Iowa provides a perfect microcosm of the ideological split that this presidential contest is exposing within Republican ranks, as well as the difficulties that it poses for the GOP in next year's general election. In a field largely united on key issues such as the Iraq War, taxes and health care, the battle now focuses on those divisive socio-cultural questions that engender emotional debate and so often elude compromise and reason. The Ames Straw Poll, a crucial stop on the way to victory in the Iowa caucuses, demonstrated both the scope and dangers for Republican prospects inherent in this ideological litmus testing.
Ex-governor Mitt Romney (MA) won the Aug. 11 poll with 31.6 percent of the vote, grossly outspending his two main opponents-second-tier candidates Governor Mike Huckabee (AR) and Senator Sam Brownback (KS). Significantly, though, Romney's margin was far from overwhelming, as he beat Huckabee by only 13.5 percent of votes cast (Des Moines Register, 8/12/07). Additionally, the combination of Huckabee and Brownback actually outpolled Romney by around two percentage points.
For Romney, these results should be disconcerting, even though at face value they confirm his status as Republican front-runner in Iowa. Romney spent lavishly on winning at the straw poll, in which socially conservative (read: pro-life) voters predominate. He went all-out, against competition with limited means, to convince skeptical abortion foes that he was in complete agreement with their outright rejection of all abortion rights, regardless of his often pro-choice history. Was Romney's tack to the right the reason he did not dominate at Ames? Far from it. Brownback and Huckabee won their votes from people who did not think Romney was anti-abortion enough. Enough participants in the straw poll accepted Brownback's logic that "we win when we stand on principles and don't abandon them" (Des Moines Register, 8/12/07) to deny the flip-flopping Romney even a third of the votes at the straw poll.
This demand for ideological purity on the part of pro-lifers does not bode well for moderate Republican candidates in the Iowa caucuses. Ex-mayor Giuliani's (NY) openly pro-choice positions make his prospects among conservative Iowa caucus-goers dim to say the least, and it appears likely that Romney will interpret the Ames results as a message to continue to pander to pro-life voters to thwart attacks on his right flank. Given Iowa's importance in a front-loaded primary calendar (remember Howard Dean, anybody?), the odds that uncompromising, out-of-the mainstream positioning on abortion and other social issues might be the ticket to the Republican nomination are alarmingly good.
That would be a lose-lose situation for the Republicans in the general election. If Romney, former Senator Fred Thompson, Huckabee or Brownback win the nomination, they will have done so in large part by catering to the views of the most hard-line opponents of abortion on the Christian right. Leaving aside the merits of their argument that a unicellular zygote has rights equivalent to those of an adult woman (not to mention an individual with a disease like Parkinson's), the fact remains that this position is highly unpopular with the American mainstream.
A candidate who has accepted the uncompromising anti-abortion rationale of the hard right puts himself at odds with the 57 percent of citizens who believe that abortion ought to be legal in most or all cases (ABC News/Washington Post Poll, 6/18-21/07). He also spits in the face of the majority of Americans who think that the government should fund stem-cell research. As moderate and independent voters delivered a sharp rebuke to GOP extremism in 2006 by voting Democratic by margins of 60-38 percent and 57-39 percent (2006 CNN Exit Polls), the chances of such a Republican candidate winning them back appear to be slim indeed.
Yet the damage that the abortion issue will wreak on the Republicans' chances in 2008 will not be limited to a situation wherein the GOP nominates a social conservative. Should the Republicans nominate a moderate such as the pro-choice Giuliani, the damage may be equally severe. To committed, often religiously motivated abortion foes, supporting a pro-choice candidate is unthinkable, akin to supporting the legalization of murder. Thus, the nomination of Giuliani would cause a sizeable chunk of the Republican base to sit 2008 out-at best. At worst, a pro-life, moral values opponent would emerge to the right of Rudy, splitting the already diminished Republican vote. The resulting Democratic landslide could be of biblical proportions.
Some GOP strategists already see 2008 as a possible looming catastrophe. The news has not gotten any better since the public rode the Republican Revolution out of Washington on a rail last November, and Bush has fallen beyond redemption with many Americans for his blunders in Iraq. In so doing, he has taken his mostly still servile party with him. The GOP is in a situation akin to that of the Democrats in 1968 and 1972-mistrusted, maligned and in need of pragmatism, not fractious ideological warfare and extremism. In those years, the Democrats tolerated the quixotic Eugene McCarthy and nominated the woeful George McGovern. The Republicans, meanwhile, showed discipline and purpose, and they dominated American politics for years.
If today's GOP presidential hopefuls kowtow to its out-of-touch base on abortion rather than focus on addressing our nation's many critical concerns, they will swiftly find that Middle America has just as little use for a party tethered to moralistic zealots as it did for one that bent to the will of pacifist hippies.