David Frum has a very good editorial on the vanishing GOP voter. I think Frum over-analyzes the problem to a great degree, and concentrates largely on the disappearing GOP vote in Northern Virginia, which I think is driven more by the culture of the federal government than by anything. The idea that immigration is to blame, and rising inequality is at issue I think is wrong. But I think there’s some grains of truth in some of what he has said:
There is a long list of reasons for this anti-Republican tilt among the affluent: social issues, the environment, an ever more internationalist elite’s distaste for the Republican Party’s assertive nationalism. Maybe the most important reason, however, can be reduced to the two words: “Robert Rubin.†By returning to the center on economic matters in the 1990s, the Democrats emancipated higher-income and socially moderate voters to vote with their values rather than with their pocketbooks.
Whether conservatives want to admit it or not, The Clinton Administration post-1994 successfully sold itself economically centrist, and it must be admitted that government grew less under Clinton with a Republican Congress than it has under George W. Bush. Clinton’s brand of Democratic governance did indeed free suburban voters to vote their values, and those values are not, generally, very socially conservative.
Big city political machines have always been Democratic strongholds. That much hasn’t really changed. But suburban areas have typically trended Republican as middle and upper-middle class voters, many of whom left cities to get away from the machine politics, voted to keep taxes low, and government running leaner and with fewer tentacles into the economy. What has George W. Bush’s brand of conservatism done for this type of Republican voter?
I don’t think former Republican voters are pissed off with income inequality, I think they are pissed off with government, as low approval ratings of Congress and the President indicate. Frum hits it largely when he says this:
Republicans have been badly hurt in upper America by the collapse of their onetime reputation for integrity and competence.
That pretty much sums it up. Republicans have demonstrated themselves no more capable of using government to protect conservative interests than Democrats. Republican’s can’t cede suburban voters to the Democrats, unless they want to be the minority party for most of the 21st century. John McCain, for all his faults, might be the kind of conservative that suburban voters can get behind.
