The Achilles Heel Of The Republicans

It's always been there, but the last decade's worth of events has made it more vulnerable than ever:

A couple things happened on the left. The small group of people who were initially receptive to thinking in empirical terms happened to be in influential if low-profile positions mostly in the prominent institutions of the left: labor, women’s groups, and environmental groups. They were very interested in being smarter about they do politics because they wanted to use their money more effectively.

The other thing that happened is they lost in 2004 and they attributed that largely to technique. In many cases Democrats did not really understand what Republicans had done but they began to impute these almost magic powers to Karl Rove and “microtargeting” and the “72 hour plan,” things that had been sketchily and sometimes inaccurately described in press clippings. It inspired Democrats who might have been skeptical of new ways of running campaigns to put aside their business interests and parochial rivalries in the interest of building institutions that could make their campaigns smarter every year.

The fact that Republicans lost so overwhelmingly in 2008, I think, delayed an awareness of the technical gap between the two sides, and they imputed Obama’s win to much broader conditions in the country. For the sake of innovation on the Republican side, the best thing that could happen to them is that they lose narrowly on Tuesday, that the story becomes how Obama and his allies ran a mechanically superior campaign, and Republican donors, party leaders, consultants face the existential predicament that Democrats did at the end of 2004, which is, “We’re going to lose forever unless we figure out how to make our campaigns better.”

That’s the first step. The second step is finding social scientists who want anything to do with the Republican party in the 21st century, and that probably won’t be solved on Tuesday one way or the other. That’s a bigger cultural problem.