The numbers are in. President Obama secured another four years in office Wednesday morning in a victory far more resounding than many pundits had predicted. His victory means many things for the president and the Democratic Party: A vindication of Obamacare, a mandate for a more liberal legislative agenda and most importantly, the security of having a Democratic president in office for another term.
But as champagne flows and victory cheers erupt in Democratic strongholds across the country, a stunned silence is settling over Republicans. Mitt Romney, despite a strong first debate and subsequent polls showing an extremely close race, lost. This is nothing short of a crisis for the Grand Old Party — and it is a crisis largely of their own making.
From Glenn Beck to the more moderate elements of the Party, conventional conservative wisdom was that this was “the most important election ever.” It was a choice between a bold future and a future burdened with debt and government expansion. Now, in their eyes, that future is upon us.
The Republican Party has two choices from here on out. On the one hand, it could follow the trajectory it set itself on four years ago: a hardline, aggressive obstructionist stance in Congress, and the advancement of a radical social agenda. Before the election, Republicans bragged of their intransigence; Grover Norquist’s “no taxes” pledge, signed onto by a slew of Republican politicians, was what the American people wanted, and saying “no” to anything and everything Democratic was true representation of the public’s opinion.
Finally, the GOP acceptance of the Tea Party as a mainstream element of its party was but an indication of the immoderate stance it increasingly adopted following Obama’s victory in 2008.
Electorally, this strategy manifested in a Romney campaign that drifted progressively right-wards before making a half-hearted attempt to appear moderate in the weeks before the election. In short, the GOP strategy of the past four years, and the one they could continue to pursue if they so choose, has been one that pandered to its base and ignored huge swaths of the population.
In the wake of Obama’s victory, though, conservative strategists may want to rethink such a hardline platform. The American people have spoken, and they appear to have given a big thumbs-down to that strategy.
So, then, what’s the GOP to do? Simply put, it needs to keep pace with the times. The GOP’s voter base — its most extreme demographic, and the one it had been courting — is not particularly diverse. It is overwhelmingly white and male. And, perhaps most importantly, it is elderly.
Now, with the “Graying of America” — the climbing average age of Americans — it would perhaps appear that this focused electoral strategy would be prudent. But here’s a fact about the elderly — they get older. And they die. And short of voter fraud, it’s pretty hard for dead people to vote.
More than that, the proportion of non-white Americans is skyrocketing: minority births already outpace white birth rates, and it’s only a few short years before the electorate reflects that fact. The GOP has, for the past four years, ignored that fact.
The GOP platform is, in short, an artifact of the past. It ignores the increasingly progressive attitudes of this country. It ignores the fact that young Americans overwhelmingly support gay marriage, are in favor of birth control and abortion and don’t want thousands of immigrants hunted down and deported.
By stubbornly digging in on these positions, the GOP and Romney doomed themselves to failure. The election is a reflection of present attitudes, not those of the 1950s.
In light of Obama’s victory, the GOP has two clear choices: it can maintain a demographic-specific, anachronistic social platform that blocks any liberal legislation, or it can be a partner in crafting bipartisan policies that benefit not just one race or class, but America as a whole. The choice is in their hands.