Is it just me, or does Brendan Miniter sound an awful lot like a  Republican version of Howard Dean talking about the Democratic need to win back the white guys who hang Confederate flags in their truck windows?  Here’s Miniter:

Regardless of the outcome of today’s elections–and recent polls show races tightening in favor of Republicans–if the GOP wants to be competitive on the national stage, it will have to first find a way to become competitive again in the Northeast.

This seems to miss the rather crucial point that, Rick Santorum aside, Republicans continue to be highly competitive in almost all of the Northeastern races not tainted by scandal (Tom Reynolds is still in the lead!).  Just the other day all the buzz was about how Chafee was coming back, but here we are assured that his defeat represents some kind of proof of Republican weakness.  Chafee Republicanism, which is essentially liberalism in a nice suit, will always have a chance in the Northeast, even as it makes everyone else in the party cringe. 

Presumably, just as there have been Democrats who now argue that the South is irrelevant to their party (see Whistling Past Dixie, whose author is going to feel slightly silly if Webb and Ford win), in the event of a GOP blowout we will be treated to future Republican attempts to argue, against Miniter, that Republicans don’t need those no-goodnik New Englanders anyway.  The book might be called Damn Yankees or perhaps A Covered Bridge To Nowhere.  That last one might bring up painful memories, so scratch that.  I look forward to such hysterical laments as What’s The Matter With Connecticut?  After all, don’t all those wealthy professionals know that the Democrats will…raise…their…taxes?!  They must be deeply confused!  How could they oppose the fight against world-conquering Islamofascists?  Rick Santorum wants to know.

Mr. Miniter makes some sensible observations, but lends them too much significance.  The elections in the Northeast promise to be ugly for the Republicans, which is amusing and somewhat curious considering that the GOP has been for most of its history a highly Northeast-centric party (and as Clyde Wilson has noted, it still is in spite of the fact that the bulk of its supporters resides somewhere else).  There are obvious reasons why the GOP has been losing strength in its longtime stronghold, as it came to increasingly adopt the politics first of Goldwater’s Sun Belt and then Nixon and Reagan’s California (not without a hell of a fight from the Rockefeller types back east!).  It then gradually adopted the familiar amalgam of Southern (stereotypically social and religious) and Western (stereotypically “libertarian”) conservatism.  The party establishment has never abandoned the Northeast, of course, and has done all it can to make sure that the concerns of Easterners always predominate in terms of setting real policy.  But it has had to use rhetoric that is certainly less than appealing to many parts of New England and the vicinity. 

But, in fact, at the state and federal levels in recent years the GOP has not been faring that badly in the Northeast.  Mitt Romney would not have won re-election (hence his dive into presidential politics), but that he won election the first time is slightly remarkable.  The squishy and moderate Republicans who have brought you Pataki in New York and the two current Senators from Maine can normally thrive in the Northeast when they can define themselves as being different from the rest of their party.  Most Northeastern Republicans have already solved their own version of the “faith” problem: while Democrats in the rest of the country beat their head against the wall trying to figure out “how to talk about faith,” these Republicans have figured out how not to talk about it and to talk about services and policy (say what you will about their policy choices).   

But of all the lessons the GOP ought to draw from its impending defeat, the need to be more amenable to the Northeast aint one of them.  For starters, the GOP in the Northeast isn’t in as much danger as many seem to think.  The Northeast does not appear to be on its way to a major realignment in which Republicans are eliminated as a major party in the region, at least when it comes to representation in Congress.  (Statehouses are a completely different question.)  In ’94, the Democrats suffered massive losses in the South; the GOP wave that year was so large because so many of these districts were ripe for the taking as the Dems had moved farther and farther away from the political and cultural values of this part of the country. 

The Northeast will probably see its numbers of elected Republicans at the federal level diminish considerably, but that simply means that they can’t run a Rick “We Will Fight Them On The Beaches” Santorum in that part of the country in the future.  In a sense, they never could–Santorum was a fluke of the last anti-incumbency wave who was re-elected pre-9/11 and pre-Iraq, and his social conservative profile has only grown in the last six years to such a degree that he does not fit that well with most of Pennsylvania.  His support for Specter’s re-election went unnoticed among “moderates” but infuriated his most loyal supporters, many of whom have crossed party lines to vote for his nebbish of an opponent, so there is a very real sense in which Santorum’s woes are all of his own making.  Yes, it was going to be a tough year, but instead of batening down the hatches and preparing for a storm Santorum tried to go into the headwind while having a Churchill-themed party up on the deck.  Running Santorum in Pennsylvania makes as much sense as trying to have me run for statewide office in New Mexico–I would get annihilated, especially if I made my most unpopular position the centerpiece of my campaign.  

This will be a bad election for Northeast Republicans, most of all because of the war, yet everything we think we know is that most of the New York races are extremely close and several of them are unlikely to flip.  At least two of the Pennsylvania races (PA-10 and PA-07) were lost by scandal and criminal investigation respectively.  Weldon was always in danger from Sestak’s strong challenge, but until the criminal probe into contract-rigging he had a real chance to hang on.  The Connecticut Three would probably have survived in any other environment.  That ought to make the Democrats wonder how they are having such a hard time closing the deal in a region that, in presidential elections, is theirs almost by default.  Yes, incumbency has advantages and these have been important in aiding endangered Republican candidates, but why do Johnson, Simmons and Shays even have the slightest chance of hanging on in a year this bad if the GOP has become so weak in the Northeast?  In any case, the last thing that the GOP needs to do is to start currying favour even more with the Northeast than it already does.  As if the party of The Wall Street Journal needed to be less like “flyover country” and more like the coastals than it already is!  The Republicans’ strength and their demographic future lie west of the Mississippi and south of Washington, and they had best take the interests of their constituents in those parts of the country more seriously than they have done or they will find themselves on the losing side in a lot more places than Connecticut.