The GOP’s Problems Are Much Bigger than Christie Thinks

Chris Christie came to the Conservative Political Action
Conference in DC last week with a self-serving message. The Republican Party
has a communications problem, one that can only be solved by a new communicator,
one a lot like Chris Christie.

What Christie doesn’t get is how deep a problem the center-right
currently faces—especially among young voters. Christie’s right about
conservatives needing to get their message out, but getting any message out
(especially to younger voters) will take much more than he suggests. Pew found that younger
voters are more liberal than earlier generations. A College Republican study found that
while many younger voters have center-right inclinations, they have also
been socialized into thinking of the center-left as the good guys. A younger
voter might be against higher taxes, and against late-term abortion (when they
think about it). They might think it is wrong for the government to cancel
people’s health that they like in order to make them buy more expensive health
insurance that they don’t want. What the young person lacks is a vocabulary for
those concerns and a sense that sensible and sympathetic people share those
concerns.

Thirty-five years ago, young people might have gotten a
sympathetic exposure to right-leaning principles (if not exactly conservative
policies) from their families or church groups. Today’s younger voters are less likely to attend church and
less likely to come from families that had a history of voting
center-right. The young voters of thirty-five years ago might have been
exposed to a center-right vocabulary and worldview from television ads and
network news that had a liberal bias, but also had norms that meant that they
had to try to cover the
opposition with something like fairness some of the time. Today the audiences
for both traditional television and the network news tends to skew older.
The result is that many young people get their information (when they get it)
from more overtly hostile media and social networking sources that don’t even
make any attempt at objectivity and minimal fairness.

This means that the opposition is defined (usually second hand
or in carefully edited snippets) as out of touch old guys who are afraid that
rap music from twenty-five years ago will make today’s teenagers want to
kill everybody. It means that Romney’s “binders full of women” comment is
common knowledge while Obama’s misspelling of respect is no big deal. One can
try to rationalize it. Obama’s misspelling is no big deal because we know he is
smart. Romney’s comment (which is totally reasonable in context) is worthy of mockery
because we know he is . . . Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs? There is no point in looking for a
comedic explanation. The explanation is that combination of elision and
emphasis that is used to cultivate prejudice.

There is nothing new about hysterias created by pop culture
and journalistic hostility to the right. Barry Goldwater could have
told you all about it. What is new is the problem of breaking into
the information stream of the nonpolitical twenty-year-old who wants to marry,
would like a larger paycheck, and wants some reasonable assurance that she will
maintain catastrophic health insurance if she should get laid off. Talking
to her is harder than it used to be—especially since most people have to
hear something more than once before they are ready to listen. That is a major
communication problem and Christie (who narrowly lost voters under thirty even against a feeble opponent who
had been abandoned by her own party) didn’t tell us how to talk to that
twenty-year-old. Possibly because nobody on the right-of-center knows how
to reach her.

That isn’t to say that Republicans (and for the moment
conservatives have to vest their federal-level policy hopes with the GOP) don’t
have an agenda problem. The ultimate confession of policy futility was Romney’s statement to a group of
wealthy donors that his proposals had nothing to attract the votes of the
forty-seven percent of the population that did not have a net income tax
liability. The good news—the great news—is that there is now an
off-the-shelf middle-class agenda on the right. There is a group of reformist
policies to increase the take-home pay of working families,
extend coverage in a much cheaper and less
intrusive way than Obamacare,
help connect the unemployed to the
job market, and restructure
immigration in a way that will
be more pro-growth and better protect the interests of our country’s
current population of low-skill workers. The work of policy reform is less that
of blazing a path than walking the path that has been laid out. And of finding
a way to tell others about it.