Analyst: Specter switch may not accelerate GOP ‘death spiral’

The moment Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania bolted from the Republican Party, attention naturally turned to the last two moderate Republicans in the Senate, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine.

However, when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked election expert Nate Silver of 538.com on Tuesday about “the odds that we could see Senators Snowe and Collins follow Specter’s lead,” Silver replied that he wouldn’t expect it, because Maine is very different from Pennsylvania.

“You don’t have that kind of ‘Pennsyltucky’ part, where you have a lot of evangelicals and you have very conservative Catholics,” he explained. “Instead, it’s more a backwoodsy, kind of New Hampshire libertarian thing. … So they would not have to move for survival like Specter. … They’re already practically independents.”

Silver also emphasized that there aren’t a lot of moderates left in the Republican Party who might be inclined to switch, making the situation very different from when a number of conservative Democrats turned Republican in the 1990s. “I don’t think we’ll see a big groundswell here,” he stated.

Silver has previously described the Republican Party as being in a “death spiral,” and though he doesn’t seem to see Specter’s switch as accelerating that, he told Maddow that the GOP’s only way out of it is if “they find a way to kind of reconcile the kind of libertarian side of the party with more of the Sarah Palin social conservative side of the party in a way that seems somehow fresh and new. It’s a very difficult problem.”

Short of that, Silver believes that, “If the economy does recover [by 2010] … they’re going to lose, probably, even more seats. … They’re not in good shape in the long term here.”

In an op-ed for Tuesday’s New York Times, Senator Snowe herself wrote, “The announcement of [Specter's] switch was all the more painful because I believe it didn’t have to be this way. … When Senator Jeffords became an independent in 2001, I said it was a sad day for the Republicans, but it would be even sadder if we failed to confront and learn from the devaluation of diversity within the party that contributed to his defection.”

“It was as though beginning with Senator Jeffords’s decision, Republicans turned a blind eye to the iceberg under the surface,” Snowe continued. “I have said that, without question, we cannot prevail as a party without conservatives. But it is equally certain we cannot prevail in the future without moderates. … There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party.”

This video is from MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Apr. 28, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com

2 comments

  

Get breaking news alerts: Email/mobile

Email - No spam: