Sarah Palin resigned from her governorship of Alaska on July 3, 2009, effective the twenty-sixth of this month. Ever since this bold and perplexing move, there has been a latent buzz regarding the possibility of Palin forming a new party to compete with the Democratic and Republican Parties. Though at this point this is probably unlikely (this is the political equivalent of the Barn Swallow, though would produce less favorable results if tried), I was wondering exactly what the implications and results of such a shift would be.
At worst, it would create another Perot-like figure in the 2012 election; I doubt Obama would absolutely need such to be competitive against whoever is his challenger in 2012 (looking increasingly like Mitt Romney might get his turn, but I won't count out challengers like Pawlenty or even Huckabee), but it would certainly be a welcome spoiler. It's difficult to judge exactly where a party started by Palin would stand politically, but it might just depend on who she'd be challenging as a third party candidate.
Against Romney, she would almost undoubtedly be unable to compete with the "libertarian" type of conservative, those more concerned with fiscal responsibility, "size" of the government, lowering taxation, and reducing the regulations levied on corporate interests. Against someone like Huckabee, she'd be hard pressed to draw the religious right with her, the voters most focused on issues like birth control, abortion, and teaching creationism.
In order to understand exactly what might come to shape in such a scenario, it's important to understand the base of the Republican Party's voting structure. Qualitatively speaking, the voting base is made up of three groups: the corporate-interest crowd, who find their main interests in reducing and restraining taxes on the rich and/or softening regulation on corporations, the "redneck" crowd, who are mainly interested in gun ownership and personal freedom, along with a minor focus on taxation, and the fundamentalist crowd, who are focused like a laser on issues like abortion and institutionalizing religion.
The corporate crowd would find their main inspiration and ushering into the party by Reagan, who preached the gospel of small government and low taxation. These are the types of Republicans that give quietly and behind the scenes, supply lobbying firms with donations, and help to sway the other groups with token appeals to religion and personal freedom. Their main goal is to cause further regression in the tax code, to shift the tax burden to the poor, and protect their monetary interests first and foremost.
The "redneck" crowd and Christian right have a large overlap, but different sides tend to emerge depending on the issue at hand. Of course, the latter comes out when discussing morality or abortion; the Christian Right was spearheaded initially by the Moral Majority in the early eighties by Reverend Jerry Falwell, who instructed his footsoldiers to vote in droves for the more religious-minded (Republican) candidate. Nixon did the most to appeal to the hillbilly types, especially in appealing to the south's "state's rights" voters, many of them made nervous by Humphrey's apparent leaning toward desegregation of schools.
So, which of these groups view Sarah Palin as their best hope for the future? At my estimation, it would be the hillbilly types - the stereotypical gun-clingers living in shacks in rural Montana. They see Palin as a clear representative of their viewpoints; she supported the Tea Party protests of April, she owns and uses guns to hunt, and she originates from a sparsely populated, hyper-conservative state. The tea party types of voters would be the ones she would draw as her base, I would think, to become the new Palin footsoldiers. These tend to be people that are very emotionally charged, and thus fairly easy to manipulate via pathos arguments.
Would this split, then, create some kind of political middleground for the "moderates" of the country to occupy? Would it finally give a comfortable home to politicians like Ron Paul? I don't think so. The polarization caused by using the two-party system for this long means that people rely on an entire set of political beliefs to paint themselves. People are "red" or "blue," or very rarely "purple," though these colors have many different shades. Those conservatives who are for state rights, heavily against gun control, and belonging to the lower or lower-middle class are going to be hard pressed to let go of all of the rhetoric that's been drilled into their heads in the last three decades. It's hard to separate, as a conservative or a liberal, the fiscal issues from the social issues. I find it difficult to believe that the base of voters that Palin would sway to her new party would believe (at least in a majority sense) that social freedoms like abortion and gay marriage should be completely and undeniably legal. So, if not a libertarian party, what would the Party of Palin shape up to be?
A rebranding and different flavor of the Republican Party. Again, as aforementioned, a different side would show depending on who Palin is competing with for the conservative spotlight. A Romney would cause them to tug their Bibles out of their back pockets; a Huckabee presidential run would have them unholstering their oversized semiautomatic pistols. The one good thing that could come out of all this, however, is the reorganization of how the parties work. A great deal of the base of the Republicans (
71% to be precise) would vote for Sarah Palin in a national election - thus, she'd draw a good deal of Republicans with her in such a move, though probably something more like 30-40% of their base. An unintended side effect would possibly be that many of the blue dog democrats, who Palin has flirted with suppporting at times, would shift their allegiances as well. This would leave us with an actual Liberal Party in the United States - certainly a welcome move in my point of view.
