I wrote this last night about the fact that Ernie Lopez, Gerald Hocker and Greg Lavelle ending their statewide political futures with their votes against marriage equality yesterday and about the chances that Cathy Cloutier, on the other hand, had elevated her statewide future based on her yes vote:
The problem, though, is the Republican Party. When I say that the next Republican Governor of Delaware will support marriage equality, I say that because no one who doesn’t support marriage equality will ever win a statewide race going forward. They will barely crack 40% of the vote. So for a Republican to win, he or she will have to be for marriage equality.
BUT…
For the foreseeable future (at least until 2016), the Republican Party’s base is violently against marriage equality, and no Republican candidate can win the primary or get the nod at the state convention without being against marriage equality. Maybe the victory today will speed the death of the rabid bigots at the heart of the state GOP, and I hope it does. But assuming it doesn’t, the GOP is caught in a horrible catch-22: it can only nominate anti-gay candidates, and it can only win with pro-equality candidates.
And this, in response to how losing could be so addictive to our state GOP:
How can losing be so addictive? Easy. It allows these social conservatives to play a role they love so well: that of the victim. They love whining about how oppressed they are. And nothing proves their oppression more than defeat after defeat after defeat at the ballot box and in roll call votes in the General Assembly. And nothing brings in the dollars of retired old bigots more than hate and fear and victimhood.
Jonathan Bernstein agrees with me, or I guess I agree with him (depending on who wrote what first) in his latest article in the Washington Monthly:
Some will argue that it’s a problem that’s self-correcting: a broken party will lose elections, and we do know that ideologically extreme parties tend to moderate after extended electoral loss. I worry, however, that the current GOP isn’t normal enough to follow that pattern. I worry about the conservative marketplace and the downgrading of the electoral incentive. I worry about the information loop, and the inability of even those Republicans who want to win elections to correctly diagnose what it takes to do so. I worry that those who do stay in touch with reality tend to be exiled from the party. And I worry that the electoral incentive for moderation simply isn’t great enough to overcome all of that. Mostly, however, I worry that it’s not really just a question of ideological positioning. If Republicans really believe that compromise is evil, then it doesn’t really matter whether the ideological gap between their position and the Democratic position is narrow or wide.