The Ecumenical Reform Coalition Strikes Back

With Romney’s odds of winning the nomination now highly improbable, and the press directly asking Huckabee if he wants to be Vice President, the McCain-Huckabee alliance many of us have longed feared is now quite visible on the horizon. Even worse though, is the distinct possibility that this ghastly marriage of factions is in fact representative of the party.

Retrospectively, it’s easy to say on paper that if Huckabee were not distorting the election, Romney would be sitting on his delegates. But I don’t think that’s true. Firstly, Romney didn’t place 2nd in the South, due to his wings getting clipped at the margins by Huckabee. In Georgia, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Alabama he was well behind in third place. Secondly, while everyone is rightly declaiming the West Virgina putsch, it’s only further evidence that Huckabee supporters will vote anyone-but-Romney if given the chance. Romney has not succeeded in making himself acceptable to soc-cons and every time he denounces their champion Huckabee, he may be damaging himself further with them.

Huckabee supporters are well aware that McCain is likely to tap their candidate for the VP slot. For the soc-con insurgency, getting Huck in a guaranteed slot to be nominated in the next round is their objective. They’re a patient bunch, and they’ve not surrendered their ambitions to transform the GOP into a Christian Abadgaran. As Ross Douthat reminds us, 2012 is fimly in the mind of his supporters.

Even worse, they may be right. Romney is only winning or placing second in states where economic conservatives and libertarians are predominant within the party (California, Colorado, Alaska, etc.). The feared “ecumenical reform coalition” between Huckabee and McCain, creates a new structural dichotomy where the GOP is divided between the liberal/moderate wing and the social conservative wing. A duality of influence split primarily between Northeast and Southeast. In such a scenario, mainstream economic conservatives and libertarians get ejected from the equation. The persistent failure of Fred and then Romney to make this constituency relevant, creates a strong electoral reinforcement for the concord too. One that gets worse with each state that falls with Romney in third place.

Imagine a Republican party whose speeches are consumed with declamations against the greedy evils of capitalism and the moral bankruptcy of an open society, and you may be contemplating the future of this party, if economic conservatives and libertarians are successfully sidelined. In a concord between McCain and Huckabee’s world views, the principal points of commonality are an instinctive opposition to a deregulated economy, and a general veneration for the omnipotent state as economic and social arbiter.

Are you ready for that? As Mick Stockinger pointed out last night, a large chunk of Republicans are already sitting it out.

UPDATE: Mick at Uncorrelated responds to this post with some interesting remarks. Noting the bizarre-but-true fact that Romney is winning among war supporters and McCain among those concerned with economy, he concludes that the messages and meanings of the campaigns have reached a kind of dissociative irrelevance. He argues voters are instead retreating into the search for a kind of identity recognition in the candidates, that has little to do with what is actually said or done.