So, all the usual caveats apply, don’t spend too much time posting and reading today and tomorrow, there is GOTV to be done. That said, I while I was dialing for voters this weekend, I got to thinking about the way that some (though not all by any means) of the Republican mouth-pieces have been pushing the meme that Mitt is going to win and win in a landslide.
From a purely election point of view it makes a certain amount of sense. You don’t want to depress the front-line folks who are doing everything they can to get you elected, even if it looks like you are going to go down in flames. You never really know (though by this point you have a pretty damned good idea) what will happen on Election Day.
This is especially true for Presidential campaign since a win or loss by the top of the ticket candidate can have a coat-tail effect, and even if you lose the top spot there are down ballot races you want to pump up as much as possible in defeat.
Still the way that Dick Morris, Larry Kudlow and (until very recently) Karl Rove are touting a not just a Romney victory but a landslide by more than 100 Electoral College votes has the whiff of Old Baghdad Bob in the last week of the Iraq war. They are all very dismissive of the polling and the polling averages.
As the redoubtable Nate Silver is always careful to say, it is possible that the polls (nearly all of them) might be wrong, but it is pretty unlikely. After all we are only a day away from the actual election and even polling houses that have a strong bias one way or the other (think Rasmussen) tend to be closer to the end result than not.
Given that what does all this counter-factual prediction have as a return on investment for Republicans and Conservatives? In a word, victimhood.
It is one of the biggest motivators of the recent Republican Party and it is something they need to maintain if they are to avoid a bloody and extensive war for the direction of the Republican Party. As long as they can make the case that a win by President Obama is somehow illegitimate, then they don’t have to look in the mirror and think about why they lost an election that structurally they should have had an easy time with.
With unemployment at very high levels, with all the money the Billionaire Boy’s Club could pour into the election, and with a candidate who was completely willing to lie, distort and blow with any wind to get elected this should have been an ideal time for a Republican to take the White House and for the Party to reclaim the Senate.
As it is starting to look as though that is not going to happen, the old demon of cognitive dissonance raises its ugly head. Humans have an amazing capacity to dispute reality if accepting that reality is emotionally painful. A defeat in this election will be particularly painful for the Republican faithful. This is exacerbated by their base’s near epistemological closure from relying on the likes of Fox “News” and Rush Limbaugh for their information.
Put simply the big, fat, wet mackerel of reality is going to smack them across the face Wednesday morning (or shortly thereafter) and they are going to look for any meme that will allow them to avoid that painful fact.
And now with the expectations of, not just a win, but a landslide they have a readymade one in the idea that the win was somehow stolen from them by the evil (their words not mine) Democrats and that Kenyan Anti-Colonial Socialist, Communist Barack Obama.
This meme is going have even greater legs if, as is a possibility with potential voting problems in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, the popular vote goes for Mitt Romney. There are still Democrats who are smarting from the 2000 election, and the fact that the Supreme Court decided to give the presidency to George W. Bush even though Al Gore had more votes nationally.
The thing, then as now, is that we don’t elect presidents by popular vote. Campaigns don’t worry so much about the national total as they do about winning enough votes in the states that will get them to 270 Electoral College votes. So, no matter what, until we change our laws or Constitution, this election is about EC votes. But that won’t stop the folks who believe the President is a Muslim and not a natural born citizen from braying that the election is stolen.
The upshot of all of this is that it gives the Republicans in Congress a convenient excuse to continue to obstruct the President and Democrats at every turn. The whole Birth meme has worn pretty thin, but the combination of an election loss where all the structure favored them and cognitive dissonance will breath new life into, if not the meme itself, the policy that it spawned.
Back in early 2009 there were quite a few (including myself) folks who thought that the Republican Party might self-destruct. While I freely admit that prediction was wrong, maybe it was wrong mostly in timing. It seems very unlikely to me that the Republicans will take this defeat as a repudiation of their policies and their vision for the nation. They are too invested in the idea that conservatism never fails, it is only failed by weak vessels.
This will lead them to even higher heights of purity and a further lurch the Right. It is not going to help them long term at all. Being the nativist party in a nation on its way to being majority minority is a loser. Being the party of religious morality in public policy in a nation that is embracing its gay citizens and likes access to abortion and birth control is a loser too. Being the party of protecting wealth and privilege at a time of income inequality not seen in nearly 100 years is not a winner either.
Yet this seems to be the direction that the Republican base and faithful will demand their law makers head. It dooms the Party to a lingering death of slow irrelevance. Unfortunately that kind of death will be like that of a wounded jackal, lashing out at everything that might come near it as it tries desperately to scavenge enough to eat to survive one more day.
The Romney campaign will be over on Tuesday and it is very likely that it will go down as a losing campaign but it will leave lasting damage in the form of a validation that there is no need for disclosure, no requirement to put forth the details of policy plans nor even come close to the truth in pursuit of the White House. This and the idea that our President is still illegitimate is a final parting shot that will hamper our nation as we continue to deal with the effects of the last Republican administration.
The floor is yours.