The Rebirth of the Republican Middle

Are conservatives leading the Republican Party off a cliff? That's what a lot of people concluded after conservatives forced the official Republican candidate out of a congressional race in upstate New York for being too liberal. That candidate, Dede Scozzafava, promptly endorsed the Democrat running for the seat — who then won an area that had been sending Republicans to Congress since 1872. Even some Republicans are complaining that a party purged of moderates would be unable to win elections outside the South. The party would be left with a hard-core conservative base, and nothing else.

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But this narrative doesn't hold up even in that New York congressional district, let alone in the rest of the country. Scozzafava was not a moderate Republican. Her support for same-sex marriage and her stance on unions put her to the left of many Democrats in Congress. Several moderate Republicans, such as former governor George Pataki, endorsed the Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman. Anyway, Hoffman lost so narrowly as to suggest that a conservative could have won under slightly different circumstances. (See pictures of Republican memorabilia.)

Republicans would pay a huge price if they tried to run Doug Hoffmans in every race in the country. But they aren't doing that. They're running a slew of moderate candidates for the Senate next year. Michael Castle in Delaware, Rob Simmons in Connecticut and Mark Kirk in Illinois have provoked some grumbling from Republicans to their right but so far face no credible primary competition. In Florida, Charlie Crist does have a primary challenger in Marco Rubio. But since polls show that either one of them could win the general election, that challenge does not threaten the party's viability.

More important, a few Republican candidates have demonstrated that it is possible to transcend the party's conservative-moderate divide. In Virginia, Robert McDonnell won a landslide — the first Republican win in a governor's race there in 12 years — by running as a problem solver. Social conservatives know he is one of them. But independent voters strongly backed him too. Voters as a whole trusted him more than his Democratic opponent on everything from fixing the roads to strengthening the economy. Once he had that trust, Democrats were unable to get voters to see him as frighteningly conservative, although they tried to make hay out of a hard-right master's thesis McDonnell wrote in 1989. (See pictures from 60 years of election-night drama.)

In New Jersey, Republican Chris Christie — who beat a primary candidate running to his right — also won independent voters by big margins. The state has not given a majority of its votes to a Republican candidate for governor in 24 years. Christie didn't break 50% either, in part because of a third-party candidate but also because he ran a vague campaign that left voters unconvinced that he offered real solutions to the state's serious economic and budgetary woes. He won anyway because voters thought the Democratic incumbent, Jon Corzine, had already failed to deal with those problems.

What these races suggest is that Republicans' principal problem in recent elections has not been that they are too far right, or — as a lot of conservatives like to think — not far right enough. After all, voters turned on both moderate and conservative Republicans in the late Bush years. The problem has instead been that voters have not thought Republicans of any stripe had answers to their most pressing concerns. Addressing those concerns, rather than repositioning itself along the ideological spectrum, is the party's main challenge. (See 10 elections that changed America.)

Most of the Republican presidential contenders — yes, I'm afraid the 2012 race is starting up already — are not running hard to the right, at least so far. Mitt Romney has refrained from throwing himself behind the momentary passions of the party's base, for example, by staying out of the conservative-moderate fight in New York. Tim Pawlenty felt obliged to endorse Hoffman, but he has successfully governed a Midwestern state that has a strong liberal tradition. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, has been playing to the base and has the low poll numbers with moderates to prove it. But she was not a particularly doctrinaire governor and could yet broaden her appeal by returning to her reformist past. None of these candidates, interestingly, hail from the South.

This year's health care debate has helped the GOP, both by making independent voters anxious about the Democrats' ambitions and by forcing Republican candidates to pay more attention to the issue. The Republican comeback could yet fizzle out. But it is happening, and die-hard conservatives aren't the only ones taking part in it.

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Read "Republican Wins Show Dems They Are on Their Own."