Newt's Rise Tests Willingness of Tea Party Faction To Destroy GOP

A funny thing happened on the way to the ascendant Tea Party strangling the government in the bathtub.  The strangler accidentally gave away the Presidency, the Senate, and increasingly likely, maybe even the House.  The question of whether the GOP will nominate Newton Leroy Gingrich to run against Barack Obama is the same question as whether the Tea faction would rather blow up the Republican Party it has taken over than win elections.  At the moment, I think the answer to both questions is yes.

A Party of Henry Clays

Kentuckian and perennial Presidential candidate Henry Clay once commented, "I would rather be right than President."  (To which one of his rivals is alleged to have rejoined, "Thankfully, you will be neither.")  As Quinnipiac University polling pointed out earlier this week, the Tea Party feels exactly the same.  While GOP voters recognize the obvious fact that Mitt Romney would be the strongest Republican challenger by far to President Obama, Quinnipiac reports that by a whopping 74-24 percent, GOP voters prefer a candidate with whom they agree on the issues over one who "can win in November."  The same sample from which that ominous stormcloud for Romney emanates also identifies Romney as the one the same GOPers view as more likely to beat Obama, 38-23, and yields up the following trial heat data:

Obama 45, Romney 44

Obama 49, Gingrich 40

Thus, at least according to this sample, there are Republicans who say that Romney would be more likely to win, and who nonetheless want Gingrich because they'd rather be right than President.  Gingrich may be the Tea Party's ultimate feat of Clay.

Mitt Gets Newt-ralized

Polls since the Newt explosion -- think of the scene in The Rite when Anthony Hopkins' bedroom floor is covered with little frogs -- suggest very convincingly that Newt is on path for the GOP nomination.  Quinnipiac shows Newt ahead of Romney nationally, 26-22.  Far worse, though, it shows Newt catching Mitt (get it?) among Catholics, 29-29, but leading among Protestants 29-18 and evangelicals 29-16.  Yes, it's the Mormon thing rearing its head.  This is why Newt, per Rasmussen, is up 32-18 in Iowa.  While winning Iowa did not propel Huckabee past McCain, Romney polls badly in South Carolina, losing badly to Cain before and Gingrich now:  31-16 per Politico.  (Cain still shows 17 in that South Carolina poll, raising the question of what would be worse for Romney, coming in third in GOP bastion South Carolina, or Cain's vote reallocating to Gingrich, giving him a commanding 43-23 win, let's say, in the state.  I think the latter is both more damaging to Romney and more likely.)

In my prior piece about the rise of the Newt, written two weeks ago, I argued that Republican rationality is no objection to the suggestion that Gingrich will win the nomination.  Not only does Quinnipiac's 74-24 bear this out, but so does the passage of two more weeks during which Newt is continuing to consolidate his position as the front-runner and the anti-Romney.  I keep having this exchange with folks interested in politics:  (Articleman:  Is Gingrich going to beat Romney?  Other Person:  No way, they'll come to their senses.  Only Romney can win.  Articleman:  So if Romney is going to win, how come he's never ahead?  He's trailed Perry, Cain, Undecided, and now Gingrich?  Don't you have to be ahead to win?  Other Person:  Romney will win when it comes down to voting.  And do I have to keep calling you Articleman?  Articleman:  No he won't.  And yes, you do.)  I am just not seeing the logic of their position.  Gingrich isn't a Perry; he's actually quite smart.  He polls as better suited to Presidential leadership than the other GOP hopefuls, which also distinguishes him from Cain.  He doesn't have a harassment allegation-cloud like Cain.  While he does face character questions, those are known and were baked into his profile, priced into his lead already.  If Gingrich was on his first wife instead of this third, he'd likely be up 15 points on Romney today instead of 2-5.  I will expound upon this further in my next post, The Marginal Electoral Efficacy of Wives.

Turning Toward Newt Is a Logical Extension of the Tea Party of 2010

We already saw the Tea Party make history in 2010.  Not only did the GOP take the House, which it would have done in any event in this lousy economy, but it was the first election in the century of direct elections of U.S. Senators in which the House switched parties and the Senate did not (this bucked eight precedents since WWI in which both switched at once).  Why?  Three examples:  In Colorado, the electable Gale Norton was passed over for more conservative Ken Buck, who lost narrowly to incumbent Democratic Senate-appointee Michael Bennet.  In Nevada, Harry Reid got the horrible opponent he wanted, and won handily over the atrocious Sharron Angle.  And in Delaware, the even worse Christine O'Donnell managed to give away the Senate seat that was Mike Castle's for the taking.  Particularly in Delaware and Nevada, faced with the ultra-stark choice of being Senator or right, the Tea voters chose being right on their notion of right.  (Never mind the Tea Party favorite winning the GOP nomination and losing to Lisa Murkowski in Alaska.  Murkowski voted with the Democrats to break the filibuster against voting on controversial judicial nominee Goodwin Liu.  The experience seems to have irked the Senator.)  If the Tea Party doesn't alter the primaries in CO, NV, and DE, the GOP could have taken control of the Senate with a switch in caucusing either from Joe Lieberman or Ben Nelson.  The Tea Party likely cost the GOP the Senate already.

