Where Have All The Moderates Gone?

When the 108th Congress closed out in early January 2007 the Republican Party had 55 Senators and 229 House Representatives. With the defection of Sen. Arlen Specter, the GOP is today looking at 40 Senators, 178 Representatives and the only thing keeping the Democrats from getting to a filibuster proof 60 votes in the Senate the seating of Al Franken.

What happened? In the GOP house the moderates have left the building, or at least most of them, leaving the GOP as a party of southern whites, rural America, religious conservatives and the wealthy.

Previously, as Thomas Frank pointed out in What's the Matter With Kansas? the Republican party was able to convince a slight majority of Americans that by helping the party improve the economic fortunes of the wealthy that the party would deliver on so-called moral issues. Instead the working class found that the GOP's policies were hurting them economically and little was accomplished on the moral issues.

Today more and more people are looking at the economy and back at the 1990s and deciding that the GOP hasn't delivered and so they are looking for other options. The trend had its base in the Northeast and the west coast, as shown by the states Sen. John Kerry won in 2004. Since then Ohio and Florida flipped to the Democratic Party, as have states like Indiana and Virginia.

It is a only a matter of time before much of the rest of the country decides they have had enough also of the GOP and the party is looking at 37 Senators. To Republicans the problem is not that they aren't out of touch with mainstream America but that they aren't conservative enough.

That kind of thinking led Sen. Specter to give up on the GOP in Pennsylvania, understanding that conservatives will win the primary and lose the general election. Since the GOP is apparently OK with the moderates leaving, one can only expect the voters to follow.