Yes, or if they lose one election in an absolutely devastating way. Let’s say they nominate someone who is even more of an insane MAGAt than Trump. Someone genuinely mentally ill. Who thinks that the shape-shifting lizard people are hiding in his closet. And a bunch of like minded Congressional R’s win their primaries.
And then they all lose. Badly. Very badly. Like they lose Texas and Florida in the EV’s There is a supermajority of D’s in the house. The Senate, which was already D in the previous election, turns overwhemingly D.
This might just get them off the MAGA train a bit sooner.
Since this is virtually a duplicate of another thread, I’m merging them.
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Agreed. Although I think it would take more than just losing elections. It would take losing the SCOTUS. Once that’s gone, the GOP will fracture. My guess is that’ll take at least 20 years.
You mean, like in 2008? We had 60 Senators (for just a few months, alas) and a huge House majority. The GOP went full obstructionist and were rewarded with a House majority two years later.
I fear our electorate is too fickle to continue to punish a party for mistakes that lead to one bad election. When things don’t magically get 100% better, they get widespread amnesia and vote for the same people they resoundingly rejected just two years earlier.
He will, and he will struggle to break 60 million votes. Trump is exactly what the GOP base wants, not Trump-lite, not Trump wannabes, not someone like Trump but smart. Trump, just Trump. Every election since 2016 that Trump was not on the ballot has been a complete slaughter for Democrats, they vastly out perform polls and keep winning elections in deep red states. Meanwhile Trump consistently out performs polls and absolutely nothing he says or does significantly lowers his support. Without Trump the party is cooked a lot worse than they are with him.
I suspect you are being over optimistic. The R base will still turn out in lock step, the Dem base will be depressed, and many of the more “centrist” Dems will cross over. The result will be an administration that is as bad as Bush Jr’s.
I consider this the best possible case, not that I think it will be a good thing. The breakdown of the norms and guardrails will continue.
Sure, just like they did for Romney and McCain. Meanwhile the Trump base gives zero shits about anyone but him. There are tens of millions of voters that are nothing but Trump voters, and we’ve seen this in action in every election since 2016.
I think several things will happen. One is that the democratic party will become overconfident and go too far left. Another is that the republican party abandons Trump moves just a tad to the left and starts over. Voters have short memories.
The saying in politics is, “You dance with those that brought you.” It will depend, I think, on how the coalitions shake out after Trump.
I think the Dems will try to hold the center while trying to accomodate both AOC and whoever steps up to take Manchin’s place, and the Overton window will continue shifting in favor of unregulated big business. I am not sure that right of left in the traditional sense is the right way to define the positions in current politics. But as it always has been, money will talk.
I agree that, while he’s still in the picture, no other candidate seems able to get real traction with “the Trump base”. But my question is: once he’s out of the picture, and the next Romney type makes his pitch — and zero shits are given by “the Trump base” — what happens when the next Trump type makes his pitch to them?
Nobody’s managed it while Trump is standing there saying No, Not Him; Vote For Me. But can we rule out the possibility that they’ll glom on to the next best thing once the original isn’t around?
I think that a real antibusiness populist moment like the 1930s is still a long ways away, though something more like the 1890s-1910 could possibly manifest. It’s hard to say which party might be more likely to lead the charge on something like that - current Republicans have more ideological and social opposition to business, while Democrat objections have to do more with economic and polical-pull factors.
One area that I think the Republican party could do well with, after some time in the desert, would be immigration. Most immigrants to the U.S. would be atrracted to the Republican brand much more than the Democrats if the former weren’t leavened with a healthy dose of racism and nativism. A pro-immigration Republican party could split the uneasy Democratic coalition between organized labor and college graduates, and might even be able to make greater inroads into urban areas that have been Democratic strongholds since they started to urbanize.
One of the big questions would be where the antiabortion movement goes once its supporters start to realize their abolitionist stance has less popular appeal than they thought.
I suspect that could only happen if the Republicans outright collapsed*; the racists are their driving force and have been ever since the Southern Strategy let them take over the party. At the very least it would require rebuilding the part until it doesn’t really have anything but the name in common with the present one.
In which case the result would be the Democrats splitting in two, resulting in a new two party system.
The Republicans weren’t exactly stable during Trump’s presidency and though they’ve expelled a lot of the never-Trumpers they still suffer from in-fighting. Once Trump is out of the picture, I think the GOP will devolve into warring factions as the various sides try to present themseleves as the true Republican party. You’ll get some that try to carry the Trump banner, but I don’t see any single Republican with Trump’s charisma (I just puked a little typing that).
If Trump loses in 2024,
Here is my rqandom guess prediction is that he will be too old, demnted and or in jail to run in 2028. The GOP will nominate some other MAGA type in his place, like DeSantis, or Jim Jordan. However theTrump base will look say of him, he’s OK but he’s not Trump, and so only mildly support him meanwhile the rest of the country will at this point be sick and tired of MAGA. So Harris will win re-election fairly easily. At that point Trump and MAGA will have become a bad joke out of a bygone era like leg warmers and Disco. The GOP will nominate someone nominally sane, the US public sick of 12 years of Democratic rule will elect him over AOC and life will go on.
After 12 more years a lot more of the Republican base will have died off, and if they don’t get Trump into power and install a dictatorship like they want that’ll cause a major and unpredictable political shift. This is pretty much the last chance of the far right as we know it to lock themselves into power before time takes it from them. But I suspect they won’t give up their death grip on the Republicans until it’s reduced to permanent impotence.
At which point the Democrats split and we end up with the Democrats and some “New Right” party that excludes what’s left of the old-style Right. At a guess, a Right that focuses more on social reactionaries and pandering to the rich but leaves out most of the racism. Meanwhile the Democrats will slide to the middle instead of being moderate right wing like now, but the actual Left will still be out in the cold.
More speculation for everyone: the “tough on immigration” stance is doomed to spectacular failure because of demographics (declining birth rates) and former MAGA politicians will be joining the clamor for government-sponsored recruiting stations in Third World countries within 15 years.
Win or lose in November, Donald Trump will declare his candidacy for 2028 before Inauguration Day 2025.
AOC will be elected POTUS, probably sometime in the forties. The Republican Party will by then have been driven back into the realm of reality, the radical elements having been destroyed by the rise of ranked choice voting and other election reforms.