Mrs. Clinton is up by around seven percentage points in polling averages. But historically, a seven-point victory for the president’s party in the national popular vote is not the way to start a wave election. Richard Nixon’s huge victory in 1972 didn’t give Republicans the House. Neither Ronald Reagan nor George H.W. Bush took the House in 1984 or 1988. Bill Clinton didn’t retake the House in 1996.
The president’s party had down-ballot success in those elections, but gains were generally modest.
A Hillary Clinton landslide, though, might be likelier to result in a big shift in the House than in the past. That’s because the relationship between presidential and down-ballot vote choice has tightened. In 2012, President Obama’s share of the vote tracked very closely with the result of contested House races, albeit with Democratic and Republican incumbents tending to do a bit better. This is a long-term trend.
This is only a very small piece of the puzzle, but it’s an important one. There is less ticket-splitting than there used to be, so where a presidential candidate wins, members of their own party tend to win, too. More so than in the past, anyway.
That’s not necessarily great news for the Democrats though, since it remains true that their presidential candidates tend to roll up huge victories in cities and college towns while losing overall in the majority of congressional districts. The House gets competitive when the Democratic presidential candidate sweeps suburban districts, but the way the districts have been drawn makes it hard to get to a majority even in that scenario. It helps if they can cherry-pick a few deep red districts due to scandal, as they did in their 2006 takeover of the House. So far, that doesn’t look too likely this time around.
On the other hand, it’s a mistake to look strictly at the results of the presidential popular vote. What matters more than that is if there are a lot of people who decide to change their political affiliation. After Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the behavior and allegiance of Southern Democrats changed dramatically. Barry Goldwater was crushed in the November election, but the states he won (other than his home state of Arizona) were all in the Deep South, previously the most universally and uncompetitive Democratic area of the country. Nixon was able to solidify that change and turn it into a landslide by 1972. Jimmy Carter temporarily reversed the trend by retaking the Deep South in 1976, but he lost it again and permanently for the Democrats in 1980. The flip of allegiance in the South came in fits and starts, and it wasn’t until after the 2002 midterms that the process was really complete on the Congressional level. This is why Nixon didn’t make progress in winning back the House in 1972 despite winning reelection in one of the biggest blowouts in American history.
Today, the Solid South acts as a bulwark for the Republicans instead of the Democrats, making it difficult for a Democratic president to move control of Congress even when winning in a Nixon-like landslide. There are other areas that seem impervious to national trends, too, mainly in exurbia, the Plains States, and parts of the Mountain West. Collectively, these areas make it appear impossible for a Democrat to win in nearly every state as Nixon did in 1972 and Reagan did in 1984. Perhaps a Democrat could max out at around 40 states, and in that case they almost definitely would carry Congress with them.
Donald Trump has shown some weaknesses in some of these areas. He’s unpopular enough with the Mormon community to make Utah at least an aspirational goal for Clinton, although she’d probably need help from third party candidates to give her a relatively small plurality win there. Erosion of the Mormon vote is probably more significant in states like Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona where Republicans can usually rely on their support to be close to unanimous. States like Wyoming and Idaho have too few Democrats to make a split in the Mormon vote much of a factor either on the presidential level or on the Senate or House level.
Trump is also showing weakness in the Deep South, particularly in Georgia, but also to some degree in South Carolina and Mississippi where the black vote is large enough to make even small cracks in the white vote a risk to Republicans. Another factor is the youth vote, which probably will be more Democratic in these Republican strongholds than it has been in the past.
Internal migration plays a role, too. Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia have all grown more Democratic as many blacks have reverse-migrated to the South and the areas have attracted professionals from other areas of the country.
What really signals a blowout in the House races, though, is when a lot of people who were reliable voters for one party actually switch, and switch for good. The Reagan Democrats took a while to get around to doing that, but they played a huge role in the Republicans’ takeover of the House in 1994, and they have sustained their majorities ever since.
In this election, the wildcard of the youth vote is a factor. They’re wildcards because we don’t measure them by how they voted before, but by how they vote compared to the youth cohort they are replacing.
Suburbia is another factor, as Trump may get wiped out in suburbs from Cleveland to Atlanta, and those new allegiances may stick. It’s possible that much of suburbia will become much more likely-Blue than lean-Blue or toss-up in the future.
While I see it as less likely, the Mormon vote could remain a little more competitive, as least for a while.
