If the Republicans are all but dead, are the Dems also in trouble?
Kevin Drum does a nice job on the state of our two main political parties, including the possibility that the Republican party’s near-death experience and/or possible death. Thing is, he reminds us, none of this means the American voter is about to switch to all-Dem all the time. So are the Republicans “doomed”?
That makes sense to me. And yet….there’s something about it that doesn’t quite add up. Republicans control the House, and no one seems to think that’s going to change in the near future. (And no, it’s not just because of gerrymandering.) On the other side of Capitol Hill, Democrats seem genuinely concerned about holding onto the Senate next year. As for the White House, Republicans have only lost two presidential elections in a row, both times in years where the fundamentals favored Democrats. And they continue to hold outsize majorities in state legislatures and governor’s mansions.
This doesn’t seem like the markers of a party so far outside the mainstream that they’re doomed to extinction. Frankly, they seem to be holding on fairly well.
I agree that the Republican Party has some long-term demographic problems that are pretty serious. Nevertheless, it’s not clear to me that the American public is ready to throw them overboard. Or, perhaps more accurately, the American public has so far shown little inclination to throw them overboard when their only alternative is the Democratic Party.
This stuff deserves a little deeper look than we’ve been giving it. The GOP has been steadily moving right for more than 30 years now, and even though it always seems like one more step should make them electorally toxic once and for all, it never does. This time we’re convinced once again that they’ve finally taken that final, fatal step, but have they? I feel like there’s more to this story. …Kevin Drum, MoJo
Darn tootin’ there’s more to this story. In particular, we could use an autopsy of the Democratic party which, in its own way, has lost energy and direction. And we could use more probes into why Americans seem to want Colosseum-style fights to the death and whether this means we’re nearing the end of the American empire. Or whether more civil, humane and small-d democratic politics wouldn’t be a nice change. Drum is looking in the right direction.
Cross-posted from Prairie Weather.
siamese twins Democratic Republican graphic via shutterstock.com