Six years ago in the blog

 The news that inspired this post have largely faded from memory but that last paragraph still has a certain relevance.

Friday, November 21, 2014

Thoughts on the coming storm

From a text exchange I had on election night

The press has gone from
"The Republicans are the responsible party"
To
"Both parties are irresponsible"
To
"The Republicans will start being responsible after they win"
To
Whatever they are going to say after the impeachment.

[voice recognition errors corrected.]

This must be an interesting time to be a political scientist or anyone studying the way institutions form, function and fail.

The  Republican party seems locked into a course that defies conventional political explanation. I don't see any way that this fight over this issue is a winning move for the GOP. I am inclined to agree with Josh Marshall's analysis:

It all adds up to an intense and likely toxic campaign fracas in which a lot of people will have a unique and intense motivation to vote. That will apply to people on both sides of course. But the anti-immigration voters vote consistently almost every cycle. And as intense as your animus is toward undocumented immigrants, it's hard for it to compare to the motivation of voters who directly know someone who will be affected. And that latter group has far more 'drop-off' or occasional voters.

This isn't getting mentioned a lot right now. But behind the headlines I suspect it's one of the key reasons Republican elites are upset that this might happen: because it's an electoral grenade dropped right into the heart of the 2016 campaign.

Of course, the standard line at this point is to say something about the leaders of the party losing control of the base, but I don't buy that -- at least not in the way it is generally framed. For one thing, the underlying political philosophy of the base and the leaders doesn't seem that different, and where there are differences, they seem to mostly come from the base actually believing the message crafted by the party elites.

Keeping in mind that they decisively won the last election, the Republicans still have big problems with information and coordination. That makes it more difficult for the party to make decisive rational moves that promote its self-interest and instead leaves it inclined to seek catharsis. Shut down and impeachment are about emotional release. The challenge for the party leadership is convincing their followers that there's something more important than that.