Below The Beltway

Today’s Washington Post reports that Virginia’s Republicans are looking up from the aftermath of Tuesday’s elections and beginning to assess the damage:

RICHMOND — The beating suffered by Virginia Republicans at the hands of Democrats on Tuesday has prompted a widespread debate within the state GOP over whether it needs new leaders to rejuvenate the party and salvage its electoral fortunes.

The Republicans not only lost the state Senate to the Democrats but also gave up House seats and several county government offices. Conceding they have been outmaneuvered by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and the Democrats, GOP elected officials and activists say the party must recast its message and find strong leaders to deliver it, especially in fast-growing and diverse Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads.

The internal debate, which prompted a round of phone calls among GOP activists after the election, occurs at a critical time in Virginia politics. Both parties are starting to gear up for a U.S. Senate and presidential race next year and a governor’s contest in 2009, the outcomes of which could cement the Democrats’ advantage in the state if the GOP does not respond.

“A lot of activists say we need new blood. We need someone else to carry the message,” said Del. Christopher B. Saxman (R-Staunton), who some analysts say is a possible future statewide candidate.

GOP activists and party leaders are growing increasingly worried about their stunning decline. Just 6 1/2 years ago, Republicans held the governor’s mansion, both U.S. Senate seats and the state House and Senate. The attorney general and lieutenant governor were also Republicans.

Now, things have taken a stunning reversal and, if present trends continue, Republicans are likely to be back where they were before the days of George Allen and Jim Gilmore — a minority party.

The question is what the GOP needs to do to reverse what has quickly turned into a decline — and the answer to that lies in the state’s two fastest growing regions; Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. Unless Virginia Republicans can find a way to stay competitive (or in some cases become competitive again) in these areas, they aren’t going to win statewide elections.

This doesn’t mean that Republicans need to become more like Democrats in order to win in places like Fairfax and Loudoun (if I were a Republican, I’d forget about Arlington and Alexandria for the time being — they’ll start voting Republican around the same time Massachusetts and San Francisco do), but it does mean they need to start convincing voters there that they have real solutions to the problems that voters in these areas care about — education, transportation, taxes.

The problem has been that Republicans in Richmond have behaved more like a Lite Beer version of the Democratic Party over the past several years. Rather than offering real alternative ideas, they’re just watering down traditionally Democratic “solutions” and passing them off as their own. Is it really any surprise that voters aren’t impressed ?

And one other word, about illegal immigration. Notwithstanding the fact that Corey Stewart and the Prince William BOCS members who supported the County’s illegal immigration ordinance were re-elected, there simply isn’t any evidence that illegal immigration is going to become the kind of issue that Virginia Republicans can use to rebuild the party. It may get votes in the short term, but in the long term, it’s going to lose potential future voters as well as the voters who have consistently said that issues like transportation and eduction are more important to them:

In this year’s state legislative races, many GOP candidates in Northern Virginia focused on curbing illegal immigration. The strategy helped Stewart, who said the party needs “someone with guts, willing to challenge the status quo and shake things up.”

Other Republicans have been critical of Stewart’s approach, saying his tone about illegal immigration threatens to push the increasingly diverse suburbs even further out of reach for statewide GOP candidates.

“Prince William is about to turn majority-minority, so what do we do? We go out and play to the fears of the white voters who are about to become the minority,” said a longtime Northern Virginia Republican activist who spoke on condition of anonymity because he must work with Stewart. “They are dooming the party for the future.”

That last paragraph makes clear what I think the illegal immigration debate is really about. It’s not about illegal immigration, it’s about immigration, and specifically immigrants, whether legal or not, from a specific part of the world.

Wholesale opposition to immigration, and some of the open hostility to immigrants that I’ve seen from some of the people supporting the Prince William BOCS’s initiatives, is not something on which a winning political coalition can be built — just ask the Know Nothing Party.