This obvious reality led many Republican Party stalwarts and media water-carriers to confront a seemingly stark reality: appeal more to minorities, or suffer the inexorable fate of adverse demography. But as Benjy Sarlin notes, these same leading lights have since shifted their opinion now that the debate over immigration reform is at hand:



At the moment, the anti-immigration argument appears to be gaining converts fast. On election night, Fox News anchor Brit Hume called the “demographic” threat posed by Latino voters “absolutely real” and suggested Mitt Romney’s “hardline position on immigration” may be to blame for election losses. On Monday, Hume declared that argument “baloney.” The Hispanic vote, he said, “is not nearly as important, still, as the white vote.” Sean Hannity, a reliable bellwether on the right, has been on a similar journey since the fall. He announced days after President Obama’s re-election that he had “evolved” on immigration reform and now supported a “path to citizenship” in order to improve relations with Hispanic voters. Hannity has now flipped hard against the Senate’s bill. “Not only do I doubt the current legislation will solve the immigration problem,” he wrote in a June column, “but it also won’t help the GOP in future elections.” Hannity and Hume didn’t arrive at their latest destination by accident. They’re just the latest figures on the right to embrace the compelling new message that’s whipping Republicans against immigration reform while still promising a better tomorrow for the GOP’s presidential candidates.

The argument, in short, is the one expressed most directly by overt racist Pat Buchanan: Why alienate the constituency that gives you the vast majority of your votes? From one perspective—perhaps a shorter-term one—the argument makes a certain amount of sense. Whites will still be the biggest share of the vote for the next several election cycles. Hispanics, while growing rapidly, are still a smaller share; but even if they weren't, they don't agree with conservative perspectives on social issues , the role of government , or even capitalism in general. In this electoral worldview, acquiescing to immigration reform merely opens a crack in the door to allow a conversation with an audience that is inherently hostile—at the potential expense of alienating the core Republican demographic.

It's a fair argument to make, but one that's fraught with obvious peril. As mentioned, the share of the white vote is in significant decline. If the Republican candidates indeed seek to play exclusively to the white vote as their method of winning elections and perform no better with minorities than they do right now, they will need perhaps 65 percent of white voters in 2016, and 70 percent or more in the next decade. It's one thing for conservative leaders to say that this is what they intend to do; it's quite another to actually do it. In 2012, Mitt Romney would have needed northward of 60 percent of the white vote in order to win. He couldn't even break that figure while running against a black president in a relatively weak economy, all as conservative media figures sought to inflame the polarizing politics of racial resentment.

How, then, do conservative intellectual leaders propose to change the Republican Party's policy and media structure to increase their already dominant share of the white vote by 10 points or more in order to just stay competitive in subsequent presidential cycles?

The answer to the question of how to get even more whites to vote for Republican candidates depends on whom you ask. The most prominent culture warriors on the right argue simply that millions of white voters stayed home because Mitt Romney just wasn't conservative enough:



White voters stayed home, Limbaugh said in May, because “they didn’t think the Republican Party was conservative enough.” You can hear the “missing whites” thesis everywhere once you start looking for it. Hannity cited York’s piece in his column opposing the “Gang of Eight” bill. Social conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly recently told a radio host that “the people the Republicans should reach out to are the white votes, the white voters who didn’t vote in the last election and there are millions of them.” There’s “not any evidence at all that these Hispanics coming in from Mexico will vote Republican,” she said.

But while this was the most salient demographic change, it was probably not, standing alone, enough to swing the election to Obama. After all, he won the election by almost exactly 5 million votes. If we assume there were 6.5 million “missing” white voters, than means that Romney would have had to win almost 90 percent of their votes to win the election. Give that whites overall broke roughly 60-40 for Romney, this seems unlikely. In fact, if these voters had shown up and voted like whites overall voted, the president’s margin would have shrunk, but he still would have won by a healthy 2.7 percent margin.

[T]urnout is surprisingly stable in the Deep South; Romney’s problem was not with the Republican base or evangelicals (who constituted a larger share of the electorate than they did in 2004).

