The Silent Majority, Paul (The Clown) Burka, Texas Monthly
The silent majority of Republican voters has allowed the most vocal, and the most radical, elements of the Republican party to take control of the primaries. But the problem isn't with the voters--the problem is the candidates themselves.
The problem with Burka's thesis is that the Republican primary voters, as well as a majority of voters in the general elections, aren't choosing to elect what he terms to be "sensible, moderate" Republicans who are, in reality, Democrat-Lite Republicans or the ideological equivalent to what used to be called conservative Democrats back when Texas being a one-party state was viewed as a positive.
For all of the TLSPM hand-wringing over the dearth of moderates in the Texas Republican Party, it's telling that the same level of angst wasn't leveled toward Democrats when they purged their party of the squishy middle after the Republican ascendancy.
What is really happening, and don't let the blathering of Burka fool you, is that Texas is polarizing in advance of the same trend at the national level. Yes, to some extent, the Tea Party gets credit (blame) for this but it's also reflective of a long-term trend toward polarization as each political side listens to the echo-chamber of their chosen media outlets.
Whether you're a fan of MSNBC (on the left) or FoxNews (on the right) there's no doubt that the views presented on both of those outlets (as well as the increasing amount of online news-ish sites that don't even pretend to report it down the middle) don't pretend to lend themselves to anything approaching moderate tones.
Conservatives, for years frustrated by what they feel to be a persuasive media bias to the left, have all but abandoned traditional media outlets for talk radio, conservative blogs and websites as well as newsletters and magazines that report the news they want to hear. Liberals mock Conservatives for this. Then they head out to MSNBC, Mother Jones, Daily Kos and (recently) Vox to have their biases confirmed while throwing fits over corporate media and all of its ills.
Part of the problem is that America has decided to make politics a game of personal pride. Winning, or losing, an election cannot be the failure of the candidate, or the electorate just selecting the other person, it's now a personal shot against one's moral code. For journalists like Burka, Dewhurst losing isn't the State rejecting a poor candidate who is not a movement conservative, but a personal blow to his belief of how politics should be done and that just can't stand.
It's the same reason people have reacted with hatred toward Bush the Younger and Barack Obama. It's also the same reason partisans defended them with such vigor even when it was pretty clear they were wrong. Bushitler and Barack Hussein Obama sprout from the same place in the human soul.
All of this does make for pretty poor politics, but also for pretty poor political journalism. It's become the norm rather than the exception from the TLSPM. Public policy-based, investigative reporting has been co-opted by Ego's in Chief whose view of journalism is a graph attached to a story suggesting that a policy they don't like is going to turn Texas into a barren, eco-tragic wasteland governed by the dim and gormless whilst the intelligent set work hard to turn cities into mini-replicas of California.
It's easy to point fingers at a low-turnout primary run-off and say that the so-called "silent majority" is not getting their way. It's going to be harder to make that argument however should Patrick win in the general. Given that Van de Putte is a bad candidate I think this will probably be the case.
Worse still, for Democrats, I believe that Van de Putte is going to go negative which is going to further cast Patrick as a victim in the eyes of Texas voters. At least, the moderate voters. The 30% of progressive voters could care less how bad of a candidate Van de Putte is. All they care about is breaking the Republican stranglehold on state-wide elections. Conversely, however, the around 40% of voters who identify as Republicans aren't going to care much about the personal quirks of King Dan, they just want to preserve the long-run of party domination.*
Even worse for the Democrats is this: The so-called "moderate center" in Texas politics is not the swing vote that many think. Over time the average margin of Republican victory** has remained fairly constant at around 55% (R) and 40% (D). If you exclude 2006 which had two name independents that skewed the results, trend is pretty consistent in major, statewide races. What this means is that the so-called swing vote in Texas is staying remarkably constant, suggesting that 'so-called' swing voters aren't as independent as they like to pretend but instead are fairly reliable voters for one party or another.
All of this runs counter to Burka's claim that the silent majority is being hijacked. If anything, the vocal majority is having more of a say in Texas politics and that say is increasingly trending toward the more conservative candidates that the TLSPM likes to suggest are outside the mainstream.
If you define the mainstream as being exclusive of those who vote, then you get a predictable Paul Burka "the will of the people is being subverted" missive. If, on the other hand, you define the mainstream as the majority of Texas voters, you realize that the only wills being subverted are those of Burka and the rest of the TLSPM.
Go vote today, whatever your party. Make sure that the candidates on the general slate in November are the ones you want and not the ones that Burka thinks should be on there because they give him inside information for stories.
*There is a point to be made about the lack of quality in candidates resulting from single-party domination, but it wasn't made when Democrats were in power and it's not really being made now. There are plenty of elected officials in office now who are only there because they can fog a mirror and happen to have the correct letter behind their name. This is a trend that I don't see improving over time.
**I'm referring to state-wide races only. Clearly in district-specific races the swings are much greater.
