More on the Polarization of the Congressional GOP

A few months back, we looked at a subject of great interest: the future of the Republican Party going forward should John McCain lose the election to Barack Obama. If you recall, we used the current composition of Congress as a model to demonstrate that the Republican Party was becoming more and more politically polarized and less ideologically diverse to the point that it was (and still is) threatened with the prospect of become a regional (read: Southern) party. Conversely, for all of its faults, and at least as it pertains to Congress, the Democratic Party has and continues to be much more successful in electing a diverse political cross-section of Members to the House and the Senate.

An article today in the Washington Post touched on these issues, and I wanted to highlight the article because I think that it provides some very strong insight into this important topic.

The crux of the Post's article is that last week's first bailout vote -- the one that failed -- illustrated how the GOP in Congress has come to be dominated by ultra conservatives, particularly those in the Republican Study Committee. While the author does not really get into those broader implications for the future that we wrote about over the summer, she does make one fascinating observation: namely, that not a single freshman Republican cast an "aye" vote on the bailout package.

Now, granted, the 2006 elections were not terribly strong for Republicans, and there are only 13 freshman representing the Red Team in the 111th Congress. However, the larger point made by this statistic is spot-on: namely, that the Republican Party in Congress is becoming more and more conservative.

As we argued back in our post, while many in the GOP welcome this development with open arms, in the end, it will only weaken and marginalize the party while the Democrats elect more and Blue Dogs and conservative Dems in red districts. It is nonetheless clear that conservative House leaders like Mike Pence and Jeb Hensarling, to name a couple, either do feel this way, or they are not strategic enough to recognize the distinction; I think it is probably a little from both.

This is a very salient issue as we move closer to the elections next month,where there is a very good chance that not only will Republicans shed close to half of the moderates left in their caucus, but also that Democrats will elect a new bushel of conservative-minded Reps to red districts.