Turnout and Principles

In a way, this piece,  The GOP Turnout Myth, by Kimberley Strassell in the Wall Street Journal is very good to read.  It makes me happy.  I had heard and had been saying that conservatives stayed home and felt terrible about that.  They didn’t care?  How awful is that?  I have also read that voter turnout, overall, is a problem.  “The turnout myth comes from a statistic that has been endlessly repeated: Mitt Romney got fewer votes than  John McCain  in 2008. This isn’t quite true (Mr. Romney this week eked past the McCain totals), and in any event it is somewhat irrelevant. The Romney vote count reflects a nationwide voter turnout that was down nearly five percentage points from 2008.”

The Democrat’s numbers were way down, too, just not down far enough to lose the presidency.  The battleground states?

Mr. Romney beat Mr. McCain’s numbers in every single battleground, save Ohio. In some cases, his improvement was significant. In Virginia, 65,000 more votes than in 2008. In Florida, 117,000 more votes. In Colorado, 52,000. In Wisconsin, 146,000. Moreover, in key states like Florida, North Carolina, Colorado and Virginia, Mr. Romney turned out even more voters than George W. Bush did in his successful re-election in 2004.

True, Project  ORCA was a bust and the Obama campaign had a better grip on the use of social media.  However, she does not embrace the idea that the medium is the massage .  No, The Republican Party is not addressing the concerns of minorities.  Strassell focuses on the GOP Hispanic voters. “Often missed in talk of the GOP’s ‘demographics problem”’ is that it would take relatively modest minority-voter shifts toward Republicans to return the party to a dominating force.”  The answer?  Reconsider the message.

Yes, on immigration and to Hispanics; as I have said in comments here , the most prevalent Republican policy on immigrations seems inconsistent with principles about liberty and the value of the individual in society.  We can and should sort those things out, but to say as some critics ( even friendly ones ) do, that demographics mean that the GOP candidates should not publicly express whatever they believe or think is to assume that the current political implications of the current demography will never change.  We don’t know that.  People change their minds with changing circumstances and with new information.

Byron York says. “The bottom line is that even if Romney had made historic gains among Hispanic voters, he still would have lost the election. That means Romney underperformed among more than just Hispanic voters. And that means winning more Hispanic votes is far from the GOP’s only challenge.”   He contends that Hispanics vote for Democrats for a variety of reasons; only college-educated Hispanics tend to vote for Romney.  “A majority of Hispanics who voted Nov. 6 favored keeping Obamacare. A majority favored higher taxes for higher earners. A majority — two-thirds, in fact — said abortion should be legal.”  Unless Republicans sound like Democrats, they won’t win those folks. The divide is of a different nature. 

Do we need two parties that are alike?  I can think of circumstances where the idea appeals.  Maybe changing circumstances and better understanding of all of the information accessible to us all will bring reasonable Democrats around.   I liked this , written by Katrina Trinko last week, as an apologetic.   Countering the current image of the GOP among the electorate  is the challenge.