Hopefully mostly clear from the choices. This election has been a clusterfuck by any account. There is definitely frustration all over the place. I’m not sure sure that I’m sure of my own predictions on this at the moment, but do you think any of these these restructurings will happen? I’m considering parties that can get at least 5 percent general support as viable.
I don’t see how the Democrats structure will be affected. Regarding the Republicans, I think there are three options.
The Trump wing of the party emerges victorious and the Romney wing decides to stay loyal to the Republican name. They vote with the Trumpists despite saying they disagree with crazier aspects of the Trump doctrine. This is the most likely outcome, probably around 99% likelihood.
The Romney wing of the party emerges victorious and the Trump wing decides to stay loyal by renouncing the crazy and going back to the way things were under Bush Jr. I’d give this outcome a little less than 1% chance of happening, let’s say 0.99%.
The party splits. One side keeps the Republican name and the other picks a new name. Maybe they resurrect the name Whig or come up with some other name. It doesn’t really matter which side gets to keep the name, the important thing is that they split. I’d given this outcome a 0.01% chance of occurring.
ETA: It may seem like the members of congress are split evenly or even favor the sane side, but that doesn’t matter. The problem is Republican voters have drank the Kool-aid, and they aren’t going back.
I didn’t want to influence things too much right off the bat, but I can think of a hell of a lot of scenarios.
But other than no real change(more likely by a vast margin), the one I think most likely is a new centrist party. A lot of independents voted against Trump this time, but the “socialist” talk combined with the “Defund the police” crap have it a very uneasy alliance.
If Romney can get a couple dozen other Repubs, Manchin, and a dozen centrist Dems( not saying easy, just possible) He can legitimately say he did support Single payer Health care, and other central positions. If Fox news went with them, and openly denounced the alt-right extremism to TrumpNet and OAN, and they can goad the progressives in the Dems to scare the normies some more, there is a viable ember there.
There will be no change, at least until the GOP vote shrinks to a size that cannot will an election even with vote suppression, gerrymandering and EC disproportion…
There is no coherent voting block in the centre and no money to finance it.
If the GOP with it’s current base can pull 74 million votes, that’s a landslide win in any US election bar 2020.
I do like a scenario coming out of option #3 i.e. the GOP splits and the two factions end up in court suing each other over which has the right to use the name “Republican Party”
Instead of the parties changing how about abolishing the current primary system? That’s what gave us Trump n the first place. The concept of non-party members deciding who a parties candidate will be makes as much sense as a non-stock holder getting to decide who a corporations CEO will be. Open primaries that lets John Q Public crossover and vote in another party primary further mucks things up.
I have been rallying against the primary system for years and when Trump actually got the nomination I was proven right!
I don’t understand how you get rid of primaries, other than by outlawing them in a constitutional amendment. And then make the presidency a open, undifferentiated free-for-all, In which case the presidency every time would be like those chaotic California Governor races where you have a ballot of 6 porn stars, 3 people who think they are Jesus, 2 Nazis, 4 guys who change their name to George Washington just for the election, the head of Nambla, and a poodle, as well as the top 20 national Ds and Rs.
For any change to occur, you would need sufficient people to think that things are not working as they are. In light of the continued success of both parties up and down the ballot, I don’t see that happening. Now, if instead, a party had seen a precipitous drop in votes, then there might be an argument in favor of some change. But that didn’t happen.
The problem is that the states set their own rules for the primary elections, and this is because the state funds them. My recollection is that very few other countries have state-financed primary elections, if they have them at all. The major parties here have such a control on the state government that they can force them to hold major party primaries, but that means that the national party doesn’t have any say in how they are held. I suppose it’s possible that the national party refuses to seat delegates not elected according to the national party rules, but unless they both do it at the same time, it won’t work because some states will refuse to accommodate the party that’s not in power there.
As I said earlier I didn’t want to poison the conversation earlier. But I think this majority Dem board is seriously over estimating the homogeneity of the newly majority Party.
Defeating Trump was a goal worthy in about 51.3 % of voters eyes. As absurd as that sounds only 51.3 percent of people looked at the reality and said Biden was the answer, when beating Trump was at stake.
The Progressives want something for their grudging loyalty this time. Something Biden will have trouble giving them without pissing off the moderates.
If the system stays 2 party, and the Repubs nominate someone Trump, Trump level, or crazier-than-Trump again, then 2024 is easy. But if they go more moderate, The Dems have a major problem. and If they do go crazier-than-Trump there is a major opportunity in the middle.
The republicans are owned by business. The Clintons were owned by business. But the nature of those in business has changed, One Koch is dead, the other is close but their ilk and successors are principled in the principle of making money, however it can be done. But if the R party goes even more white-power, anti-globalist, down-with-the-Jews, alt-Right bullshit, they may switch back to Biden. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they buy a third party. If you don’t think there is a massive wave of people willing to vote 3rd party on principle as of today there are. I would estimate if you held theoretical election today, literally today, with the choices of R. Candidate, D. Candidate, Middle party candidate, it would get 25% of the vote at a minimum. Now that is today, in a couple years things can change.
