So I got to wondering after reading this article that I saw in another thread, if there’s any chance that the GOP establishment could possibly bail en-masse and form a new party out of the sane parts of the old, leaving the Republican party to merely be a bunch of Tea Partiers, and a 21st century equivalent of the Whigs.
So am I hallucinating when I wonder if this could be a possibility?
I’ve been thinking it’s a possibility, especially if the GOP looses this presidential election.
No, they’ll all pretend they all supported him all along. After all, he’s got to stand for re-election in only 4 years, and the primary race starts well before that.
But saying you were with Trump all along will be a losing strategy then.
“Republican Party” is one hell of a high-recognition brand name; the sane elements would make an enormous sacrifice in giving it up.
We have to thank Peggy Noonan for coming with the perfect name for that kind of pretend move (And Peggy got burned by it too):
That was applied to the pundits and politicians that pretended for months that Palin was the beesnees even tough they knew better. As Trump joined Palin to the hip it is a nice cromulent term to use again.
I think a schism is very likely, although it depends on how things play out. If Trump can be beaten in a primary in 2020, then it will probably be avoided. Or he might choose not to run again. Either way, Republicans work on rebuilding.
But if Trump is actually popular enough to win, twice? That would be a game changer, especially if the Democrats continue their march to the left. That wouldn’t just leave mainstream Republicans without a home, it would also leave the Blue Dogs and even some liberal defense hawks like Schumer and Menendez with no home. That’s a pretty broad coalition to start a new party with.
I think there would be a strong desire for a new party, but it’s hard to see who would be in it. The problem with Republicans today is that they are very fractured and it’s hard to imagine what a coalition of anti-Trump Republicans would look like. The Venn diagram of Trump supporters has a lot of overlap with Trump haters when you look at specific issues.
I think what makes it possible though is that the donor class is mostly ideologically in that middle range. If some prominent leaders got together and pitched the idea to donors, I think they’d be willing to open their wallets. The Kochs can’t stand Trump and they alone can get such a party off the ground.
This is very true. I don’t see a split and in our system a two (major) party outcome seems to be a stable state.
The brand is in the dirt though. Let the nativists have it and form a new party. A new party made up of reasonable Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats could actually give minority and young voters another option. Eventually, that party would probably supplant the Republicans as the nativists aged and died.
0% chance. If Trump is their nominee and loses they’ll just blame him. If he wins they were supporting him the whole time.
Eh, I think the most likely scenario is that Prez Trump manages to talk a few relatively normal Republicans into his administration (Christie, being the obvious example) and then spends his time picking twitter fights with random celebrities and playing footsie with the Klan while they run things. The end result being a much more cartoonish looking, but substantially similar to what a Romney Presidency would’ve been.
I certainly wouldn’t rule anything out, but I’m pretty skeptical of the idea that Trump is going to turn into either a brutal fascist or suddenly re-emerge as a hardcore liberal as pretty farfetched.
So I don’t think the GOP will have the motivation to go form their own party. They’ll just learn to use Trump and ignore the more embarassing facets of his personality, in the same way they managed to do so with Palin or Limbaugh or dozens of other ugly characters.
If it looks like Trump is the only way to beat the Democrats in November, the Republicans will fall in line, guaranteed, no matter what he says or does.
Let me see if I’ve got this straight: if, hypothetically, Republicans hold both the House and the Senate while Trump is the president – and most of the states have Republican governors and most of the state legislatures have Republican majorities – the question would be about how the Republican party has problems?
That is a good point. Trump would be the supposed leader of the party, but there would be very few Trumpists in office. Would Paul Ryan then become the “real” leader of the party and Trump just tolerated in office as long as he keeps Democrats out?
This. I know plenty of conservatives who are absolutely beside themselves at having to choose supporting the horror the R party has become, or betraying their ideals and voting left. Generally disgusted with the GOP. If an organization arose on a platform of, say, reluctant government money movement–both for war and federally funded infrastructure, and which simply refused to legislate morality without some kind of reality-based reasoning, I think my disenfranchised righties would be very interested in doing the new thing. Such a group would need to be willing to turn a deaf ear to the extremists, and remain satisfied they’d still get the extremist vote if only because a vote for the new party would still be a vote against the left. It’d take a couple cycles to develop, maybe.
Depends on what kind of extremism you’re talking about. Since Trump is no small government advocate, and small government advocates are numerous enough that they should have a party representing them, they would certainly have to have a big voice in any new party. And some of them would be rather extremist on that front, but that’s okay, there are extremists in the Democratic Party too who want single payer health care and free stuff for everyone.
The kind of extremism we’d be rejecting is the nativism and know-nothingism. We would do things like acknowledge that climate change is real, but not necessarily endorse big government solutions. We’d be pro-science in general, inclusive and welcoming to all. But on all the legitimate differences in ideology that people have, that are based on an INTELLECTUAL foundation rather than an emotional one, all viewpoints would be welcome. In practice, we’d be a moderate conservative party, since liberals already have the Democrats and the hardcore religious conservatives would stick with the Republicans, but we wouldn’t exclude anyone except those who preached divisiveness.
Well, that’s for reasons partly political-cultural but mainly mechanical: At the federal and state levels, we have a single-member-district, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system for electing legislators. That tends to freeze out third parties (and force everyone who wants to participate seriously into one of two “big tent” parties) – tends to; Canada has a similar system and the New Democratic Party has been a strong third party for decades, though it has never won control of the national government; likewise with the Liberal Democrats in Britain. But, I’m sure the partisan lineup would be very different in every one of these countries if we/they had proportional representation (which I will continue to plug at every opportunity, mainly because most Americans don’t even seem to know what the phrase means).
Depends also on how regional differences shake out. There would be two parties everywhere, but they might not be the same two parties, or they might align with the GOP banner but call themselves something else as well as the Progressives did in the Midwest at one time.