The GOP Jihad

As Specter's forced march down the gangplank makes clear, the GOP is in the midst of a reactionary spasm — one that threatens to marginalize the party for a generation to come. Rather than acknowledging the party's failed policies and reaching out to new constituencies, the GOP's dominant faction is retrenching around the anti-government, free-market, fundamentalist strain of Republicanism last championed by Barry Goldwater — who steered the party to one of its most crushing defeats in 1964. The purists are led by a group of GOP veterans who tried to bring down Bill Clinton in 1994 — including Contract With America architect Newt Gingrich, former House majority leader Dick Armey and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. The veterans are allied with House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, a Gingrich protégé who has emerged as the youthful face of the Party of No, as well as with stimulus-rejecting Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and right-wing radio heavy Rush Limbaugh, who enforces the new GOP orthodoxy from the most feared bully pulpit in America. Together, they seek not to expand the party but to purge it.

Indeed, the Republican jihad has reached such a fever pitch that, to these ideologues, excommunicating one of the party's most powerful senators and handing the president a potentially unstoppable majority actually marks a positive development for the GOP. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Sanford cheered Specter's departure, calling him "deadly for the Republican brand." Firing up his listeners, Limbaugh hailed the defection for "weeding out people who aren't really Republicans," adding that he only regretted Specter didn't take John McCain with him.

Moderates in the party were appalled by the loss of Specter — but seem powerless to stop the ideological cleansing. Sen. Olympia Snowe — the Senate's last moderate Republican, along with Susan Collins of Maine — rebuked the purists for betraying the Republican coalition. "I believe in the traditional tenets of the Republican Party: strong national defense, fiscal responsibility, individual opportunity," Snowe said. "I haven't abandoned those principles. The Republican Party has abandoned those principles." Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina went even further. "We are not losing blue states and shrinking as a party because we are not conservative enough," he said. "If we pursue a party that has no place for someone who agrees with me 70 percent of the time, that is based on an ideological purity test rather than a coalition test, then we are going to keep losing."

The purge comes as the Republicans find themselves in their deepest electoral hole since the 1960s. With the election of Barack Obama, the party suffered its worst presidential defeat in 44 years. Since 2006, the GOP has lost 51 seats in the House and another 15 in the Senate — and there's no sign that the Republicans have hit bottom yet.

Obama's victory was not simply a repudiation of failed conservative governance — it was a reflection of a fundamental electoral shift that threatens the GOP's long-term viability. White working-class voters are disappearing fast — their share of the electorate has plunged by 15 percentage points since Reagan left office. One in four voters are now racial minorities, and Hispanics, the fastest-growing bloc of new voters, broke for Obama two to one. Even more striking, nearly 70 percent of young voters from the millennial generation cast their ballots for Obama — and their ranks are swelling by 4.5 million every year.

"Our coalition is shrinking," McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt warned in a speech to Log Cabin Republicans in April, "and losing ground with segments of the population that are growing." In addition to the GOP's "alarming" inability to capture young voters, Schmidt said, the rise of Hispanic voters "could soon cost Republicans the entire Southwest. It's very hard to see how we put together 270 electoral votes without the Southwest."

A look at the national map reveals that the GOP risks becoming hemmed in to the northern Rocky Mountains. According to a recent Gallup analysis based on more than 350,000 poll results, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents enjoy a majority of five points or more in 35 states. Only five states tilt to the GOP: Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Nebraska. This is an epic shift from 2002, when a majority of states leaned Republican. "You can't be noncompetitive in vast regions of the country and have any hope of governance," says Tom Davis, who led the GOP to victory in 2002 as head of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

According to recent CNN polls, Republicans are less popular than the governments of leftist Venezuela and communist China. Even legalizing marijuana has a bigger electoral constituency than the modern GOP. "The Republican Party has not coalesced around anyone, and it has not coalesced around any ideas," says Frank Luntz, a top Republican pollster and strategist. "And you've got the best communicator ever in modern politics as the leader of the Democratic Party. It is the perfect storm against the GOP."