Will Republicans Lose The Presidential Election Through Overreach?

I’ve been suspecting that Obama will lose the 2012 election. Presidential elections seem determined, more than anything, by the state of the economy; if people’s incomes aren’t growing in the months before the election, the incumbent loses.

There’s a certain justice to this — when the economy is lousy, incumbents should lose. Accountability is a good thing in a representative democracy. Where I have problems with our system, it’s usually cases in which the system shields politicians from accountability (such as using the filibuster to strongly effect policy without being held accountable by voters).

On the other hand, the economic pit we’re in really isn’t Obama’s fault; the economic collapse happened before he took office, and the weak response from the Federal government is more the fault of the Senate than the White House. If politicians are going down because of the economy, I’d rather see a purge of Senators.¹

It’s also plausible that the connection between the economy and presidential elections is contingent on the opposing party selecting — as they usually do — someone relatively middle-of-the-road, with mass appeal. It’s possible that if the Republicans — tempted by the lousy economy making Obama look beatable — choose an extreme right-winger whose views alienate independent voters, we could see Obama win despite a lousy economy.

Conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru thinks it’s possible:

Whenever someone suggests that a candidate can’t win, many conservatives retort that people said that about Reagan, too. (What they forget is that people also said it about Barry Goldwater, and they were right.) And much of the Republican Party has convinced itself that Bush- era compromises bred political failure, a line of thought that makes concerns about electability seem beside the point. Combine these views with the natural inclination of people to think that their ideas are more widely shared than they are, and the result is a process where electability gets short shrift. Obama’s weakness only reinforces this tendency. […]

Texas Governor Rick Perry has suggested that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional and that they should be replaced by state-run programs. There’s a reason no Republican candidate since 1964 has run on a platform anything like this one on entitlements: Both programs are extremely popular.

Perry has also suggested that he disapproves of the New Deal, seeing it as a moment when the federal government began to exceed the constitutional limits of its power. He hasn’t said he wants to undo the New Deal, but it’s not out of bounds for Democrats to make the charge, given the importance he attaches to constitutionalism.

Of course, it’s also possible that Perry’s candidacy will fizzle out and we’ll wind up with Milt Mitt “everyone likes a bland man” Romney as the candidate. But let’s face it — a Perry candidacy would certainly be more exciting.

Use the thread here to discuss this post, or to discuss anything else about the Republican primary and the 2012 elections.

1. Just on general principle. If I think about the partisan politics of this years senate races, then I want the incumbents — who are mostly Democrats — to win. [↩]