GOP base may be an anchor too

I Republican Gov. Mike Pence has long been a big fish in conservative circles. And this week he looked every bit the part, raging and writhing like a shark caught in a net after the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that he signed to cheers from social conservatives provoked a furious backlash, not only from gay rights and liberal groups but also from pillars of Indiana’s business community.

Pence’s agonies underscore the challenge the GOP faces reconciling the demands of its culturally conservative base with the realities of an America growing more diverse, secular and tolerant. That widening gap may be the biggest obstacle to GOP hopes of recapturing the White House.

Republicans have many reasons for optimism about next year’s election. Since 1948, only once has one party held the White House for three consecutive terms. In Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democrats have a presumptive nominee who is talented, tenacious and has a chance to make history, but is also older and prone to ethics controversy.

Voters once disillusioned by George W. Bush’s iron fist abroad are showing enough doubts about President Obama’s velvet glove that “Republicans have developed a lead on the national security issue,” says GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson. On the economy, stagnant wages could blunt the benefit Democrats might expect from resurgent job growth. Any of these dynamics might look different by next year. But today all offer Republicans hope.

Yet with the new law, Pence detonated what could be the biggest landmine facing his party in 2016: the sense that the GOP wants to reverse the cultural and demographic changes remaking America. Multiple cultural issues — same-sex marriage, requiring businesses to serve gay customers, gay rights in the workplace, mandating that employers include contraception in health insurance, legalizing immigrants here illegally, and maintaining legal abortion — all sharply divide the parties and align the public along consistent demographic and ideological lines.

Across these issues, Democrats represent the groups and interests most comfortable with change — what I’ve called a Coalition of Transformation revolving around minorities, white-collar whites (especially college-educated and single women) and millennials. Republicans rely heavily on the groups most unsettled by these trends. This GOP Coalition of Restoration centers on older, blue-collar, religiously devout and non-urban whites.

In polling last year by the Pew Research Center, about threefifths of all Americans agreed that society should accept homosexuality; about the same number said the growing number of immigrants “strengthens American society.” Even most Republicans who are college-educated or younger than 50 endorsed those views. But in each case most Republicans who are either bluecollar or 50-plus expressed a negative view about the change. And those voters are increasingly central to the party’s fortunes.

Pence’s struggles powerfully illustrate the difficulty of satisfying that disaffected base without projecting intolerance about big social changes that most Americans now accept. Even as Pence and his legislative allies moved to revamp the bill to explicitly prohibit businesses from denying service to gays, virtually every major 2016 GOP contender felt compelled to support Indiana’s original law.

That stampede underscored how little flexibility the candidates feel they have to confront the base. Even Jeb Bush, who has otherwise urged “respect” for same-sex couples, fell into line over Indiana. (Bush then fuzzed his position at a Silicon Valley fundraiser Wednesday by indicating qualified support for revising the law.) Apart from Bush, the other leading contenders have opposed providing immigrants here illegally a pathway to citizenship. No leading candidate is likely to back mandating employers to include contraception in health insurance.

Democrats face their own cultural divisions, because more African Americans and Latinos than upscale whites hold conservative positions on some social issues, such as gay marriage. But the groups in the Coalition of Transformation all mostly welcome the modern remixing of America’s identity — and they remain among the electorate’s fastest-growing components. That’s why, as Anderson notes, Democrats “feel they have the wind at their back” on social disputes and are likely to seek new confrontations that illuminate their cultural differences with the GOP.

In that way, Indiana’s imbroglio traces a closing circle. From Richard Nixon through Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Republicans escalated most cultural clashes, confident that such collisions would help them dislodge socially conservative whites from the Democrats. Those voters anchored the GOP dominance of the White House from 1968 through 1992. But as the country has grown more diverse and culturally tolerant, they no longer represent a winning coalition in a presidential race. As Indiana shows, fear of alienating the voters who built their last durable presidential majority is preventing Republicans from taking steps that might help them construct a new one.

Gap widens as U.S. grows more diverse, secular and tolerant.