Philip Klein and DaveG take me on. To recap, my argument has been that social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage have tended to help Republican candidates, and that a Republican presidential nominee bereft of those issues will be fighting on more difficult terrain. That’s the key point I wanted to make: All else being equal, a socially-conservative Republican nominee would have a better chance of winning than a socially liberal one. But all else isn’t equal, of course, and Giuliani brings strengths that could more than make up for this flaw in his candidacy. Large risks can bring large rewards.
Klein doesn’t argue that I’m wrong about the social issues being advantageous to Republicans; he sets the issue to one side and argues that Giuliani is a very strong candidate. He may be right about that.
DaveG, meanwhile, argues that social-issues defections won’t matter electorally:
Republicans aren’t going to lose Texas because a Texan isn’t on the ticket. We’re not going to lose Alabama because a southerner isn’t running. And we’re not going to lose Utah or Louisiana because the GOP nominee is nominally pro-choice while promising to be functionally pro-life. The reason is that the few Bush voters we lose in those states won’t be enough to make a real difference in the electoral vote count due to the GOP margins in those states being so high. The voters that will change the map are those who will vote for Rudy but who wouldn’t vote for Bush. Identity politics alone will ensure that the Rudy-led GOP ticket receives more votes from voters in industrial states than did President Bush. This will be similar to the dynamic we observed in 2000, when Bush won lots of southern and evangelical voters that didn’t vote for Bob Dole. Most voters aren’t political junkies and prefer to vote for the guy they can relate to. The folks that can relate to Rudy at a gut level will be located in states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Illinois, and New Jersey. These states have lots of electoral votes, and most of them were very, very close in 2004. Sure, New Jersey’s always a tease, but can anyone imagine Rudy not winning Pennsylvania, which the president lost by only 2 percent? Or Wisconsin, a 1 percent state for Kerry? Those two states together have 31 electoral votes. If Rudy gains just a few points across the industrial north and midwest, he changes the electoral vote totals dramatically. And he does this, remember, without losing any southern or western states.
Well actually, yes, I can imagine Sen. Clinton beating Mayor Giuliani in Pennsylvania. Republicans shouldn’t worry that Giuliani would lose Utah; they should worry about Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania. They should worry about swing voters, not just base voters. Some swing voters in the states just mentioned were torn between their views on guns and abortion, on the one hand, and their views on health care and trade, on the other. Eliminating the issues that attract them to the Republican party–as the Democrats did when they ran a well-funded pro-lifer against Rick Santorum, for example–could bring them back to the Democratic fold.