TW: Charlie Cook makes a simple but instructive point. Sometimes as a party you are on the wrong side of the majority on a particular issue with little chance of moving the majority. The Democrats perceived this relative to gun control. Rather than hypocritically changing positions which would be intellectually dishonest and therefore not credible, Dems merely stopped talking about the topic. Now that Dems are in power anti-gun control efforts should slow down or cease but just stopping the Republican efforts to arm everyone to the teeth is progress.
Cook suggests the Republicans would do well to mimic this approach relative to hot-button social issues about which the base Republicans may be passionate but the majority of Americans are not despite the base Republicans hopes and dreams. The ideologues faced with these choices choose to fall on their electoral swords, the pragmatists win and nudge the policy in their preferred directions.
From Charlie Cook:
"...It's easier to say that Republicans need to change than it is to say what they should change. But maybe Republicans should take a page from the Democratic playbook.
It would be unprincipled, intellectually bankrupt and pointless for the Republican Party to move from the right to the left on issues or overall positioning. But, on some issues, maybe they would be best off being silent.
When Democrats lost their House and Senate majorities in 1994, polling for organized labor showed that the top issue for union members voting Republican for Congress was guns, something that had nothing to do with unions.
In 2000, when Al Gore lost West Virginia, Gore's state manager later said that the top three reasons for Gore's defeat there were guns, guns and guns. Guns probably played a factor in not only Gore's loss of his home state of Tennessee but in every state that even touched Tennessee.
It was the presidential loss in 2000, on top of the congressional losses in 1994, that convinced the Democratic Party to simply shut up on guns. As much as many Democratic elected officials wanted to legislate the issue, they realized that they couldn't get re-elected if they kept offending so many union members, white males and rural and small-town voters on the gun issue.
Gun-control advocates had plenty of other reasons to support Democrats, so remaining silent on the issue didn't hurt the party that much. Rather, it enabled it to have a conversation with voters who otherwise would not listen as long as guns were on the table.
Republicans need to think about this in terms of their emphasis on certain social and cultural issues. The GOP has turned away a large number of highly educated, economically upscale voters who would be a natural fit for the party were it not for these divisive subjects.
Republicans have created problems for themselves in the libertarian-leaning Mountain West as well because of their stance on these issues. When westerners say they want government out of their lives, they mean out of the whole house, including the bedroom. Generationally, Republicans are killing themselves with voters who are now under 35, who see the party as narrow and intolerant. As Will Rogers used to say, "When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njonline/offtotheraces.php
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