McCain Forging New GOP Coalition

One of the points I've raised here - a hypothesis, really - is that the GOP's hardline conservative base is demonstrating an increasing irrelevance to the future progress of the GOP. Indeed, "movement" conservatives now appear to be a minority in the Republican establishment of '08 .

McCain, the presumptive standard-bearer, is the key catalyst of such trends, with his maverick style and the most compelling political comeback of '08. But the changing underlying dynamics in this year's voting coalitions are the important measures by which to gauge group power within the Republican Party's ongoing evolution.

This week's U.S. News and World Report goes as far to suggest that McCain has indeed forged a new GOP coalition for 21st century politics:

McCain's victories last week, following other wins in South Carolina and Florida, came despite attacks from the likes of radio talker Rush Limbaugh and a raft of social conservatives, including influential evangelical leader James Dobson of Focus on the Family. They consider the senator a traitor to the conservative cause on issues including his support of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, his leading role in campaign finance reform, and his efforts on immigration reform that included a path toward citizenship for illegal aliens.

But by cobbling together support from the party's liberal, moderate, and somewhat conservative members, and in particular voters who said they value character and national security, McCain managed to put together a new GOP coalition, one largely without social conservatives who have long played starring roles in Republican elections. That coalition (with help from independent voters) not only allowed him to assert last week that he's ready to "wrap this thing up" but also raised questions about whether his success without the support of the far right represents a post-Reagan revolution or, at the least, a major realignment within a fractured and demoralized party.

McCain, never a warrior in the culture wars, though he opposes abortion, scoffed at the notion of revolution. "I have a very strong conservative record," he says, and he simply wants to bring Republicans back around to conservative principles, particularly on spending. "We basically alienated our Republican base that cares about fiscal discipline by the spending spree and the corruption over the last many years," he says. "We de-energized part of our Republican base." Some party stalwarts have suggested that a McCain presidency would look more like that of the first President Bush, with some moderates in decision-making positions but no leftward movement on issues including the war, abortion, and immigration.

Sure, this is just talk in the absence of hard data. Still, we're seeing more information coming out on McCain's winning coalition in this year.

The current Newsweek, which also features a McCain cover story, cites John Zogby arguing that McCain's ahead of the curve in political demographics:

According to surveys, McCain is competitive in head-to-head match-ups with Clinton and Obama, largely because he appeals to conservative Democrats and independents. Part of his pitch is that he can "reach out" (a phrase that Limbaugh, on his show last week, repeated disgustedly, imitating McCain's voice)....

McCain may, in fact, have a better sense of America's shifting political mood than his detractors. "More and more of us are independents," says pollster John Zogby. "More people are not wedded to a party, a candidate or an ideology." Michael Dimock of the Pew Research Center says poll numbers show a small shift away from the GOP. About 34 percent of registered voters identified themselves as independents in 2007, up from about 30 percent in 2006, he says. That's the highest it's been since 1999, and almost all the slippage has been on the Republican side. Many in the Republican Party base, meanwhile, seem to believe it's still the same country it was a political generation ago—their country, in other words. "Conservatives are on the eternal search for a new Reagan," columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Washington Post last Friday. "They refuse to accept that a movement leader who is also a gifted politician is a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon."

It would be foolish, of course, to argue that movement conservatives count for nothing in Republican Party calculations in '08 (if they sit out, they could indeed swing the election to the Democrats).

What does seem to be happening, though, is that the conservative movement's veto power on party nomination's has been revealed as more bluster than beef. Consequently, all the talk about backing Hillary Clinton over McCain is either a ratings grab by talk radio blowhards or true cognitive instabilities.

As I noted in an earlier post, Rush Limbaugh's power is "so 1990s," and for all the sound and fury of the talk radio fundamentalist right, McCain's moving toward his coronation in spite of the most virulent objections of the party base.