Looking Towards 2016

After last Tuesday’s election, the media immediately began its post-presidential election process of savaging the losing campaign for reasons explaining their defeat. While it is true that Romney’s campaign could have made many small, yet beneficial changes to improve its positioning against President Obama, it did not fall short in the election because of gaffes or poor organization or Paul Ryan. Instead, the Romney campaign suffered from long-term social trends in the Republican Party that must be corrected if the party hopes to win control of the presidency in 2016.

This year’s election results show that the Republican Party lacks support among women, minorities and our more liberal generation — three groups becoming more important within American demographics. Single American women supported Obama two-to-one over Romney, and non-white voters (now more than one-fourth of the voting population as opposed to nine percent in 1980) voted more than three-to-one in Obama’s favor. But while many political journalists and analysts have asserted, quite convincingly, that the Republican party needs to replace its social views to prevent itself from solely catering to conservative white male voters, the abandonment of social views is less important to the GOP than a clarification of its party ideologies.

Women and American minority groups are not, as the media would like us to believe, single-issue voters. Despite assertions from Chris Matthews that Romney’s views on abortion “destroyed his ability to win over women voters,” a 2012 CNN poll showed that the majority of women (52 percent) considered themselves pro-life. Similarly, Hispanic Americans did not vote en masse for Obama out of a desire for illegal immigration to continue. The problem is not the socially conservative views of the Republican Party, but rather that these views are not applied conservatively.

In order to gain support from women, young people and minority groups in 2016, the Republican Party must distinguish between true social conservatism and their current policies of social control by extending their fiscal principles of “small government” and “increased personal freedom” to social policy. Republican candidates must clarify their goals without compromising their party’s beliefs, opposing abortion and illegal immigration, for instance, but not attacking Planned Parenthood and illegal immigrant populations. Conservative women don’t like government control over their taxes or uteruses, and the Republican Party’s willingness to force its social views on Americans isolates voters whose social views may not even align with the Democratic Party. One of my favorite examples of how this distinction is possible comes from Congressman Marco Rubio, who asserted over the summer that the Republican Party must “not define [itself] as the anti-immigration party, but as the pro-legal immigration party.”

By changing its rhetoric while maintaining its social conservatism, Republicans can gain more support in the moderate majority and break away from the increasing control of the party’s radical few. The Republican Party is not the party of homophobes, sexists and bigots, and in order to sever themselves from these extremist social interests, the Republican Party must clearly adopt policies denouncing government attacks on social freedoms. Moreover, Romney’s decision to pander to this socially controlling extreme right wing resulted in a redefinition of his views later in the campaign that confused and isolated both moderate and right-leaning voters. If the GOP wants to succeed in the 2016 election, it needs to not sway in its values, but maintain pragmatic and clear social, fiscal and foreign policy goals. The GOP’s social stances are not outdated, but they have become so corrupted by the Tea Party Movement and Bush-era conservatives that they contradict the Republican principles of individual rights and privacy. The message of the Republican Party needs to return to its ideological roots; if it does, it will be successful. Economic freedom and social self-determination will remain popular even as American social views and demographics shift and evolve.