( – promoted by Colorado Pols)
Aaron Blake and Reid Wilson at The Hill suggest that Republican candidates will emphasize that they’re conservatives and de-emphasize their party affiliation. They cite recent polling that shows the GOP very unpopular while more voters self-identify as conservative than any other ideology.
See their piece here:
http://thehill.com/campaign-20…
I wanted to see how that theory played out in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District, which has two announced and one semi-announced challengers to freshman Democrat Betsy Markey. I looked at their campaign Web sites to see how prominently they played up party affiliation and ideology.
Cory Gardner, who was part of the GOP leadership in the state House, makes his Republican ties evident, using the word three times in the third paragraph of his campaign bio. He also describes himself as a “fiscal conservative.”
Web sites promoting Tom Lucero and Diggs Brown, on the other hand, never mention the word “Republican,” at least that I could find. They do describe themselves as fiscal conservatives, though they don’t use that phrase.
More details at my Coloradoan blog: http://tr.im/oRxi
Follow me on Twitter @BobMooreNews
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is a little short on the Democratic affiliation too — but I see you noted that in your longer blog post at the Coloradoan. Markey’s home page doesn’t mention she happens to be a Democrat, but her bio does list, buried many paragraphs down, her party activity:
Notice there’s nothing actually claiming she’s currently a Democrat, though we wouldn’t be wrong to assume that.
But then again, as I point out in my Coloradoan blog, she also doesn’t claim to be a current member of Congress in the bio posted on her campaign site.
You can paint this a “red” problem if you like, but the Hill article seems to do so with too broad a brush:
“There’s something wrong with that picture: 40 percent conservative, versus 39 percent linking themselves with Republicans. It means there are plenty of conservatives out there who are done with the GOP, and independents aren’t replacing them.”
Assuming a standard sample size of around 1100, “plenty of conservatives” would be something like 10, hardly “something wrong with that picture.”
Isn’t the real issue that the Party affiliations now point less to platforms, and more toward funding streams from bases that alienate the middle? Candidates need the money that comes with affiliation, but they use it to reach out to the middle, and so sweep their affiliation under the rug.
In truth, both Dems and Republicans stopped being “themselves” in the mid-90s as a way of re-branding to get past the stereotypes of the late-60s. Republicans became less and less concerned with the “public thing,” and to be perfectly honest about it far less conservative about being Conservative. Democrats, too, gave up on “empowering the people” in order to re-power their party, embracing “progressivism” over “liberality” (Constant’s social side of economic liberalism, which Reagan may have managed to discredit forever in American politics, even though it was originally a Republican brand!).
About the only place these “labels” matter any more is among older voters who cherish the Cold War notion that our two-party system of opposing choices is the essence of our democracy. THAT, it seems to me, is what’s significant about dodging party labels in NoCo. If Republicans aren’t standing by their brand up here, it just might mean that the political landscape is opening up to debates on what matters most to our citizens, rather than to ideological partisanship over largely symbolic values. Granted, this emerging brand of “fiscal conservatism” has ideological strains all its own, but if candidates from both sides of the aisle are competing to claim it, this suggests that its ultimate definition will be in the hands of the voters which, in the end IS the essence of our democracy.