Reports of the Death of Conservative Consensus Are Greatly Exaggerated

[Valin]

Contentions: Seth Mandel

2/16/12

 

One of the more interesting questions to come out of the visibly pronounced chasm between the Republican Party’s moderate/establishment and more conservative/Tea Party wings is what happens if the Republican candidate for president loses to President Obama in November? I waded into the discussion a bit a couple months ago, when there seemed to be a distinct possibility that Newt Gingrich would solidify his place as the “not Romney” of the election and make it a two-man race between himself and the former Massachusetts governor.

 

Today, Ben Domenech proposes an updated version of the question over at Ricochet. If conservatives would be blamed for a Gingrich or Rick Santorum loss (social conservatives especially, in the case of the latter) and moderates for a theoretical Romney loss, Domenech asks, with which candidate would conservatives rather lose? I don’t have an answer to this particular question, but rather an observation about it: This is almost entirely a function of the specific candidates competing for the nomination this year, and not particularly representative of each wing more generally.

 

What I mean is that, particularly in the case of Romney versus Gingrich, the Republican Party’s “representatives” of each side of the conservative divide are uniquely unpalatable to the other. Romney is well liked by the establishment and by moderates, but he is vehemently disliked by the base. The reverse is true for Gingrich, who has won a serious following among the conservative movement’s grassroots (even seemingly winning over skeptical Tea Partiers), but has earned an unusual amount of fear and loathing from elected Republicans.

 

(Snip)