Has the Republican Party lost sight of its roots? Does it need to return to a purer version of conservatism in order to return to power? Alan Abramowitz takes a look at the recent evidence in Senate races and concludes just the opposite: the more conservative a Republican candidate is, the worse they perform:
The results in Figure 1 show that there was a fairly strong negative relationship between conservatism and electoral performance. The more conservative the voting record, the worse the performance of the incumbent. Republican senators with moderate voting records like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and John Chafee generally ran well ahead of the Republican presidential candidate in their state while those with very conservative voting records like John Ashcroft, James Inhofe and Jim Bunning frequently ran behind the Republican presidential candidate.
Italics mine. Abramowitz then goes on to rerun the data while controlling for things like the strength of the challenger, the national political climate, and the presence of any major scandals or controversies involving the incumbent. The results are the same: “For every additional one point increase in conservatism, Republican incumbents lost an additional three percentage points in support relative to their party’s presidential candidate.”
For the time being, none of this matters. Parties that suffer stunning losses — the Democrats in 1980, for example, or Britain’s Labor Party in 1979 — frequently decide that they need to double down and return to the true faith. After losing a few more elections they finally move to the center and start winning again. I imagine the same will happen to Republicans. They’re sure to win seats in this year’s midterm, which will confirm them in their view that hardcore conservatism is what America wants, and they’ll have to lose badly again in 2012 to finally convince themselves otherwise. By 2016 they might be ready for prime time again.
