Help! Walker’s losing Ron Brownstein!

The pensants are restive: Ron Brownstein says [on KCRW’s To the Point, at 20:40] that Scott Walker’s pursuing a “losing strategy” by a) talking about reducing legal immigration and b) supporting a constitutional amendment to overturn Obergefell. According to Brownstein, Walker was the man who could have bridged the GOP’s blue collar populist and social conservative half and its moderate, upper income wing. But now he’s alienated the latter. …

Seems like a highly suspect bit of punditry to me! Has Walker really burned his bridges with white collar, upscale GOPs with these two moves? Those Republicans probably don’t want to reduce legal immigration and aren’t bothered by same-sex marriage. But, unless they’re DC strategists or corporate CEOs, is it really important to them that immigration levels not ever be reduced? If the quota goes from 1 million a year to, say, 800,000 — that’s a killer for white collar GOPs? Might they likewise be willing to tolerate a candidate who formally supports a transparently doomed effort to amend the Constitution — the way GOP moderates in the 1980s tolerated Ronald Reagan’s various amendments about abortion and school prayer (and his opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment). …

This seems like a big flaw in the accepted “don’t-please-the-Tea-Party” analytic framework: Intensity matters, and it may be entirely possible to mobilize one wing of the party on issues they care a lot about (e.g. immigration) without sacrificing broader appeal — as long as those aren’t issues the other wings of the party care that much about. …

Thesis: Brownstein instinctively resists the idea that an immigration control position could ever be smart politically. His Next America empire is at stake! …

Further study: Does the same “intensity counts” logic apply, in mirror-image fashion, to Democrats? Maybe not.  To pick one issue, “higher taxes” may please the party’s left wing, but it’s hard to argue this isn’t something the party’s moderates care about. …