FiveThirtyEight Says Best Bet for GOP is to Go Libertarian

Zombie Jefferson Sez "I Was a Libertarian Before It Was Cool, Bitches!!"

Paging Michael Steele and fellow right-wing extremists! Spare us the links on Miss California being "biblically correct" because she's against teh gheys marrying, and no more discussion that Jesus wanted you to be abstinent. I'd rather be watching Manos: The Hands of Fate interspersed with ExTenze commercials than discuss those schnoozer issues. Because the pollmeisters at FiveThirtyEight have stated that the best bet for the GOP is turning into pot-smoking, bailout-hating, and gun-toting libertarians. This assertion seems to come from the popularity of the tea parties. From Nate Silver:

If gay bashing is becoming less in vogue among Republicans, it's unclear which other cultural issues -- areas where Republicans sometimes favor bigger, more statist government -- might take its place. Yes, there's always abortion. But I'm surprised there hasn't been more anti-immigrant sentiment, as often happens when jobs are scarce; perhaps the Republicans' poor performance among Latino voters on November 4th might have scared them away from that issue. Marijuana legalization seems to be gaining some traction (although more among pundits than policymakers), but about half the conservative commentariat (see Glenn Beck, for instance, who calls himself a libertarian) seems to embrace it.

Maybe you see a pattern there and maybe you don't. But of the roughly four different pathways the Republicans could take in the post-Obama universe -- toward Ron Paulesque libertarianism, toward Sarah Palinesque cultural populism, toward Mike Huckabeesque big-government conservatism, or toward Olympia Snowesque moderation/ good-governmentism -- the libertarian side would seem to have had the best go of things in the First 100 Days.

Matt Welch snarks that the GOP "miraculously relocated some of its alleged principles at the precise moment it lost power", and seeing how damaging the Bush years were to the GOP's fiscal conservative image, he's pretty much on the spot. But, hey, when your party is less popular than Hugo Chavez by polling data, you can only improve.