Next GOP leader’s task

Next week, Georgia’s Republican Party will elect its first new chairman in six years. And my, how much has changed since then.

When Sue Everhart won the first of her three terms in 2007, the GOP had just re-elected its first governor in 130 years, Sonny Perdue, to a second term of his own. But it had not captured offices such as attorney general. Today, Republicans hold every statewide office.

Yet Republicans’ momentum is not entirely on the upswing. Georgia last year provided Mitt Romney with the second-narrowest margin of any state he won, albeit a still-healthy 7.8 percentage points. The Georgia GOP also remains a predominantly white party at a time when the state’s electorate is steadily diversifying.

Significant electoral losses are not likely next year. Not when Georgia Democrats are struggling to find a credible candidate for either the U.S. Senate race or the gubernatorial race, much less both.

Things will get a bit hairier in 2016, depending on the presidential nominee for the major parties. They’ll get hairier still in 2018, when Nathan Deal presumably will be exiting the governor’s mansion and demographic trends presumably will have continued.

By 2020, when whoever wins next year’s Senate election and whoever wins the 2016 presidential election will be aiming for second terms, all bets are off. Absent any change on the Georgia GOP’s part, this will be a purple state.

The biggest question facing delegates to next weekend’s state GOP convention in Athens, then, is which of the candidates would plot the best course for making the changes necessary to extend state Republicans’ hold on power.

Candidates matter, of course — a lot. But the ability of any state party to shape the candidate-selection process may be at a new low after the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision ushered in the era of super PACs. That era is still new, and the impact of super PACs on elections is not yet fully known.

But this we do know: Thanks to super PACs, candidates’ ability to raise money relies less than ever on their closeness to state-party chieftains.

One way candidates are still limited, though, is in their ability to expand their voting base measurably beyond its present composition and size. Georgia politicians are more apt to be punished for making waves than for treading carefully. See Roy Barnes’ sudden, stark change of the state flag and Saxby Chambliss’ openness to unpopular changes regarding immigration and taxes, to name two examples.

If future GOP candidates in Georgia are to attract more minority voters, they very likely will need grass-roots activists to prepare the way. Not least because grass-roots activists already share important similarities with many minority voters on issues such as religion and school choice (see last year’s charter schools amendment, which fared extremely well in traditionally Democratic areas).

But those voters won’t suddenly turn to the GOP one day simply because Republicans realize they can’t win without them and start paying attention to them. It will take years of serious, permanent efforts to win their trust before the GOP can win their votes.