No fighting the hypothetical: Trump loses and loses fairly solidly, the Senate goes into D majority.
Does the GOP go with Trumpism 2.0? (He could even run again!)
Simple continuation of being the party of no, with no agenda of their own other than kneecapping the Ds?
Or alter course, and in which way?
Related - if they do alter course and Trumpism is no longer there in all its extreme ugliness, do the wings of the D side elevate their intraparty bickering?
Given the OP scenario, my expectation is they clean house of the Trump acolytes and establish a more traditional conservative party that, unfortunately, continues to genuflect to the evangelical base.
“Trump. Trump? Nope, sorry, never heard of him.”
Trump would become persona non grata the same way George W. Bush has. Trump’s failure to get reelected would be seen in the same light as the economy tanking at the end of the Bush administration; some sort of aberration that couldn’t have been foreseen and had nothing to do with the party.
After thoroughly casting off Trump, for the next election they will nominate someone who promises to cut taxes, appoint right-wing judges, increase immigration enforcement, etc.
It’ll whither and die like the Whig party before them. Although not mandated by law, the way the Constitution was cast pretty well guaranteed that when political parties formed, we’d have in effect two of them.
Nothing says one has to be the Republican party.
I’d expect they’d double down on everything, just like in 2008. You’d see some conversations about being more friendly to, say, Hispanics or whatever which will go nowhere.
I seriously doubt this is the path they take; they will only become more aggressive and anti-democratic. Trump is a symptom of the disease, not the disease. Trump was able to articulate and voice what many conservatives had been feeling but felt unable to come out and say. He stripped the party of whatever shame it had left. They’ll pivot away from Trump and find a charismatic ideologue.
Over the past three years the Republicans threw all the never-Trump conventional establishment leaders out of the party. They’re not going to be welcomed back just because Trump loses. The younger elected Republicans are extremist nutcases, who won their primaries by outshouting the mere far right.
Who can these people appeal to? Their base is graying and dying. Younger voters voted Democrat by a 35 point margin in 2018.* The Republicans have done everything they can to alienate people of color, who are the fasting growing demographic and who skew much younger than white voters. Other than racist and sexist policies, the party has no new ideas to offer and so can’t pivot toward them.
In the short run, they’ll cling to local power wherever the demographics are still favorable, hoping that the Dems will screw up in some big way that will alienate a sufficient percentage to give them a path into national power.
I’ve never heard Trump’s drumming, I can’t imagine he’s any good.
Maybe the GOP will recruit Max Weinberg; he’s supposed to be a Republican no?
(I think the word you want is drubbing.)
I don’t see them backing off. They didn’t back off from the Tea Party nonsense or any other extremism in my lifetime. Why would they think that now they went too far?
What happens when Republicans lose elections that they would have won had they not been racist and misogynistic?
Well after losing in 2008, they came back as the Tea Party.
And after losing in 2012, they came back as the Trump party.
And after losing in 2018, they came back as a proto-fascist party.
People need to understand that old republicans who value compromise and flexibility have long since left the party. The republican party that exists today have a different value system. People have to understand that those who continue to identify as republican do so precisely because they feel like they should have more power than they do, and they are determined to keep it even if it means tearing the country to pieces. What matters is that, in the end, they want the power to impose their will on everyone else.
Just losing the white house, house, and senate in 2020 wouldn’t be enough; something major has to happen that reshapes the value system of enough people to the point where we realize that having people who think like republicans in power is dangerous. We’re not there yet, not even close.
The GOP’s existential fear of an electorate where diversity,secularism and social and economic justice are the prevailing sentiments means that its willingness to cheat and manipulate our archaic system won’t end with the demise of Donald Trump.
Interesting notion…I’m going to think on this.
Disenfranchisement and suppression won’t end anytime soon. GOPs know their program is abhorrent to the majority of current and potential voters; their only recourse is to lie, cheat, and steal. Don’t expect improvement.
