I’m going to let Bill Wilson of the group Americans for Limited Government begin the discussion and set up the premise; after all that’s what alerted me to the Rasmussen poll:
“The stunning Rasmussen Poll showing the Republican Party finishing a decided third to a hypothetical ‘Tea Party’ candidate should send shock waves through the GOP. It demonstrates once again that the timid, tepid Republican leadership is leading its party to the brink of disaster. Tens of millions of Americans are looking for strong leadership to stand up to the Obama-Reid-Pelosi leftwing onslaught. Instead, the Republican Party is giving them the same shilly-shally two-step that cost it a majority in Congress, and the Oval Office. Looks like the American people are telling the GOP in no uncertain terms, ‘Lead, follow — or get out of the way.'”
(Today), Rasmussen Reports released the following information:
In a three-way Generic Ballot test, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds Democrats attracting 36% of the vote. The Tea Party candidate picks up 23%, and Republicans finish third at 18%. Another 22% are undecided.
Among voters not affiliated with either major party, the Tea Party comes out on top.
For this survey, the respondents were asked to assume that the Tea Party movement organized as a new political party.
This tells me two things, one of which was pointed out by Wilson in his intro.
First of all, the GOP is slow to embrace the TEA Party movement because they’re a bottom-up, grassroots effort that scares the living daylights out of the inside-the-Beltway crowd running the party (and yes, that includes Michael Steele.) And the GOP elitist crowd seems afraid to make sure candidates have at least some adherence to principle, as I noted a couple weeks back.
Having been a veteran of Republican circles over most of the last 15 years, it seems to me that those who consider themselves Republican are indeed open to a third party if the GOP continues its drift away from conservatism, and this poll proves the case. (It’s even more striking on some of the internals.) Yet Rasmussen notes in the synopsis:
In practical terms, it is unlikely that a true third-party option would perform as well as the polling data indicates. The rules of the election process—written by Republicans and Democrats–provide substantial advantages for the two established major parties. The more conventional route in the United States is for a potential third-party force to overtake one of the existing parties.
It’s good that this was mentioned because it brings up my second point. In a straight three-party race the Democrat wins a plurality of the vote. But let’s assume for the sake of this argument that those who responded as voting for the GOP would lean more toward the TEA Party philosophy than the Democrats (I think that’s a pretty good bet.) Combine the two and you have the conservative coalition winning 40-36.
Rarely in national politics is there a parting on the Democratic side. However, there are examples of Republicans losing due to third-party ballots dating back almost a century:
- In 1912, former president Theodore Roosevelt ran as his own Bull Moose Party and outpolled GOP incumbent William Howard Taft. But in the end Democrat Woodrow Wilson won and got a second term in 1916.
- 80 years later, Ross Perot won enough of the vote to allow Democrat Bill Clinton to win with a 43%-37% plurality over incumbent Republican George H.W. Bush. Bush didn’t help his cause, though, by raising taxes during his term.
- On a more local level, just last year the third-party Libertarian candidate ran well enough to impact the local Congressional race, which a Democrat won by a 49% – 48% margin.
- The Conservative Party candidacy of Doug Hoffman in New York’s 23rd Congressional District was considered the high water mark of the third-party movement, yet in most elections the Conservatives nominate the same candidate as the Republicans do – this was a somewhat rare exception.
- On the other hand, Democrats can point to the Bush-Gore race in 2000 as an example of a left-wing third party spoiling the broth as Ralph Nader’s 97,000 votes in Florida would have presumably given the state to Gore easily had Nader not been on the ballot.
Most of American history has seen the presence of two main parties, and since the mid-1800’s those parties have been the Democratic and Republican parties. It is unfortunate in some ways that the system is rigged to maintain it as such, but these are the cards which have been dealt and there’s very little outcry about changing this.
I happen to think that the TEA Party supporters are the generational successors of the Reagan coalition he built in the 1980’s. Reagan won with a conservative, low-tax, pro-America, pro-freedom, limited-government platform (as Newt Gingrich did in 1994) and it’s a shame that the GOP got away from that in subsequent elections. Eventually it cost them control of both Congress and the White House.
Being the opposition to the Obama agenda may not be enough to convince the TEA Partiers to install the GOP into power because it’s not been that long since the charge that the GOP was simply Democrat-lite was embraced by voters. It’s worthy of note that Democrats came into power by running to the particular district, basically lying through their teeth that they would govern as centrists in order to win conservative-leaning districts. We have to employ that strategy in reverse, not allowing the Democrats to control the agenda and not allowing them to hide their left-wing voting record.
We know what we’re up against and it’s time to embrace a conservative agenda once again – but this time walking the walk and not just talking the talk.
This poll result can be read in a few ways. There is certainly your interpretation, which I mainly agree with. But it also points out that the coalition which makes up the GOP needs each faction in order to be successful electorally. We saw that in NY-23. A wishy-washy moderate couldn’t attract conservative votes, but a combative conservative couldn’t attract moderate votes. The end result was that the worst candidate running won. I see something similar happening in Delaware if conservatives don’t support Mike Castle. There is no way any person more conservative than he will win the Senate seat there (oh, for the days when Bill Roth and Pete Du Pont could win election in that state), so if conservatives don’t turn out for him, Delaware will get liberal Beau Biden in the Senate instead of moderate Mike Castle. When a conservative winner isn’t an option, a moderate is certainly better than a liberal in my opinion.
Both moderate Republicans and conservatives need to realize that elections are about electing the best candidate possible, not the ideal candidate. The Democratic strategy of supporting candidates tailored to their districts is wise. The Republicans should do the same. If it takes a pro-choice, pro-labor Republican to beat, say, Barbara Boxer, that should be enthusiastically supported by all Republicans. It’s better to have someone in office who agrees with you 50% of the time rather than someone who agrees with you none of the time.