GOP Still in the Doldrums

I hope you had a pleasant Halloween and remembered to set your clocks back an hour. It will be nice to have more light on the way to work in the morning, though the fall of darkness at five o'clock on that first evening always comes as a depressing shock. It calls up images of the months of cold and gloom to follow. Or of months snuggled under a throw with a good book and some hot cocoa, if you're of a positive bent. The problem is often less the problem itself than how we react to it or deal with it.

Now that calls to mind the sliding fortunes of the Republican Party of late. There are a number of polls out recently, all of which continue to chart the plummeting estimation of the GOP in the eyes of the American populace. You can see some here at PollTrack.com. One of note mentioned is a CNN survey just out that puts the GOP's favorables/unfavorables at 36-54, compared to the Democrats' 53-41. Other recent data says only 21 to 25% of the people now identify themselves as Republicans, compared to 34-36% who identify themselves as Democrats. You can find lots of interesting numbers, including these, at FiveThirtyEight.com. Democratic identification has been pretty steady at around 36% since about 1984. Republican has been around 32% over the same period, so this drastic fall has got to be a matter of concern for them.

There are a number of explanations, of course. One is the unpopularity of George W. Bush at the end of his tenure, which rubbed off on the rest of his party and meted out serious election consequences in 2006 and 2008. No doubt the effect still lingers, particularly since his Vice President, Dick Cheney, even more unpopular than Bush, continues to inject himself into the news cycle and remind the voters what they had grown so disillusioned with. Another is certainly the economic crisis that became manifest during the Republican watch as well.

One can expect these phenomena to dissipate some with time. But in a deeper sense, the current disillusionment continues to be a product of ongoing strategy. Whatever his other messages, Barack Obama's 2008 calling card was "change." The American people were hungry for it. Even his Republican opponents recognized that and tried to play up their "maverick" and "rogue" credentials. But the present face of the GOP, both in Washington and among their populist-oriented grassroots activists, seems to stand primarily for opposition to any change and to working together civilly to achieve solutions to the country's many problems.

In spite of the angry town halls on health care, a majority of Americans now support a health "public option." Or maybe partly because of them. They opposed the economic stimulus, extension of equal pay for women, immigration reform, cash for clunkers, talks with Iran, gas mileage standards and most opposed Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. While there are plenty who have problems with one or more of those initiatives, the fact that they uniformly seem to be against every attempt at change and appear to reject as a nearly unified bloc Obama's "bipartisanship" overtures have placed them in a tough spot with a public that knows a lot is wrong and needs fixing.

Americans may not all agree on what to do, but most feel standing pat with a bad hand is poor strategy. Until the Republicans can come up with and articulate a vision and some ideas that actually change the status quo and are not simply rehashes of their traditional mantras that most associate with having led to the current bad state of affairs, the GOP will keep wallowing in the doldrums. These things do tend to go in cycles, so Republican fortunes are bound to improve sooner or later. But unless they can find something new and meaningful to say they could actually find themselves losing a couple more senate seats in 2010.