of the report’s advice was common sense stuff:  new voter database, better technology, etc.  But the Wall Street Journal reports that,

In focus groups, voters who had left the Republican Party said they found the GOP to be "scary," "narrow-minded," "out of touch" and the party of "stuffy old men."

The Journal quotes one former party member,

Jim Brown III, a registered Republican and retired 79-year-old photographer from Naples, Fla., said the party is going to need to do a lot to win him back.  "You don't need 100 pages to determine what's wrong with the Republican Party," he said. "The party is just out of touch, and has left me behind.  It needs to catch up with the times."

I’m happy to do so.  Just let me know exactly what I need to catch up on.  From my recent experience as a Republican-endorsed candidate, I can speak first hand to our party’s branding problem.  I received a ton of free advice on just what was wrong with the party.  Roughly half of what I heard completely contradicted the other half.  The RNC’s report suggests changing the party’s stand on a number of controversial issues.

The Hill newspaper—which covers the U.S. Congress—published a story this week under the headline, “Voters prefer Republican budget ideas, but dislike GOP”.  The first paragraph speaks for itself,

“More voters trust the Democratic Party than the Republican Party on budgetary issues, according to the results of a new poll for The Hill—even though a strong majority actually prefer Republican fiscal policies.”

I’m not sure I could have written a paragraph that better summarizes where American politics stands today.  It turns out—in the The Hill’s words—a strong majority of voters prefer Republican policies, until they find out those policies are from Republicans.

Here is my advice to the GOP.   Before you go changing your position too many issues, find out for sure whether voters are aware of what your current positions are.

One of the recurring themes from focus groups and polls of independent voters is the need for more bipartisanship.  I’m sure that there is a sizeable chunk of the population that wishes politics were…well, less messy.  They would prefer a more genteel, less confrontational politics, more along the lines of the Lion’s Club vs. the Rotary than the Hatfields vs. the McCoys.

And in other places of the world, you can find instances where parties are not as ideological.  Historically, the leading political parties in Ireland, for example, are not based on ideology, but, on who took what side in the 1920’s-era civil war.

But with the large structural problems facing our state and nation, now more than ever we need a—shall we say—robust debate on the future.  To have that robust debate, we need political parties that offer real differences.