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“The GOP is changing, and nobody knows what it will look like when the dust settles,” journalist Dante Chinni writes in a new NBC News article analyzing the future of the Republican Party.
In Chinni’s Oct. 22 article, he compares and contrasts the communities of Delaware, Ohio, and Wilkes County, North Carolina.
The article includes insights from three members of the Ohio Wesleyan University community: senior Christopher Dobeck, secretary of the Ohio Wesleyan College Republicans; politics and government professor James Franklin; and 1999 OWU alumnus Jai Chabria, a former aide to Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
Chabria, a politics and government major at Ohio Wesleyan, says it’s too soon to know how the Republican Party will evolve over the next decade.
“I don’t think I can sit here and tell you what it is going to look like in 10 years,” he tells Chinni, “but it’s going to look radically different that it did before.”
Franklin, a member of Ohio Wesleyan’s faculty since 2000, says Delaware’s strong economy impacts what local residents want and need from party politics.
“People here generally support levies for schools, public parks, libraries," Franklin tells Chinni. "People are willing to use their tax dollars to support these things, and that speaks to a more moderate Main Street Republicanism."
Dobeck, an OWU history major and education minor, says generational experiences also are relevant to the GOP’s evolution.
“There are plenty of young Republicans in the world,” Dobeck says, “and their views are different from their parents and their grandparents.”
Read Chinni’s complete article “Two Counties Defining the Battle Lines of the GOP’s Civil War.”