Thomas Edsall has written a slightly odd account of the state of the Republican party for The Huffington Post.

With Republican party leaders so constrained by ideological blinders that none of their positions is likely to produce gains among non-white minorities, especially Hispanics, the GOP is finding it has no real alternative but to revert to a “white voter” strategy.

If Republicans moved to the center, would this yield significant gains among African Americans? Given President Obama’s extraordinary popularity among black voters, this seems unlikely. As for Latino voters, one suspects that their concentration in the hardest-hit states and metropolitan areas will produce complicated, cross-cutting effects: some will continue to blame the Bush administration for their economic woes (if you lost your home in 2008, the memory would likely stay with you for a while) and others might give Republicans the benefit of the doubt in 2010, notwithstanding fine-grained, hard-to-perceive shifts in ideology.

To some extent, it’s working. The party’s opposition to President Obama’s agenda — particularly his cap-and-trade energy proposal and health care reform plan — is resonating strongly with disaffected white Democratic voters. Republican grievances about Obama, combined with race-baiting commentary from the far-right ideologues who have become some of the most dominant voices of the modern GOP, have led to a precipitous drop in the president’s approval ratings among whites.

Edsall is overestimating the impact of “far-right ideologues.” An alternative hypothesis: the president’s approval rating is declining among whites because many of them feel like Chris Ann Cleland, a Virginia voter recently profiled in The Washington Post by reporter Sandhya Somashekhar.

“He’s just not as advertised,” she said. “Nothing’s changed for the common guy. I feel like I’ve been punked.”

This might be an unfair characterization of the Obama administration’s policies, yet one could argue that the Bush administration was also blamed for circumstances beyond its control. Note that Chris Ann Cleland doesn’t seem to have been manipulated by race-baiting. Edsall continues:

It’s all very reminiscent of the party’s notorious Southern Strategy, which carried the GOP for decades. But that strategy backfired spectacularly in the 2006 and 2008 elections, and there’s no reason to think it will work any better in 2010 — especially given the ever-growing importance of the minority electorate.

Leave aside for the moment historical debates concerning the the real source of the Southern Strategy’s effectiveness — does it make sense to say that an overreliance on white voters backfired in 2006 or 2008? Or could it be that the Iraq War was profoundly unpopular and that the party presiding over an economic meltdown is likely to suffer an electoral drubbing? It does seem that harsh anti-immigration rhetoric damaged some Republicans in the Southwest. But Edsall is overstating the case. In fairness, I love overstating the case. It’s fun!

Moving along, Edsall offers a persuasive explanation of why Obama’s support among whites has eroded.

The appeal of the anti-Obama agenda has proven to be particularly strong among whites of low and moderate incomes. The Pew Center, tracking evaluations of Obama’s job performance, found in a July 30 report that there “has been essentially no shift in opinion among affluent whites [but] among whites with annual family incomes of less than $75,000, Obama’s approval ratings have declined substantially (from 57% in June to 47% today). Assessments of Obama’s performance remain high among African Americans (85%).”
The appeal of the anti-Obama agenda has proven to be particularly strong among whites of low and moderate incomes. The Pew Center, tracking evaluations of Obama’s job performance, found in a July 30 report that there “has been essentially no shift in opinion among affluent whites [but] among whites with annual family incomes of less than $75,000, Obama’s approval ratings have declined substantially (from 57% in June to 47% today). Assessments of Obama’s performance remain high among African Americans (85%).”

That is, Republicans identified an issue where they are in tune with less-affluent voters, and those voters have responded in kind. The real mystery is why Republicans haven’t done as well with less-affluent non-whites. One possibility is that African American and Latino voters might be more heavily concentrated in dense transit-dependent metropolitan areas, and so they are less sensitive to energy costs. Another possibility is that cultural affinity for an African American president outweighs anxiety over a higher cost of living, or rather it inclinces non-white voters to interpret Obama’s policies in a more favorable light.

Support for Obama has declined most sharply among white men. Keep in mind that this is a group that has long been favorably inclined towards Republicans; that they would “come home” to the GOP isn’t entirely unexpected.

Edsall ends on a more convincing note.

For the Republican Party, these trends not only illustrate the danger of attempting to win without improving margins among minority voters, but also the danger that a modest collection of Congressional wins next year – say 10-15 House seats –will only reinforce the dominant forces in the House and Senate wings of the GOP that adamantly support a conservative agenda that precludes concessions to minority groups. That, in turn, would increase the likelihood that the Democratic Party will be able to maintain majority status in 2012 and beyond.

This is true, and yet it begs the question: have Republicans made this less likely over the last several months? Democrats have effectively leveraged Obama’s personal appeal among minority voters. It doesn’t follow that Republicans have failed. Moreover, the opposition to Sonia Sotomayor will likely be forgotten in 2012 or 2016 if Republicans manage to craft a more effective economic message, one that, like the case against cap-and-trade, emphasizes the cost-of-living and other core economic concerns.