The Wall Street Journal - The Right Way? Republicans Rethink, Reload for 2014

By Gerald F. Seib

The morning after the 2012 election, The Wall Street Journals front page carried this summary of the political landscape: A campaign year that began with great hope for Republicans.instead ended Tuesday night with the GOP in a cloud of gloom.

It wasnt just that Democratic President Barack Obama had won re-election. It was that he won even though his job approval had been stuck below 50% for months, and the unemployment rate had hovered around 8% for most of the year. He won relatively easily, holding intact the coalition of young, female and minority voters that first put him in the White House. A presidential campaign that once looked very winnable for the GOP had gone awry.

Many Republicans also believed they had blown a chance to reclaim control of the Senate, and blamed tea party activists who took control of the nominating process in some states and produced candidates who were easily caricatured as extremists. The partys most-energized activists, the party establishment felt, had undermined its fortunes.

Republicans had maintained control of the House. Even there, though, they had lost the national popular vote in House races to the Democrats, 48% to 47%. Only favorable mapping of congressional districts saved House control, small solace at a time when the GOP seemed to have had a legitimate chance to win the House, Senate and White House at once.

In the elections aftermath, the party wasnt in agreement on what the problem was. Some thought that, because Republican nominee Mitt Romney had lost despite winning more white votes than any GOP candidate since the 1980s, the outcome was a sign that the party needed to broaden its coalition to include more young and minority voters. Others urged a recommitment to conservative principles that would energize the partys existing base.

Such disappointments and disagreements can set a party into a bout of soul-searching. Thats exactly what happened to the Republicans, who embarked on perhaps the most public period of introspection by either party since Democrats tried to regroup after Richard Nixon destroyed George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus appointed five veteran GOP campaign operatives to form a task force, fan out across the country, and conduct thousands of interviews and focus groups with party regulars. The group returned in March 2013 with a report a Journal story called a scathing self-analysis of the partys problems.

Public perception of the party is at record lows, the report said. Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country. When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their ears to us.

The task force also found that there was no single view of what the Republican party ought to stand for but, rather, several views, often in conflict.

The task force said the party should embrace an overhaul of the nations immigration system to appeal to Hispanic voters, but House Republicans balked at immigration plans that provided any path to citizenship for the millions of Hispanics in the country illegally. And while many in the partys leadershipnot least House Speaker John Boehnerthought the GOPs image as a party that could be trusted to govern effectively would be enhanced by negotiating a broad budget deal with President Obama, the House tea party faction repeatedly blocked that path.

The tea party caucus in the House became a kind of guerrilla force in its own right. It was personified in many ways by Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a first-term congressman who, within weeks of his election, was spearheading an unsuccessful coup against Mr. Boehner. That gambit didnt work, but Mr. Massie and like-minded colleagues discovered that they had the power to stop other things the party establishment wanted, such as passage of a farm bill, an increase in the governments debt ceiling and an increase in the federal debt ceiling. These were conflicting impulses no task force could resolve, and with which the party has continued to grapple in the halls of Congress.

In many ways, however, the more interesting introspection and experimentation has been happening not in the Capitol or a task-force hearing room but in statehouse buildings around the country and in conversations Republicans launched with voters far from Washington. Those are the places The Wall Street Journals political reporting staff visited to chronicle much of the partys attempts to find its footing, compiling many of the stories collected here.

In Kansas, Gov. Sam Brownback set out to create a red-state model he thought could be a model for the party nationally. The model was designed not to smooth off the corners of conservative views, but to sharpen them. He passed the largest income tax cut in state history, and set out to make more fundamental changes in the states tax code. He was confident the result would be robust economic growth, but even some Republicans worried about the sales tax increase needed to fill part of the revenue hole, and the fate of the states education system under decreased funding became a hot topic of debate.

In Ohio, another Republican governor, John Kasich, tried to blaze a different trail. He pushed tax cuts but, citing his strong Christian beliefs, argued that Republicans benefit from showing a compassionate side, cooperated with the Obama administration by undertaking an ambitious expansion of the Medicaid health program for the poor. The fact that the strategy aligned him with a health-care overhaulObamacare, as Republicans called it lwidely despised within his party seemed not to trouble the governor at all.

I know this is going to upset a lot of you guys, but we have to use government to reach out to people living in the shadows, he told one conservative group.

Meanwhile, Republicans grappled with what many considered the partys biggest long-term political liability: its poor performance among the nations burgeoning Hispanic population. Many turned to Rep. Steve Pearce of New Mexico for guidance and inspiration. The Journals profile of him summed up his importance to his party succinctly, calling him the rarest of Republican Party officeholders, a very conservative Anglo who keeps winning elections from a predominantly Latino electorate.

The Pearce prescription is simple: Engage, rather than shy away from Hispanics. You just have to show up all the time, everywhere, he said. Most Republicans dont bother. I do. I bother.

In South Carolina, Sen. Lindsey Graham had a different problem. When he supported an immigration reform plan that provided a path to legal status for illegal immigrants, he found that though many party leaders agreed with his course, convincing voters back home was a harder sell. He has stuck to his position in the face of voter skepticism, working to buttress his position by stressing his conservative credentials on other issues.

The partys conflicts remain largely unresolved. Still, by the end of 2013, something interesting began happening: Things started to come easier for Republicans. Some of the tea party factions impulses subsided, enough of them standing aside that their congressional leaders could shepherd through Congress a two-year budget plan that put to rest the politically harmful talk of a government shutdown.