The problem with the Limbaugh/Schlafly analysis, though, is that it's almost certainly wrong. They're right that fewer white voters showed up in 2012 than could have been expected, but those numbers simply don't change the equation. Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics did a comprehensive evaluation of the "missing white voter" from a conservative perspective, and estimated that 6.1 million fewer white voters showed up to vote than could have been projected. Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz demonstrated that Trende's analysis is flawed, in no small part because 2012 had significantly lower turnout than 2008 and Trende does not account for the millions of "missing minority voters" who could also have been expected to show up. But for the sake of argument, let's ignore that and take Trende's hypothesis at face value: let's say those millions of white voters had shown up without any corresponding rise in the minority vote. Would it have mattered?Where this "missing white vote" is located is even more telling in this regard. Trende's analysis of changes in turnout between 2008 and 2012, colorfully illustrated here , indicates that the sharpest dropoffs in turnout that would cause this phenomenon occurred in the Northeast and Midwest, whereas by contrast:Why does that matter? Because the statistic about Romney winning 59 percent of the white vote, while accurate, is also misleading. When analyzed by region, the white vote is not monolithic: President Obama actually won a majority of the white vote in the Northeast, and did not perform badly in the Midwest. The data is skewed by Obama's ultimately unsurprising performance among Southern whites, among whom he got less than 30 percent of the vote. Schlafly and Limbaugh make the mistake of assuming that Trende's so-called "downscale, Northern, rural whites" would have performed for Romney at an even stronger clip than evangelical Southern white voters did had they turned out to vote. Those who argue, then, for further radicalization as the key to winning a high enough share of the white vote to keep the Republican Party viable long-term are clearly out on an increasingly thin limb. But if extreme conservative radicalism isn't the answer, what is?

Much of the conversation among conservatives on where the Republican Party goes from here centers around the notion of "libertarian populism." Tim Carney and Ben Domenech have each written about the need for the Republican Party to move beyond simply being the party of the rich because there aren't enough votes there. To be viable long-term, they argue, Republicans need to embrace a campaign that will appeal to the disaffected, and cast the blame for their ills on big government as well as big business. Says Carney:



The GOP is out of power and it needs to play to the disaffected. The disaffected are not the wealthy, an obvious point that conservatives can't seem to understand. The wealthy got wealthier under Obama, and corporations earned record profits while median family earnings fell. Obama uses these facts to defuse the charges he's a socialist. Republicans should use them to show that Obama's big government expands the privileges of the privileged class. Instead of trying to convince successful people that Democrats will take away their wealth, why not explain to the middle class that big government is keeping them down?

In fact, most of the biggest problems with today’s economy are the result of government, which has damaged the labor market with awful incentives (disability, overgenerous unemployment, awful retraining programs, minimum wages and other barriers to entry, tax/regulatory discrimination against small businesses, etc.) which need to be eliminated. Republicans haven’t been aggressive about pushing out an agenda for working moms, when getting the government out of the way is exactly the sort of policy push they need to hear, in more tangible terms. Libertarian populism strikes at the heart of these problems by going beyond "tax cuts for the rich", and instead targeting bold reforms which go beyond tweaking the state and actually take an axe to it. Consider the tax issue as a central aspect of this: you argue for a flat code in order to achieve a flatter code, one which limits the abusive power of the IRS, generates economic growth, and prevent cronies from lobbying for, and benefiting from, loopholes individuals and small businesses can never access.

As Ross Douthat notes, this is an approach that deserves to lose given the economic realities facing the working class. From the voter’s perspective, one immediate problem is that libertarian populism looks less like a genuinely new agenda and more like a fresh marketing spin on the GOP’s current platform favoring “job creators.”

Domenech' take is similar, and references the Republican Party's need to divorce itself from the concept of "big," whether applied to government or banks. As Thomas Edsall writes in the, however, messaging along these lines would constitute a huge break from current orthodoxy: The GOP has continuously advocated for the interests of the elite over those of the downtrodden. Still, if leading conservative luminaries, including Ross Douthat , are pushing for at least a messaging shift that positions the Republican Party in opposition to the influence of large corporations, that would be a welcome development—as would potential evolutions on marijuana legalization, interventionism and marriage equality. But what does a Republican-themed libertarian populist agenda actually look like from an economic perspective? Domenech explains:In other words, "libertarian populism" is the belief that markets would function perfectly if government would stop creating distortions: a classic Chicago School economic argument. This agenda should sound familiar: After all, it's the same dismantling of the social safety net and progressive tax code that Republicans have traditionally argued for. The only difference is that this time, this proposed erosion of protections for the working class is simply dubbed as helping the working class free itself of the burden of government. With a few exceptions, such as paying lip-service to popular sentiments against big banks, the conservative intellectual class seems to have decided that it's not really the product that needs tweaking—it's just the packaging. Mike Konczal at thecharacterizes it thus True. But even if this message were different from contemporaneous Republican economic orthodoxy, it presupposes the idea that Trende's "rural Northern white voters" are staying home because they would vote Republican if they did vote, but that Republican candidates aren't economically libertarian or anti-government enough for their sensibilities. It also presupposes that all these voters would somehow be more willing to vote if Republican strategists could somehow figure out how to dress the same old policies in the correct libertarian clothing.

Before going down this road, maybe the Republican Party will want to invest in polling to test the attractiveness of the new ideas and solutions they simply don't have. After all: You don't want to go trying to get 6 million disaffected white voters to all get out to the polls and vote for you without the right outfit to disguise the same old policies that made them stay home in the first place.