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that we won’t see all the repercussions of the Trump candidacy in this year’s elections results, just like we didn’t see all the repercussions of LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act until nearly forty years had passed. We didn’t see shifting pro-Reagan allegiances manifest as Republican congressional majorities until more than five years after he had left office.
The youth vote of Reagan’s day supported him, and they remain largely loyal to the Republicans even today, but the same may be true of voters who came of age in the second half of the George W. Bush presidency or during the Obama Era. Thirty-five or forty years from now, these voters may still be loyal Democrats.
So, yes, even if Clinton wins this election in a blowout, she may not carry the House with her. But it still could be the beginning of a congressional realignment.
Having said that, most congressional landslides punish the president’s party. Most presidents see their party do very poorly in the first midterm election of the presidency. There are some exceptions, like George W. Bush’s post-9/11 successes in 2002, but that was probably a special circumstance. If Clinton wins the presidency, the chances are that the Democrats will lose seats in 2018, so this year is likely their best chance to win the House.
It still doesn’t look likely, but if it happens it will happen because a lot of people the Republicans thought they could rely on simply walk away from the party. And then the question will be, how many of them walk away for good?
Thanks for the insights, Martin. This is the sort of education I so appreciate. So much nuance here.
It will also depend on how strong Trumpism is going forward. Will non-revanchist republicans be able to tell go with No True Scotsman, or will they be firced to see the direction their team is going and decide who they’ll assiciate with. Libertarian party might benefit a lot in the next 2-3 years.
Some observations.
A lot of suburbs are changing or have changed to more diverse demographics. There are rings of majority black suburbs in a lot of cities now and even more diverse demographic suburbs. The suburban vote is no longer exclusive “white flight” in nature.
The rigidity of places like Wyoming, the western Plains States, and the rest of the less urbanized parts of the Mountain West in part depend on the media dominance of daytime shock-jock radio that runs in many tractors and workplaces and forms the topics of idle conversation and “ain’t it awful” conversations. But what have they actually gotten from Republican politicians for their loyalty but more things to be outraged about, even as Republicans control both houses of Congress.
But in all those places, there are still substantial numbers of Democratic voters who if enthusiastic could begin a general critique of the failure of movement conservatism just like enthusiastic Republican voter bent people’s ears about the failures of liberalism during the 1970s. Remember the tax-and-spend + liberalism word train everywhere you went in the 1970s.
What movement conservatism has created is a bloated military and a national police state. Because that is the only places they were willing to put money. Except for the public-private ripoffs. Don’t think that there isn’t chapter and verse to support that now. And the gun enthusiasts think that registration laws are their major worry because they have buddies on the police forces and in the military. Poke holes in that illusion.
That is a geographic proposition in above all the “deep red” Congressional districts. What changed in the South was the terms under which political officials were to serve their constituents beyond the base of “constituent services”. Up until 1980, their task was to bring in good-paying jobs and federal investments in infrastructure — roads, schools, hospitals (remember Hill-Burton, That is how counties got county-owned hospitals.) After 1980, politicians were to cut taxes (and spending), conduct the Baptist/Evangelical culture war, and let bigotry out of the closet (thanks to Jesse Helms’s clever TV talking. Isn’t it time for voters to assess what exactly they’ve gotten for their hardnosed ever-radical Republican loyalty? Regarless of whether their incumbent Congressman has a challenger or even a weak challenger? Shouldn’t some of the professional clowns have the fear of God and the voter finally put into them with chief clown Trump being the Joker’s face associated with them and their ha-ha craziness?
I’ve argued against a marketing campaign in vain this year. So go negative with the PACs and SuperPACs and the non-tied money. (1) Conservatism 52 years after Reagan and Goldwater stirred the GOP convention has failed on all of their vision–all of it. I bet you can show point-by-point from early speeches where the surface claims of the benefits of conservatism failed. (2) Certain incumbents are so sure of re-election that they have become evil Jokers. Rip the Steve Kings, Louis Goehmerts, and down the line on this. (3) Others would rater investigate than legislate, and even those investigations do not investigate those things (like torture, warrantless surveillance, and inauditability of nation security expenditures) that need auditing. (4) The amount of public funds that Republicans have spent over 25 years investigating the Clintons. Humiliate the loudmouths with their own lies and the truth the media did not accurately portray. Yes, flash the big red “Lie” over the GOP clown’s face and morph them over and over into the Joker. (5) Figure a way to make voters want to hear policy simply explained (Vi Hart can do it with math) and put up some of those positive explanations.
