With Labor Day in the rearview mirror and campaign season ramping up, media stories are full of the story line as to whether the GOP will recapture control of the Senate. Although currently most prognosticators are assigning roughly a 60% probability of this happening, what should be good news for the GOP is really an indication of weakness. The GOP needs to pick up 6 seats to flip control of the chamber to their side. The current administration is confused (we don’t have a strategy to deal with ISIS), scandal ridden (we didn’t use the IRS to persecute political opponents, but everybody’s hard drives with potentially incriminating evidence seem to be crashing), and economically sluggish (roughly half of the U.S. believes the we are still in a recession even though it has been over for 5 years). Add to this that the electoral map favors the GOP this cycle (the Democrats are defending many more seats), are more motivated to turn out to vote (parts of the Democrat coalition tend to skip midterm elections), and the GOP nominated respectable candidate across the board (no Todd Akin, Sharron Angle, or Christine O’Donnell in this bunch), and there are 7 Democrat seats in states that Mitt Romney won, and the chances of a GOP takeover the Senate should be closer to 90%. If the GOP can’t win under these conditions, it is not clear under what conditions they would be able to win.
So what is wrong? Why is the GOP lagging? Pundits talk about how the GOP brand has been damaged, and perhaps this is part of it. The other part of it is likely that the GOP is not offering a vision of where the country should head? In 1994, the Republicans had the Contract With America. Whatever else it may have been, it laid out exactly what the Republicans would do if they were given control of the House and Senate. So what is the Republican vision now? Have they offered an alternative vision? We know that they are “Not Obama”, and in an election under these conditions, that could be enough. Occasionally, certain individuals will talk in generalities about this or that. Or they will say what they are against. Or they will argue in generalities that we need to cut taxes and reduce regulations, but these are not a vision. If the GOP squeaks across the finish line with a 1 or 2 seat majority in the Senate, what do they intend to accomplish. Sure, Obama will likely veto anything that they pass over the next two years. But what do they intend to pass that will serve as an argument for why Americans should elect more Republicans to Senate and a Republican President in 2016? They don’t say.
If the Republicans want to be the majority party in America again, they can’t just say what they are against. Yes, the Republican electorate is angry and frustrated, and they have a right to be. They are put upon by the state (the IRS), they are mistreated and caricatured in popular culture (when was the last time a Republican was the good guy in a movie), and their money is taxed and given to people who vote against them, and when they do pass laws, they are often invalidated by courts (sometimes on dubious legal grounds). But being angry and being against things isn’t a governing philosophy. Simply “reducing the size and scope of government” is a meaningless platitude. It tells me nothing about where the Republicans want to take the country, except that they want less of whatever it is that we are doing now.
The Republicans need to lay out a vision of where they want to take the country, and have to put forth a credible plan for getting there. Rather than being “against illegal immigration”, they can be FOR an immigration system that brings in the high tech foreign workers we need, and keeps out low wage migrants that compete with American low wage workers. Rather than being “against high taxes”, they can be FOR a much simplified tax code that gives us the revenue we need without the exhausting forms and credits that require paid experts to comply with even the most basic tax situations. Rather than being “against excessive regulation”, they should put forth a plan that will give us a regulatory structure for the 21st century, instead of simply building on the outdated regulatory infrastructure of the 20th century. This can be done within the broad context of renewing and rebuilding America for the 21st century, which is a positive agenda.
The problem for the GOP is that it isn’t articulating a coherent, positive vision. If they can articulate one with a single voice that is positive, plausible, and coherent, they will give people a reason to vote for them. And they will likely find that people will.