Costing it the Presidency?  We've already covered that one above.  Barack Obama will beat Newt Gingrich if given the chance.  Will likely beat him easily.  Rasmussen says Obama would win by six; Quinnipiac says Obama would win by nine.  The real telling point is that Obama's approval rating is net-negative (roughly 43/48 right now) and that he roughly ties the generic Republican; per Gallup Obama is narrowly up within the margin of error even in this matchup (+1), while Rasmussen shows him within the margin of error in either direction (+1 and -3 in the last two surveys).  Underscoring this point, Republicans with names all lose lose to Obama despite his relatively low standing, and Newt instead of Mitt would be Angle or O'Donnell on an epic, Goldwater-ian scale of right rather than electable.

Yet this is not only what the Tea Party wants to do.  Listen to Quinnipiac.  This is *why* the Tea Party wants to do it.  Whoever said the Party of No wasn't kidding.  This party clearly wants to say no to Obama more than it wants to beat him.  It also wants to say no to those within the GOP ranks who want election more than saying no.  Just because it's fun to think about Amy Winehouse and John Boehner at the same time, imagine either singing, they wanted me to win elections/I said no, no, no.

So why do I suggest in my lede that the Tea Party may even give away the House?  After all, the GOP won the House very convincingly in a, well, Newt Gingrich-in-1994-like victory just a year ago.  But here's the rub.  As Nate Silver pointed out after voting in 2010 in my favorite post of that year, our elections are much more nationalized than they used to be.  That is, the outcome of individual House races is much more closely tied to Presidential voting in a House district than it once was, and results in House districts are more predictive of each other (e.g., more correlated as a general matter).  I think this should work both ways, and Nate's post, as I pulled it back up while composing this, suggests as much -- that alignment means that a narrow shift to the Democrats nationally could have a decisive effect in the House.  That is, if Obama would lose to Romney but beat Gingrich, a Gingrich-branded GOP, which is a Tea-branded GOP, is more likely to give away the House.  As Nate's "An Aligning Election" post indicates, the Democrats only have to defend in 2012 12 House seats in which Obama won a minority of votes, while the GOP must defend 55 in which he won a majority in 2008.  Remember that Democrats need to swing a net of 26 districts to retake the House.  That Tea brand, like Gingrich's own, has a net-negative approval rating.  And it is falling.

The Real Winner of the Tea Party's Rise:  The Median Voter Hypothesis

So who is the real winner?  Barack Obama?  Sure, but that's the superficial answer.  Why is he a winner, with approval ratings only a hair above 40%?  Because the Tea Party is changing history.  It is turning what should by all historical precedents be wave elections in 2010 and 2012 -- waves against a party in power during an awful, awful economy -- into narrow wins for the party in power.  In a more recent post providing several different models of the 2012 Presidential election, Nate notes two hypotheses competing to explain Presidential elections:  the referendum hypothesis, in which the question is whether the incumbent deserves re-election (and in which bad economies dictate unfavorable outcomes), and the median voter hypothesis, in which voters vote for the person to whom they are more closely aligned ideologically.  Nate suggested, as some have, that given the predictive power of the referendum hypothesis over the years, one might want President Obama to run a more overtly ideological campaign, because ideology would be his best hope.

This turns out to be half-right.  President Obama hasn't needed to define himself in starker ideological contrast.  To paraphrase Obi Wan's rebuke to Anakin during their climactic duel on the lava planet (when Anakin complained that Obi Wan had alienated Mrs. Anakin), "You have done that yourself."  That is, the Tea Party has made of itself such an unflattering and ideologically extreme contrast to Obama that the median voter hypothesis -- even in this indisputably bad economy -- now trumps the referendum hypothesis.  Where a Bob Michel or Bob Dole might in years past have ascended to being Speaker of the House or Senate Majority Leader because of the grativational pull of electoral cyclicality, the Tea folks have doubled down so hard on their exclusionary philosophy, that they have repealed that very cyclicality.  

The median voter theory agrees:  like Clay, the Tea Party would rather be right than President.  And if the Tea Party pursues that theory to the extent of nominating Newt Gingrich, as today would be more likely than not, it will have completed its two-cycle squandering of a great opportunity for the Republican Party.  If the Tea Party does this, and the economy turns up modestly in a second Obama term, you will see a Republican Party that will have lost five of the last six popular votes for President, that will be demographically more unrepresentative than it once was of a now browner, younger, more pro-gay, more pro-marijuana, and less overtly religious electorate, and that will have lost some or all of its native advantage on foreign affairs issues, and will have expelled the virus of the median voter from within its ranks.  While that would make 2012 interesting, it would make where the Republican Party goes from there a bigger and more interesting question.  I think that's where we'll be a year from today.