Yes, deliver us from the fuzzy focus middle-class homey boring softball political ads that allowed the re-election of Mitch McConnell.
Market ideas and policies and put even the stalwart GOP saluters on the defensive for allowing a party to degenerate to nominating Trump.
But there needs to be signficant downticket GOTV so that these unopposed members of Congress start dragging down state and local tickets even though they are not running and might be endorsing downticket races.
In Wyoming, Carpetbagger Cheney, the spawn of the torturer, should be vulnerable to attack while her Democratic opponent can put forth his policy campaign. Divert GOP money to spending it to defend Trump in Wyoming and Cheney’s linkage with Trump. It’s a low-cost, starving media state. Do the same with local issues not being served in DC in the western regions of the Plains states down through Oklahoma and West Texas.
If there’s all that post-Citizens-United money on the Democratic side, why cannot Democrats find the voice and strategy to shake loose the Hillary Republicans they promise to a more progressive agenda than corporatism? In fact corporations did very well under the New Deal policies that prevailed into the 1960s. And corporations that had to deal with unions actually did even better by having stimulated demand for their own products.
There are two sides to election analysis. Analysis of the current dynamics and analysis of how to shake up those dynamics so as to get the change that people want to see. Because on the left and right, people are tired of promises and getting business as usual that is indeed not succeeding as measured by their own lives.
A House blow-out is necessary; figuring out how to make it possible is what is needed for Democrats to give it its best shot and not laze their way to defeat in Congress like in 2010, 2012, and 2014.
And would it be too much spiking the ball if Jim Clyburn was elected Speaker of the House? Not that Pelosi has failed to deal with a bad situation creatively in her current and hopefully future role as House Majority Leader.
And Patty Murray was elected Senate Majority Leader.
I really would like to see a realigning election and then have the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus Breitbartian heads explode with how soundly they were repudiated by the American people.
And have enough of a majority to make some quick institutional changes in priorities and powers with a bunch of saucer-eyed Republicans in the minority in Congress. Enough that even Louis Goehmert adopts a front of comity and sanity and Steve King has to pretend not to be a bigot.
Great comment on a great post. Booman nails the electoral realities from an objective standpoint and you’re plotting strategy based on those realities. Since you’re on a roll, how about a creative strategy to keep 2018 turnout from dipping 49 million from 2016, as 2014 did from 2012?
Who shows up in Presidential years who doesn’t show up in midterms?
People who are either enthusiastic about the President, fixated on the idea that the top guy runs everything, or has a beef with Congress or specific members of Congress. Or doesn’t understand the downticket, who is on the downticket, or why they should vote for the people on the downticket. That speaks to what used to be called “voter education’, was carried out by a full cycle bunch of party volunteers, union volunteers, Democratic-supported civic club volunteers. And was supported by the local newspaper election coverage and after TV the local TV station’s election and candidate coverage. Nobody’s doing that now; downticket is depending of media, which tells voters nothing but the opponent is the bigger lout. Restore that voter education operation during canvassing and use the victory to pick up volunteers to continue it through December 2018, meeting on a weekly basis to coordinate education venues and presentations done as they opportunistically can be set up. If you can, roll these voter education operations out to each precinct in your CD by January of 2018. (The average number of precincts per Congressional District is 444; it’s not an easy task.) So you are eventually involving around 2000 volunteers (at that figure) to cover all precincts and educate 175,000 voters, which means a cumulative two-year attendance of at least that many people reached. And you by then have some idea of who your voter base is and what their issues are for each candidate office. You also have compiled as reasonable email list (just don’t abuse that like Richard Vigurie did; it is a party asset, not a private one).
I guess that little math exercise means that you have to have a ratio by election day of 1 volunteer for ever 8 voters in the average sized precinct by the time of the 2018 election. That is a worst case as if no one was an informed voter about the downticket races and the midterm. Having 5 people per precinct available to do a voter education session at some time within the two years of the Congressional cycle is not a bad target. The average seems kind of high; there must be some CDs that are zoos as far as the number of precincts. And think of the voter education session as actually pulling in a average of 8 people, no matter how well publicized and networked, especially for low information or low motivation voters.
