DOMESTIC
VANDERBILT POLITICAL REVIEW
A break in the cycle
The struggle between purists and pragmatists in the Republican Party
R
epublican candidate Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat reignited concerns that Republicans cannot win
elections by acting like moderate Democrats, and that they need a true conservative candidate to attract more voters to the
polls. The opposing faction within the GOP
believes that the party attracts a high percentage of white voters, and that the party
does not reflect the growing diversity of the
population. This struggle between the purists and the pragmatists within the conservative polity, along with the rising power
of the Tea Party, epitomizes the dilemma
facing the Republican Party today. In the
search for a compelling national mandate
to win the 2016 presidential election, the
Republican Party must adopt a more balanced political strategy to garner the sup-
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port of different voting blocs without compromising traditional conservative ideals.
In recent months, several traditionally conservative columnists – led by Rich
Lowry of The National Review and William Kristol of The Weekly Standard –
have emphasized the importance of pure
conservative ideology to win future elections. National exit poll surveys consistently show that forty percent of the electorate votes for the party whose values
they share, and twenty percent of voters
support the party platform that prioritizes
their key issues. Ideological purists theorize that Mitt Romney lost the popular vote
by five million because he was unable to
energize the core GOP base. They speculate it would be possible to increase turnout by five to six-and-a-half million addi-
Photos: Gage Skidmore
12
tional GOP voters with the selection of a
Republican candidate who maintains pure
conservative values. Instead of issue-based
minority outreach (for example, courting
Hispanic voters by promoting immigration reform), the party should focus on
white voters, which Romney won fiftynine percent to forty-one percent. Within
the white vote, Republicans held a decisive
margin on senior, married, and non-college
educated whites. By promoting purist conservative ideals that appeal to these demographics, it would be possible to swing the
white vote advantage from fifty-nine percent in 2012 to seventy percent in 2016.
However, considering the changing demographics of America, it is difficult to conclude that the purists’ “Great White Hope”
would be successful outside of House elections where districts have been gerrymandered to include finely-grained white voting
blocs. The white vote has fallen from a high
of eighty-eight percent in 1992 to a low of
seventy-two percent in 2012. This trend is
expected to continue, and the minority vote
is likely to grow to thirty percent by 2016.
If Democrats continue to win eighty percent of the minority vote in every election,
they would need to win only thirty-eight
percent of white votes in 2016 to achieve
a popular vote majority. There has been a
seismological shift in voter demographics
in the past twenty years that cannot be ignored. Moreover, with an increase in college education and growing secularization
in society, Republicans cannot assume the
inherent support of the white vote to remain. As such, a pure conservative ideology and higher white voter turnout may not
guarantee a Republican in the White House.
Does this mean Republicans need to
sacrifice principle for power and not field
a true conservative in the next general elec-