One of the painful political lessons I learned during the 2016 Republican presidential primary is that it’s the candidate with the broadest appeal who usually wins — not necessarily the one with the most rigid adherence to principle or even to the party platform.
My preference is always going to be for the candidate who seems most dedicated to following the Constitution and market-oriented economics. A conservative policy nerd, like me. But those kinds of candidates rarely win elections, and when they do, such as when Ronald Reagan was elected president, something very special has happened.
These recollections surfaced while watching the Texas Republican primary results Tuesday. If you gauged the political temperature of the moment based on Facebook or Twitter, you would have thought that Gov. Greg Abbott was in trouble, or at least was in for an interesting evening.
That’s because Texas Republican social media has seethed with anger at Abbott for at least the last two years, mostly because Abbott didn’t appear to be as aggressive as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on COVID-19 and some social conservative priorities. Abbott also took heat during the brief period of mask mandates he imposed at the peak of pandemic concern.
But your Facebook and Twitter feeds misled you, because Abbott won Tuesday night by more than a comfortable margin over his Republican challengers. Just as many other mainstream Republican candidates handily beat challengers more favored by parts of the grassroots.
My point is not to criticize Abbott’s challengers — they undoubtedly pressured him in a more conservative direction. Nor am I criticizing grassroots engagement. My point is that the opinion of the overall Republican electorate is far different than what you might have gathered from social media or from monthly meetings of local political clubs.
Tuesday night’s results remind us that social media keyboard crusaders and angry grassroots activists aren’t representative of the broader Republican electorate — just as Twitter sentiment is not representative of the nation at large. This is a lesson we all need to absorb as we learn how to manage and evaluate our usage of social media; it’s great for some things but really lousy for accurately gauging political sentiment.
Why does this matter? Because confusing social media sentiment with overall voter sentiment is amplifying counterproductive divisions within the Texas Republican Party.
The sole purpose of a political party is to win elections, period. There are always going to be various constituencies within any political party, but the job of the party is to coalesce constituencies around a common set of goals and ideas in order to win elections.
I know anecdotally that social media has drawn a significant number of people into politics who were previously uninvolved and uninterested. They didn’t read newspapers or journals of opinion, and they may or may not have voted in primaries and elections. But they were on Facebook, and constant exposure to a stream of hyperbolic, overheated, sometimes misleading political posts got them engaged but misguided.
Engagement is good, but many of these folks now actively run the Republican Party at the grassroots level. They are literally newbies, they get their takes from social media, and they often push the party in a direction that is contrary to its mission: making a broad appeal sufficient to win elections.
Astonishingly, much of the Texas GOP grassroots was hoping for Abbott’s defeat. This despite the governor being a repeated winner in statewide elections, despite Texas’ economic success during his governorship, and despite Texas being among the most open states during the pandemic.
It’s almost as if the grassroots fault Abbott for NOT simply ignoring the legislature and granting them all their policy wishes directly from the governor’s mansion — which would hardly be conservative.
Republicans in Texas need to remember why we have political parties. For a principled conservative like me, that means nominating the most conservative electable candidate, not necessarily the most conservative one.
Getting worked up over a single issue or a single frustration may give you some personal satisfaction, but is counterproductive to the long-term goal of winning elections and implementing policy.