So how low a point does either party have to reach before they can be ***truly ***considered doomed? The Democrats did lose three consecutive presidential elections in the 1980s (and when Bush Sr. had a 92% approval rating after the Gulf War, it did look like they could lose a fourth) but rebounded strongly. Republicans may have a fading voter base, but do still have built-in advantages with the Electoral College and Senate system (and perhaps gerrymandering.)
Does it take 4 consecutive presidential election losses? Falling below 40% in voter support?
It’s not going to happen. Republicans won 6 straight presidential elections after the Civil War. Democrats survived. Democrats won 5 straight after the Great Depression (admittedly, 4 were the same guy). Republicans survived. The two major parties are too entrenched to be “doomed”.
The last major American political party that was truly doomed was the Whig Party which fell apart during the 1850s due to the issue of slavery. For that to happen to either the Democrats or Republican, there would have to be a similarly divisive issue which would result in the party shattering into several irreconcilable shards. While there are differences within the parties, I don’t think there are presently any that rise to the level of potentially destroying (but that can change quickly).
Further, even if the country moves hard left or hard right one or the other major parties will realign to be the electable opposition. We are not going to have an Era of Good Feelings one party system anymore.
If the country, say, becomes divided between Bernie Sanders on the left and Joe Biden on the right, then Bernie Bros will be the new Dems and Biden will be the new GOP. If we go right, we might have Trey Gowdy as the new GOP and Jeb Bush as the new Dem.
Parties morph and change to adapt to current conditions - losing election after election kills a particular version of a party, but the remnants survive, and adapt and change. After successive losses to FDR you get Eisenhower, not Hoover reborn, etc., etc.
No party is doomed. McGovern gets shellacked, Dems retain the House and Senate, Mondale gets shellacked and the Dems keep the House and the Senate 2 years later after the Reagan coattails fall off.
And that’s not taking into account all the state legislatures and governors.
Another no-more-Democratic Party scenario could start with CNN/AP/ABC/NBC/CBS projecting that DJT lost the November election. Given the power of incumbency, Trump will probably win legitimately, but, that’s far from guaranteed. And, if mainstream media say that Trump lost, there’s an, oh, say, 99 percent chance Donald declares it to have been stolen from him. Then, competing slates of electors will probably arise. And the electoral votes are counted by a session of the House led by – the vice-president.
If Pence declares Trump the victor, and the Secret Service goes along – voila. One party rule.
Do I think we’re that close? Probably not. With a rare event, like democratic collapse, most of the time, predictions will be premature. And Trump Jr. has more of a Vargas/Perón feeling to me than his Dad.
The presidential republic system of government has a bad record for stability. The United States has been an outlier there, but some of that could be due to luck.
The Repub party is already doomed. They can’t win in 2020, as they have spent the last 20 years making everything us or them and it will only get worse in the next years as they get older and deader. They have have made the electorate binary; People wiling to throw all judgement and morality away to swear allegiance to the cult of Trump, or sane people, this is shown unequivocably with McCain and Romney.
The masters are going to be personally financially successful as the blustering opposition, because 30% of the news eyeballs and ears is worth hundreds of billions so the money bags will keep the thunder up.
The name is too valuable to surrender, so it will survive, but the Party itself will continually grab any position that is pragmatic for the time.
The Swing voter is dead, Trump killed him, the sides are chosen and immalleable
The GOP has at least two advantages in 2020 over 2016.
One is the power of incumbency.
Another is fundraising. Hillary outspent Trump 2 - 1 in 2016. This time, the Republican ticket will have at least as much money to spend as the Democratic. Every time you read “Hillary won the popular vote,” remember that she did it when Trump ran on the cheap.
Donald is behind in the polls today, but the negative ads his campaign couldn’t afford last time will have an effect.
Campaign ads for the presidency don’t matter that electorate is decided let them piss more into the Kool-aid for the decided.
Doesn’t anybody fucking get it. The Impeachment was a compete success. Pelosi had Sun-Tzu as an advisor with the whole damn thing. The State of the union might as well have never existed with the “tearing” taking every possible headline and now so much Repub money will have to be spent in kowtowing fealty to him or he will piss on them in the primaries.
He Is not a republican. He is nothing but an ape who wants worship, and will tear his supplicants dreams apart as it fails, and will try to tear the country apart as that part fails.
Bloomberg has said though that he still plans to keep his personal political apparatus/team up and running to campaign on behalf of whoever does get the (D) nomination, though, so that negates whatever financial advantage Trump may have. Bloomberg can pour his billions into the (D) effort, legally.
The two parties will remain. They may evolve to something else. Remember, Republicans and Democrats switched ideological places in the 20th century. Lincoln was a republican but he was nothing like today’s republicans.
I agree that the current two party system has proved highly stable and is likely to remain so. It has already survived two massive shocks:first the Great Depression and the resultant consensus for a much larger government which Republicans resisted for some time but eventually accepted in the 1950s. And then the civil rights movement and the end of Jim Crow which completely transformed partisan alignment in the South but did not end the broader two-party system. The Republicans do face a long-term threat from demographic change but it is a lot slower than many Democrats seem to believe and if they actually start losing consecutive elections by big margins, I think they will adjust.
I mean that’s Trump’s poll numbers have held steady or improved throughout the impeachment process. That’s inconsistent with the claim, in #12, that impeachment was a “complete success.”
Trump’s approval numbers are low because he is an extremely negative campaigner. Median voters don’t like that of him. However, his character assassination is going to bring down his opponent as well, making for a close election in which the incumbent will, as normal, have an edge.
There are many examples of incumbents with miserable approval polling winning in Presidential elections. Tsai Ing-wen was re-elected by a landslide last month, in Taiwan, after years of approval numbers much worst than Trump. This was a different situation from ours because Taiwanese voters are more open to changing their minds. But it does show that low approval, in a modern country, is consistent with re-election.
Ford almost got four more years in the White House, two years after pardoning Nixon. And after the GOP were decimated at the polls in the 1974 mid terms following Watergate.
Came down to a couple of percentage points. Or specifically 20,000 votes across Wisconsin and Ohio.
If your point is “it’s possible Trump will be reelected”, then I don’t disagree. I’m just not sure how that’s relevant or interesting – we all know it’s the case. The impeachment went about as well as anyone could have reasonably hoped – Trump supporters obviously don’t care about any possibly wrongdoing or inappropriate behavior, so this wasn’t going to move them. The Democrats stuck together, and got a prominent Republican to agree (Romney). Trump’s wrongdoing is pretty much impossible to deny, to the point that most GOP Senators even agree that what he did was wrong!
That’s all good stuff – as good as there was any reasonable possibility of occurring. And all that will be useful in the general election campaign. We’ll see.