Sabato’s Crystal Ball – THE GOP: POISED FOR ANOTHER QUICK COMEBACK?

Rhodes Cook on THE GOP: POISED FOR ANOTHER QUICK COMEBACK?

The current state of the Republican Party is a good-news, bad-news situation. The good news is that the GOP has gone through several debilitating elections over the last generation and each time has recovered quickly.

The bad news is that the conditions may not be as ripe this time for a fast Republican comeback as they were after the elections of 1964, 1976 and 1992.

The presidential election of 2008 is the fourth since 1964 that has left the Democrats in control of both the White House and Congress. And in the past, Republicans benefited from a confluence of favorable factors to rebound with alacrity.

They had pragmatic leadership that muted ideological differences within the party. Democratic presidents had troubles governing, even with strong congressional majorities. And by the time of the midterm election, the sitting presidents had acquired a beleaguered look, with presidential approval ratings that had fallen below 50 percent.

The result in each case was an environment conducive to a quick GOP rebound.

Just four years after Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Republicans won the White House. The Vietnam War, urban race riots and a bout of inflation all served to damage the Democratic “brand.”

Four years after the post-Watergate election of 1976 left the GOP diminished and hunkered down, the GOP again won the presidency. The ill-starred administration of Jimmy Carter invited ridicule, spawning the term “misery index” to define a new scale of economic ineptitude.

And just two years following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, Republicans captured both houses of Congress. Like Johnson and Carter before, the mood between Clinton and the Democratic congressional majority was often fractious…

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