After the outcome of the election, the Republican Party has been thinking about what needs to be done in order to remain successful under the Obama Administration. Check out this article from Free-Times about the current “GOP Civil War”, with quotes from CEO Wesley Donehue.
In the wake of any presidential election, members of the losing party expend much energy in a ritual of self-evaluation. In the struggle for the Republican Party to define itself after its Nov. 6 loss to President Obama, it doesn’t appear this self-examination will be pretty.
“Is Republican Civil War Looming?” asked a recent Fox News headline.
“There is a Brutal Civil War in the GOP,” warned Business Insider.
“The GOP’s Civil War Goes Public,” blared Politico.
In the coming months, some of the internecine warfare will be about personalities. Karl Rove, for instance, the former George W. Bush strategist who raised roughly $172 million from wealthy donors with the ultimately unsuccessful promise of beating Democratic President Barack Obama and his Democratic congressional allies, is likely to become an early target.
But the bigger — and more urgent — battle will be about ideas.
On Nov. 6, Obama won the popular vote by approximately three percentage points and snagged 332 Electoral College votes to Romney’s 206. The Democratic president won his re-election with overwhelming support from Hispanics, blacks, women and young people, which offset his poor showing among whites. The Republican Party has long counted on its bread-and-butter votes coming from a population that is shrinking: older whites and working-class males, particularly from the conservative countryside.
“Every election loss is a time for reflection and recalibration,” says Matt Moore, director of the South Carolina Republican Party.
In that time of reflection, Republicans across the country will be asking themselves what their party and its nominee could have done better, and what they’ll have to do next time around if they want to win the White House.
Those questions will range from whether former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was conservative enough, to whether the party’s fundamental positions are unsound or if the message is just in need of tweaking. Should the party scale back some of its more cringe-worthy rhetoric on social issues? And what to do about the bomb-throwers and carnival barkers of the right, from Rush Limbaugh to Donald Trump? There will be a tug from the tea party on one side and from moderates on the other.
In that conversation, the Palmetto State could be ground zero.
A pivotal early primary state whose Republican electorate is largely reflective of the national GOP base, Republicans in South Carolina had, until this year, accurately predicted the eventual nominee of their party since 1980.
This year, they opted for a full-throated conservative, Newt Gingrich, rather than the eventual nominee, a man sometimes derided as Moderate Mitt. Whether that means South Carolina is losing its relevance on the national level — or is a harbinger of things to come — remains to be seen.
South Carolina is a state where the tea party has found fertile ground, leading an insurgency that put Nikki Haley into the governor’s mansion in 2010. It’s also a state that is thoroughly controlled by the Republican Party: The GOP holds a large majority in both chambers of the General Assembly; holds all of the statewide elected offices; and holds six of the state’s seven congressional seats. Depending on where you look in the state power structure, establishment Republicans hold sway in some places and tea partiers in others.
Nowhere can the split be seen more clearly than in South Carolina’s two members of the U.S. Senate.
Read the rest of this article at Free-Times.com