Poor Republicans are stuck with him.
From the Republican National Committee's
post-mortem:
As part of the Growth and Opportunity Project’s effort, focus groups were conducted in Columbus, Ohio, and Des Moines, Iowa, to listen to voters who used to consider themselves Republicans. These are voters who recently left the Party.
Asked to describe Republicans, they said that the Party is “scary,” “narrow minded,” and “out of touch” and that we were a Party of “stuffy old men.” This is consistent with the findings of other post-election surveys.
Sounds like a real problem! So what should the GOP do about it?
The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself. We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue.
Translation: "Our conservative media bubble is killing us". And it is. But there's nothing the RNC can do about it, because rather than shrinking, the conservative media machine is
growing. The likes of
Breitbart and the
Tea Party News Network exist because the conservative base considers Fox News too liberal.
Saxby Chambliss was too liberal for these crazies. CPAC won't allow any gays in, or Chris Christie, the one guy who might make 2016 interesting.
That ever-expanding search for ideological purity is shrinking the GOP tent and further radicalizing conservatives to the point that they can no longer function in polite society. Meanwhile, they further alienate every growth demographic while costing them easy Senate holds and pickups.
It's quite the quandary! But if the solution is forcing Rush Limbaugh off his soapbox, then there is no solution. They built this monster, now they live with it.