Trump’s Democratic successor reveals what is a long string of Trump’s hitherto-unrevealed misdeeds (actual and attempted). Republicans having to claim repeatedly they never knew anything about them is transparently bogus, gets old fast and proves especially effective as a Democratic election weapon. At least three consequences can be envisioned as following from this premise:
Republicans nationally follow the example of Republicans in CA, and begin to recede into irrelevance (at least, temporarily);
Republicans urgently encourage a lot of fresh faces (i.e., those with no direct connections to Trump or his administration) to run for office;
Trump tweets that Democrats are savaging what was the greatest administration in history because they never forgave his 2016 victory; and Republicans are now losers because they ran away from him (and Trumpism, in general).
It is possible some wishful thinking may have influenced my analytical and speculative processes.
Yeppers to all of the above.
The Republicans will double down on their current course unless they are forced to change. In the hypothetical scenario in the OP, the only force strong enough to make them change would be losses in both 2022 and 2024. If we wake up on November 8th, 2022 with the house still in Democratic hands, and then on November 5th, 2024 with a Democratic senate, house, and president, the Republicans will start to change. Until then, they will keep doubling down.
Mitt Romney. When he took a stand against Trump during the impeachment process, he basically declared himself the reform candidate of the Republican Party. If Trump loses decisively, the party is going to want to distance itself from Trump and all of his horrible attributes. I can’t see a better candidate for them, at this time at least, than Romney.
Bush Jr. was content to retire to his ranch and fade away from the public spotlight. Trump is unlikely to take that path. The only way Trumpism goes away is via defeat at the ballot box.
But that kind of worked. The GOP steadily picked up a cumulatively large number of seats in Congress, state legislatures (that was said to be what, cumulatively 1000 seats or something), state houses, etc in the following years. In terms of realistic political horizons the 2008 market crash was an aberration in terms of ‘permanently’ turning lots of voters against the GOP.
So it probably depends a good deal actually if the ‘drumming’ (that could be a phrase for a big loss, just never heard it before) is due to say the fallout from coronavirus* as opposed to Trump losing badly when that mainly blows over soon. IOW losing big because an electorate came out to vote highly unhappy with Trump over the whole 4 yrs. despite economy etc going OK. That would surely make some difference in the party’s subsequent reaction.
And just as importantly what the Democrats do (are able to do) in office. As much as many here probably like Obama (maybe not progressive enough, but heart in the right place?) his achievements early on were major fuel for the big GOP gains in elections on many levels from 2010 onward, though with major exception of failing to defeat Obama in 2012. If the Democrats sweep in and enact an agenda like the one spoken about in the primaries, every by Biden, the GOP isn’t going anywhere and doesn’t need to change. It’s a polarized country: major progressive legislation will at least at first give the GOP a lot of scope to generate an electoral backlash, as in 2010-2016 elections. Whereas ‘long term’, ‘demographics are destiny’ etc remind me of people predicting the price of oil in the long term: it’s impossible. Lots of people on the internet think they can predict such things, but they can’t. In terms of just a few election cycles a big Democratic ‘mandate’ significantly fueled by a one off event like in 2008 will offer the GOP lots of comeback opportunity as in 2010 etc. A ‘drumming’ when things seem to be going OK with GOP in power would be much more likely to generate a significant change in the party.
Sure, the place of primacy in the party Trump personally achieved during his term (which he didn’t really have in Jan 2017, ironically) would be severely challenged if he loses by a significant margin, for any reason. However whether it causes the GOP to fundamentally change I think does depend on the reason he loses.
*there are no exact parallels and voters might more specifically, and rationally, view that as due to Trump admin mishandling. The world financial crisis of '08 had lots of roots worldwide and the ones in US didn’t particularly date to Bush’s admin. But let’s assume it’s mainly fear/unhappiness about corona, not so much specifically that objective Trump mishandling is the main factor, ‘don’t fight my hypothetical’.
That’ll only be an issue for a limited period, unless the New York Department of Corrections liberalizes its policy on cell phone possession.