More people voted “not Trump” than “Trump” this time. That is not a mandate Biden, or for anything at all past 2022.
Just as people voted “Not Hillary” more than they voted Hillary in 2016.
I’m curious whether you’re objecting to party primaries in general or to open party primaries.
It sounds like you’re objecting to open primaries. And you certainly have a point logically speaking. But …
Is there much actual evidence of strategic / malicious primary voting where a diehard e.g. D voter votes for a schmuck in the R primary or vice versa?
Sure it goes on some. But enough to matter? And is one party more victimized by it than the other? I know I don’t know for sure, but I suspect the net effect is way down in the noise.
If I was fixing/improving the primary system it would become a flavor of preference voting, where I could rank-order my choices. Here in FL the primaries are closed. I voted by mail in the D primary. Between the time I mailed my ballot and the primary election was held, my preferred candidate withdrew. So my vote was wasted. If I had been able to express a ranking of all the others then my vote would have counted for something.
That is a change worth having. And the more we move towards mail-based early voting or even in-person early voting, the more this issue will affect material numbers of voters in every state in every election.
Preference voting also provides a way for folks to enter a vote for a “protest” candidate followed by serious candidates. That will be valuable some years.
Back to the OP’s question.
The state-level election laws and the game theoretic considerations demand exactly 2 national parties with the current names and current legal organizations. That is as fixed as all our constitutional arrangements. Not that parties are enshrined in the constitution; rather that the collective practical obstacles to changing one is about as big as to changing the other. IOW we’re stuck with as-is-where-is for as long as our country still holds together.
What can happen of course, is that the insiders who steer; the donors who fund; and the rank and file who rally, post to TwitFace, & even sometimes actually vote can completely alter what the party stands for or is trying to do. IOW same familiar label with potentially all-new contents.
As we have seen with Trump and Trumpists the last 5-ish years.
How many times have we seen Republicans double down on positions that seemed insanely untenable, only to find them happily tending it decades later?
How many times have we seen the left foot-gun themselves over ideological purity?
I don’t see anything changing for a while. They impeach Trump, go back to business as usual, and respond to further calls for accountability with cries of “so this is how Democrats repay our selfless, good-faith, and thoroughly principled bipartisanship.”
And it does make sense for Republicans to wait for the Democrats to fracture into establishment and progressive wings. Neither faction appears to be going anywhere, and progressives are losing their appetite for compromise.
Really, both sides’ best play is to play it safe and wait for a controversy or schism to take out the other side. The structure of the Constitution favors it, the shitty intellectual habits of the American public favor it. I think we’ll be spending a few more years waiting for all the dirt to settle to the bottom of the glass.
First thing that popped into my head was David Clarke, Sheriff of Milwaukee County. No way he would have ever won the Democratic primaries had Republican voters not crossed over.
But I oppose primaries open or otherwise. It is ridiculous for the general publc to decide who a party candidate will be.
I am old enough to remember when there were no presidential primaries. Each party had a massive convention involving large delegations from each state, the size dependent on how many votes the party had collected in the previous elections. These delegations were in turn chosen by conventions of the party members in the several states. This was the notorious “smoke-filled room”.
And the couple I watched on TV (1956 and 1960) were truly exciting. The parties argued over the platform and the choice of presidential candidate was really not known in advance since the delegates were free agents, not pledged to anyone. After Stevenson was nominated in 1956, he threw the VP nomination open and it was a real race between Estes Kefauver and JFK. Kefauver was the nominee, but it was the first appearance of JFK on the national stage. But in choosing their candidates, electability was the primary (or only, really) consideration.
Then states started choosing their delegations in primaries. They had varying degrees of autonomy, depending on the state, but in every case they were bound to cast their first vote for the candidate who had won the state primary. Different states had different rules on when the delegates were unbound.
At first, this all seemed like a vast increase in democracy. Give the populace the choice. And maybe would have been had the turnouts for the primaries been better. But in fact primaries turned out to attract the most militant party adherents. That was true even in closed primary states like my native PA. You had to register with a party and could vote only in that party’s primary. If you registered Ind, you were shut out of the primary entirely. But open primary states were even worse since they invited ratf**king–voting for a weak candidate in the other primary.
While I cannot prove that this is what has led to the massive polarization we see today, I think it has exacerbated it. Unintended consequences.
I think this will effect the Democratic Party. If the GOP splits up then the far left will go to war with the Democratic moderates. They will decide this is the chance to push their agenda and they’ll be right.
Two party system is just too stable to be changed with our current set of laws. We would have to implement some form of ranked choice voting to have a chance of a significant change.