Reply #39: Republicans are approaching dominance. [View All]

It is the result of a far reaching strategy developed and implemented over a long period of time.

The first element of this strategy was to recruit and train, with nationally solicited funds, republican candidates for local elections with the idea that these candidates would later run for the state legislature and then Congress. This was the original purpose of GOPAC.

But GOPAC evolved from just a recruitment and training organization to a propaganda machine. The purpose of the propaganda was to make sure that the republican party defined the democratic party in the minds of as many voters as possible. That became a second element of the republican strategy. In the last 10 years or so democratic candidates and the democratic party have allowed that to occur.

Since Newt Gingrich took over GOPAC, the republican strategy has included trying to marginalize the democratic party by painting it as extremist in its liberalism. This is why a republican candidate for any office higher than dogcatcher is trained to use the famous GOPAC words when referring to a democratic opponent or the democratic party. It is also why the republican party spends millions of dollars every year and employs hundreds of people solely to make the democratic party appear too liberal for most independent voters.

Another element to the republican strategy was to focus on redistricting. The RNC spent tens of millions of dollars on state legislature elections in the late 1990's and especially the 2000 election. According to the RNC, the reason this was done was so that republicans would control more of the redistricting done after the 2000 census. Although the obvious goal of redistricting was to create more republican districts, another element of this strategy came to light just after the recent Texas redistricting.

The Texas redistricting continued implementing the republican strategy of defining the democratic party as too liberal. In effect it combined the redistricting strategy with the definition strategy. The redistricting did not seek to eliminate the most liberal democrats in the Texas Congressional delegation. Rather it sought to eliminate the more conservative to moderate democrats and guarantee the re-election of the most liberal. This is part of a strategy described by Tom DeLay to make the democratic party the party of blacks, feminists, homosexuals, and extremist liberal groups like ELF. This redistricting strategy will be followed in other states whenever the republicans get the opportunity, even if that does not occur until after the 2010 census.

The republican strategy to become the dominant party has been well thought out and developed, and well implemented on a national scale. It has been depressingly effective in my opinion. It irritates me that the democratic party apparently has no strategy to counter it.