Doesn’t make sense; there are campaign contribution limits.
Anyway, any talk of political extinction seems hyperbole. After Watergate, the Republicans looked doomed; yet less than a decade later, the Reagan Era began.
After getting hammered in 1984, the Democrats looked hopeless, yet, the Bill Clinton era began less than a decade later and in 2000 the Democrats were less than six hundred Florida votes away from holding on to the presidency for a third consecutive term.
There’s also the issue of voter fatigue. After 8, 12 or 16 consecutive years of one party in the White House, voters will inevitably get tired and want the other party, just for a change.
More doubling down on “real conservatives”, attacking whoever was the losing GOP nominee as RINOs, a promise to do better, and ultimately, not much change.
The problem the GOP has isn’t an election by election problem, its a generational problem. And the only thing that will fix that is when all of the older, white members die off and the younger generation takes over.
This has been true with a fairly homogenous voting population (white, male, straight). The current problem the GOP faces is that it’s no longer homogenous and they don’t get many heteros.
QFT.
The results of the presidential election in 2016 will be unlikely to have any affect on the life or character of the Republican Party. The GOP has spent the better part of the last 35 - 40 years building up local constituencies that are not going to disappear because the guy at the top was defeated. They have done a much better job, in that effort in that period, than the Democrats.
Unfortunately, (from the perspective of taking and holding the White House for decades), their strength works against them in the general election. That strong base has been built by assembling a party that tends to be to the Right of the overall populace. To get through the nomination process, a GOP contender must play to the far Right, potentially alienating the middle of the road independents and endangering their chances in the general election. The last Republican to win the popular vote was GHW Bush, riding, to a certain extent, on Reagan’s popularity, and he could not hold the office.
However, the GOP now holds so many statehouses and local offices, that the party is in no danger.
Wolfpup, you have an astounding sense of entitlement if you think not making someone the most powerful person in the world justifies throwing around accusations of “thoughtcrime”. Judging politicians by their moral opinions is what people are supposed to do.
Gerrymandering a governorship is difficult. And Democratic billionaires lately have outspent the Republican ones.
Younger people get older over time, though.
The Republican won the popular vote in 2004.
If the GOP loses again in 2016, the party will change, so yes, it will be “the end of the Republican Party as we know it” just as the 1988 loss was the nail in the coffin of the New Deal/Great Society Democratic Party. The party transformed into a socially liberal, economically neoliberal party.
The Republicans could change in a few ways and there will be major arguments over how to change if they lose in 2016. One thing they could do is stop worrying about the White House and just concentrate on domination of every other winnable office. Since Democrats don’t pay attention to non-Presidential elections, Republicans can actually consolidate their current power in Congress and a majority of the states and even make some more gains, especially if they aren’t wasting as much money trying to win the Presidency. They can instead try to depower the Presidency, which Democrats nowadays claim is an out of bounds view, but which they happily did in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. When you have all the power in Congress but not the Presidency, making Congress more powerful at the expense of the Presidency is entirely legitimate as long as the means are constitutional. And with control of a majority of states, Republican can stymie Democratic efforts to do things nationally as they are doing now with the health care law.
That’s the easy way out though, however much it might satisfy Republican politicians in safe red districts and states. A better way is to find out what voters dislike about the Republican Party and change it. That doesn’t mean going Democrat-lite, so much as it means keeping what works(small government, strong defense, family values), and jettisoning what doesn’t(overly religious appeals, bad government management, culture wars, stupid real wars).
What’s the difference between family values and culture wars? What’s the point of a strong defense that doesn’t get used? When the government gets smaller how does its management ability not suffer?
It means standing for family values but not against alternative lifestyles unless a case can be made that such lifestyles are actively harmful. Stick to the science, not the Bible.
In a dangerous world, it will be used. Using it smartly is how you build confidence. The GOP used to be the party of smart power until GWB came along. There’s an opportunity here because Democrats have problems of their own now. Two straight administrations of “Bomb frequently but never use ground troops even if we need them to accomplish the mission” has exposed Democrats’ claims of greater sophistication as a sham. The Republicans can regain trust on this issue by doing things more like Reagan and Bush 41 did.
