If so, then in principle, John Kasich has some hope. The hope comes from the possibility that those voters who didn't vote for him last year might someday vote for someone more like him than the guy who was called a "fucking moron" by his own Secretary of State. So, signals...
Signals come from somewhere. Politicians and media figures, mostly, and there's that tangled relationship. The Republican Party has a complex relationship with "the media." Latin time! The "-ia" suffix is a pluralization of "-ium." So, media: plural. The media are... Yup, that stick is rammed way up there! This is a substantive point. Republicans have been bashing "the media" for a long time, but Fox News is part of "the media," as is the Washington Times (not to be confused with the Post). Fox will never let you forget that their ratings are higher than CNN or MSNBC. Very Trump-y of them, right? (I wonder if that's a coincidence...)
The point is that the media landscape consists of many different outlets with a variety of viewpoints. Some strive for a watchdog role that doesn't pick a side consistently, but others are clearly partisan or ideological. Of course, that's not the same thing. Breitbart is ideological, but not partisan. They will pursue an ideological agenda, but are happy to bash the GOP. Fox will contradict themselves on policy, but will pretty much take the GOP's side no matter what. They are more partisan than ideological, which makes sense given the historical role played by Roger Ailes.
Both amid, and more importantly, prior to the rise of these outlets, though, the GOP spent years telling its core voters to distrust "the media." In 1996, as Fox was just getting started, the National Election Studies survey asked respondents how often they trusted the media, from "just about always," to "most of the time," to, "only some of the time," to, "almost never," to, "never." Pretty much nobody responded with the last answer (those who would give that last answer won't participate in a survey, as they cower in their tin foil hats!), and few respondents say always, but middle answers varied a lot by party ID. In 1996, 3.8% of "strong Democrats" (the most "Democratic" on a 7-point scale) said "almost never," whereas 20.1% of "strong Republicans" gave that answer.
Fox News started because there was demand in the market for a Republican news source. Republicans had been told that they shouldn't trust any other news source, and they are still told that today. I keep harping on the Trump University story because it is an obvious demonstration of Trump being a two-bit con man, but... you have to know about the story to understand what's going on. It isn't a story that Fox will cover, and if strong Republicans-- the base who keeps nominating the fuckwits-- have been told to distrust and hence ignore any media source that isn't pre-approved, well...
Well... Fox isn't covering much about Russia either.
Nevertheless, this is the easy and tempting answer. Not many people watch Fox. It is easy to exaggerate their importance because those of us who do pay attention to politics are too aware of their presence, but the actual audience, if you look at Nielsen ratings, is probably too small to explain that much about broad trends in politics. The core distrust of the media, though, is important for considering how Republican voters treat signals about Republican candidates, and the media aren't the only sources of signals.
In 2008, John McCain selected... Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate. She was clearly unprepared, unqualified, and to borrow Rex Tillerson's phrase, "a fucking moron." It wasn't just Fox News that covered for her, though. It was the entire GOP. The reason: Thomas Eagleton.
In 1972, George McGovern initially selected Thomas Eagleton as his running mate, and then withdrew Eagleton after revelations about his depression. It was a big scandal at the time. The GOP was not going to let Sarah Palin's stupidity and lack of qualification turn her into Thomas Eagleton. So, instead of anyone in the GOP acknowledging the fact that putting her a heartbeat away from the nuclear codes would be fucking terrifying, the party sent signals about what constitutes being qualified for president, and what doesn't. The signal: vote for the unqualified, demagogic dipshit.
And that brings me back to Zaller. Zaller's RAS model is about the sequential reception and acceptance of signals. As more and more signals in one direction are accepted, it becomes more difficult to counteract them because any signal in the opposite direction is resisted that much more strongly. Add to that the modern media environment, which wasn't even a consideration in Zaller's model, and John Kasich has a problem. Republican primary voters have been told, repeatedly, by media figures and their own party leaders, that qualifications and intellect don't matter, and that the biased "lamestream media" (remember that gem from Sarah Palin?) aren't to be trusted. Those signals have been received and accepted, making it not just harder for signals in the opposite direction to be accepted, but for voters to turn to outlets that would send those signals!
What would it take to counteract them? Repeated, unified signals. Zaller. The problems? Twofold. First, the people who have already received and accepted those signals have also been told not to trust any media source that would present them with any opposing signal. Kasich is fucked unless Fox News, Breitbart, and the now-highly-fragmented media environment all get on board. That's a collective action problem! This would have been much easier long ago, when Fox News really was the elephant in the room, so to speak, but the more fragmented the media environment gets, the more challenging the coordination problem becomes because the more likely it is that a viewer can just turn away from Fox if it looks like they've been turned into a bunch of cuckservatives.
The second problem is coordination among the politicians themselves. In order for Kasich to get his way via the RAS model here, Republican primary voters need to receive a uniform signal that they should stop voting for the dipshits, and that uniformity must come from the Republican leaders. You can immediately see the problem. Any one leader has an incentive to call the other Republican leaders cuckservatives for any such attempt. As Ted Cruz and his ilk do. The problem is that this isn't just a one-way thing.
And that's the twist on Zaller here. The RAS model isn't really a model of voting behavior. I've been referencing it in the last couple of posts, and everybody should read Zaller's book, but it is really a book about survey responses to questions about policy, not voting behavior. I'm writing about voting. The relationship between voters and their party leaders is a more dynamic one. That act of voting changes the power relationship and creates the incentive towards mutual reinforcement and the unhealthy spiral we have been observing for years.
This should sound kind of bleak, because it is. John Kasich wants intelligent governance. I don't think he's going to get it any time soon. The Secretary of State called the President a "fucking moron." Four years ago, Bobby Jindal said that Republicans had to "stop being the stupid party." Sound familiar?
I don't know what it will take to "fix" the Republican Party. I wrote a long series over the summer about the problems created in our political system right now because we don't have anybody taking up the banner of classical conservatism, and there is clearly recognition within the GOP that things have gone very wrong. Solving those problems, though, requires a tremendous effort of collective action, and the party clearly isn't there yet. Sorry, Gov. Kasich.
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