How to Guarantee a Democratic Victory in 2008

I'm not interested in seeing Rudi Giuliani get the Republican nomination. I will work for Fred Thompson instead. But I see statements like this, and I get very, very worried:

I do not believe a pro-choice Republican candidate can win the presidency (Giuliani can win the GOP nomination, but not the general election). This is because, if the Republicans run a pro-choicer, far too many pro-lifers (myself among them) will refuse to vote for him, and either stay home or vote for a third party candidate, thus making it impossible for Giuliani to win the presidency.

Personally, there are no circumstances under which I could vote for a candidate who believes it's okay to slice up unborn babies, or puncture the back of their heads with a fork when they are halfway out of the womb.

A few years back, gun owners self-righteously withheld their votes from George Bush, Senior. I understood their disgust, and I could not develop any enthusiasm for him, either. But the net effect of gun owners refusing to vote for Bush, who was a weak supporter of gun control, was to put in office Bill Clinton--an enthusiastic supporter of gun control.

If Republican voters pick someone like Giuliani, there are going to be two choices in November:

1. A pro-choice Republican.

2. A Democrat. (There's no need to identify that the Democratic candidate will be pro-choice; there's a litmus test for this.)

There is a possibility that Republicans could pressure a pro-choice Republican President to nominate a mixture of pro-life and pro-choice judges to the federal bench. This is not an ideal situation for a pro-life Republican, obviously. But if a Democrat ends up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, any pro-life judge that gets appointed will be an accident.

It is entirely sensible for pro-life Republicans to work very hard to see that a pro-life candidate gets the Republican nomination. I can see why pro-life Republicans might well decide to grudgingly and with great reluctance vote for a pro-choice Republican in the general election. I would not expect them to put money into that candidate's campaign, or make any effort (even at the bumper sticker level) on behalf of that candidate. But if pro-life Republicans in large numbers refuse to pick the lesser of two evils in a general election, they are guaranteeing that the greater of two evils will be President of the United States.

UPDATE: One of my readers points out that if pro-life voters sit out the 2008 election, and a Democrat gets elected, Republicans will have no choice to but to bend to pro-life demands the next time around:

A more dynamic analysis would note that how you vote in one election influences the choices you get in the next election. If, for instance, pro-gunners demonstrate to Republicans our willingness to vote for an anti-gun Republican candidate, the rational response by Republican candidates is to become more anti-gun, because this gains them some marginal votes from anti-gunners, but does not lose them our votes. The Democrats then respond by also becoming more anti-gun. And suddenly we're not debating the Lawful Commerce in Firearms act, but instead renewal of the "Assault weapon" ban.

Of course, how this works out in practice is dependent both on the actual relative numbers in each camp, (If you're a marginal interest group, the rational politician just writes you off instead of trying to win you back.) and whether a temporary setback is likely to lead to a permanent loss. In which case you're trying to lose as slowly as possible, rather than trying to win.

I understand the logic of this. But is letting President Clinton pick the next two or three Supreme Court justices a case of "temporary setback is likely to lead to a permanent loss"? Imagine a Supreme Court that decides that same-sex marriage is Constitutionally mandated, and limiting "hate speech" allows revoking the non-profit status of churches that speak out against homosexuality or abortion. Imagine a Court that rules that freedom of religion does not include the right to refuse to perform same-sex marriages.

There's also the experimental example. After the 1992 elections, when gun owners to a large extent sat out the elections because Bush Senior was mildly anti-gun, what was the name of that strongly pro-gun candidate that Republicans picked in 1996? I'll bet he just cleaned Clinton's clock! (Oh, that didn't happen?)

Ditto for what happened when gun owners sat out the Dan Lundgren for Governor campaign in California? He was strongly anti-gun. And which strongly pro-gun Republicans have followed him at the top of the ticket?

Sometimes, if you sit out an election, those parts of the Party that don't particularly agree with you anyway have a reason to say, "Why are we worrying what they think? When we needed them, they weren't there for us."

UPDATE 2: Adam Graham thinks I'm missing the reason for this, pointing out that gun control is largely a dead issue now. But unfortunately, not because Republicans learned their lesson--but because Democrats lost the 1994 Congressional elections, by their own admission, largely because they got what they wanted on gun control. What concerns me is Adam's view that:

The best possible outcome for our country of a Giuliani nomination is for a conservative third party to emerge that either leads to the GOP going the way of the Whigs or moving the GOP to the right and then disbanding.

There's several problems with this idea:

1. There would need to be enough conservatives to form a third party. There aren't even enough to control the Republican Party with any certainty--or Giuliani wouldn't be a serious Republican candidate for president.

For those of you who think that because evangelical Christians are a majority of the U.S. population that therefore there is a conservative majority--sorry, it doesn't work that way. Much of the evangelical Christian population of the United States isn't terribly conservative. Much of it believes in gay marriage, that homosexuality is an alternative lifestyle, abortion is getting rid of "fetal tissue," and that maybe Islam isn't so different from Christianity. Why? Because they watch television, and this is their major source of information and ideas. (Pastors by and large don't make any effort to correct these points of view.)

2. If the GOP goes the way of the Whigs, the net effect will be to hand over control of the nation to Democrats for perhaps two presidencies, at the end of which there will be either a solid leftist majority on the Supreme Court, or we'll be fighting against Islamists in the streets of America. (The Whigs did elect two presidents, but the Democratic Party was largely in control for most of the period that the Whigs were the "other party.")

3. I like the idea of moving the Republican Party right--but what if the net effect of doing so is to cede the libertarian and liberal wings of the Republican Party to the Democrats?