It should be enhanced. Smaller organizations tend to be more nimble and more accountable than large ones. Do you know who ordered the EPA to go poking around in an abandoned mine for no reason other than that they wanted to create a new Superfund site, and thus more work to justify their budget? I don’t. And I bet if you ask around, there will be no one who knows who gave that order and no paperwork with anyone’s signature but Gina McCarthy’s, and she’ll claim that an unnamed subordinate signed her name to a piece of paper she’d never seen.
In a smaller organization limited to enforcing our environmental laws as written, which is what the EPA used to be, that kind of thing won’t happen.
I’m pretty sure the answer to that would be “nobody”, because it didn’t happen that way.
To the extent that you made any distinctions at all, they’re too razor thin to get across in today’s sound bite world. You won’t be against alternative lifestyles unless a case be made that they’re actively harmful? That’s the case they’re already trying to make, or do words like “threat to traditional marriage” not ring a bell? Our military doctrine should be “smart power” like under Reagan. Who gets to define what “smart” means, and are we going to invade Grenada again? I don’t trust the Republicans to run a more accountable government when they’ve done so much scapegoating to try and shrink it.
You said these were changes that the Republican Party could make, but these aren’t changes at all. It would be just another re-branding campaign.
ETA: Actually, your post did have one prospect, to start applying science and evidence rather than the bible. That would be a genuine change.
Even if you disagree with how the EPA screwed up, someone gave an order that turned out very badly. It is very unlikely we’ll ever know that person’s name. It would be different if it was a private company at fault.
Media coverage has been of the attitude, “Well, shit happens.” That’s not how we hold our government accountable. This should be a BP-level outrage.
As for the rest, yes, some of it is rebranding, but some is actual change. The GOP should embrace gay marriage, renounce preemptive war, govern better(as in, the government should be seen to actually perform better under Republican oversight), and shrink government intelligently rather than going first for the food stamps and school lunches.
By as we know it, I’m considering the current Republican Party to be the party since the Gingrich wave election in 1994. It’s of course impossible to call that a clean break from the previous years, but that seems about right to me. In a similar manner, I would argue that the current Democratic Party is the party of Bill Clinton born after the 1992 election. I don’t see the Democrats having a major revolution, but I do think it’s entirely possible the Republicans have some kind of change the way they did 1994.
Yeah, let’s hold individuals accountable, like we did with the BP spill, and not sweep it all under the rug, like we’re doing with the EPA.
No Republican candidate would dare utter those words.
Your cites are not repudiating adahers post.
Technically.
But they’re easy to work around, in the following manner:
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Billionaires can give as much as they damn well please to independent PACs.
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The independent PACs can spend as much as they want to influence political races.
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A prospective candidate can have a close friend or longtime trusted aide set up an ‘independent’ PAC that the billionaires can write unlimited checks to, and as long as they don’t coordinate with each other while the candidate is actually running, it’s technically independent.
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So the ‘independent’ PAC can effectively be the real campaign for the candidate, with unlimited funds to work with.
If the Republicans embraced small government, that would be a major change for the party, probably enough to make it unrecognizable. As it is, the current party spends a major portion of their energy on vilifying small government, and escalating big government.
The party leadership has wanted to change since before Obama, their base simply won’t let them. If they could they would drop any opposition to same sex marriage and pass immigration reform with a path to citizenship tomorrow, but they would be punished for it and none of them is willing to sacrifice their career for the party. The far right has a disproportionate level of power in the primaries so the ability for the party to change is severely hampered. At this point i think all they can do is wait for enough old people to die off as someone above said and then slowly steer back to the center, mainly on gay rights and immigration. Gay rights is the easy one since they don’t actually have to DO anything at this point other than stay quiet, immigration is going to take some pain.
Doesn’t make sense; there are campaign contribution limits.
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Aw, that’s sweet.