From a progressive standpoint, one voter skill for education is how to deconstruct what the political ads are actually doing (generally trying to get your emotions to undermine rational and even voluntary thought about policy and politics). From a non-marketing, voter participation and understanding perspective, the only function of an ad is to validate that this is the Democratic candidate and these indeed are his positions. Voting for this candidate is voting for these policy positions. From the candidate’s perspective, they are best served if the persona in the ad is the persona constituents meet in person. And that that persona is close to the real deal.
As the CD voter education effort develops, it can have a social media presence with well-moderated discussion of issues in the CD. And forums for vetting aspirational candidates and candidates themselves through the filing-deadline-through-wrapup of the campaign cycle. It can also branch into campaign education and candidate development as it is able. DKos has had an interesting practical election DIY guide this year that gives an idea of what the content of this voter education might be, and Democratic Party institutions have developed courses as well.
During the campaign cycle, do solid get-out-the-vote, especially over those geographic areas that with less turnout for Democrats in 2010 and 2014. That involves routine emphasis on the practical difficulties of voting for Democratic voters; job hours, child care, transportation, reminders that it really is time to do it. And it involves banking as much of the vote as possible during early voting to allow work buddies to trade off shifts to permit voting.
Building a bottom-up strategy involves a lot of investment in time that gives grassroots volunteers a sense of ownership of the process. When “professional” politicians and salaried partisan consultants run roughshod over their actions or demean their activism or frustrate their policy agendas, it turns their volunteer efforts off and neither voter education nor GOTV happens with as much deep and geographic breadth.
Increasingly those who are not in the salaried class are turned off in general by those who are (or still are) and the class presumptions about what works and what doesn’t in particular neighborhoods. Sensitivity to that among the volunteers builds a more diverse base of volunteers.
The idea is building a resilient organizational base that is open to new blood and new ideas within the progressive-democratic-liberal tradition of the Democratic Party. And the enthusiasm around that base turning out downticket voters.
In an idiotic segment on NPR this morning, David Greene kept trying to get Sherrod Brown to say Clinton ought to be holding rallies this week because Trump is holding them, instead of the 11-day fundraising blitz she’s having. Brown was fantastically on message and eloquent as always, but couldn’t succeed in getting Greene to discuss reality.
I’m wondering now, though, if the blitz might really be about something–it’s for the DNC and 38 state party organizations as well as her own campaign, and could it be from a new sense that the House is winnable?
But yes, Brown was good.
Last week Kaine went to – Idaho. The Clinton campaign is definitely trying to stretch the map. So far it seems like an attempt to put the Republican on their heels in general rather than an attack on the House because I’m not seeing a focus on the specific areas they need to win like upstate NY, the Philly suburbs, and a motley assortment of swing districts scattered about the country.
Over the last week or two, I have found it interesting that many news stories about the POTUS campaign have clearly attempted to breathe life into the idea that Clinton is taking on water and Trump is pivoting and the race is tightening…
…while most polls continue to show that Clinton’s swing state and national polling advantages are not shrinking, and are in some crucial cases widening.
The media has become bored this week. They want their horse race, damnit.
The biggest realignment in living memory was negative – fleeing a party that was no longer tolerable for one that catered to their fears. This was the South (and the white supremacy vote in general) fleeing the post-Civil Rights Act Democrats over time for the Republicans. It happened over time largely because incumbency protected old line Democrats like Ernest Hollings, who white South Carolinians trusted on racial issues even as they distrusted his party, until those incumbents either switched parties or died or aged out. These politicians also benefited from the ticket-splitting that, as Boo notes, has become less common as pre-CRA legacy pols at every level, and the voters that support them, have died out.
Something similar in reverse is shaping up now – not because of Donald Trump, but because of his supporters. Two generations of Republican voters have been marinated in an extreme worldview and increasingly one that is untethered from reality. They’re not going away if Trump loses. At every point so far where they could have pulled themselves back after a setback – the 2006 midterms and the 2008 and 2012 presidential years – they have instead chosen to double down on their radicalism, blaming their failure on a lack of ideological purity by their standard-bearers.
In 2012, a base that almost by definition respects authority chose to turn on their own leadership – which, with their famous post-election autopsy, finally did recognize the hole they’d dug themselves – rather than moderate. Ever since they’ve been purging their ranks of any leadership – Boehner, Cantor, on down – that dares to compromise or deal with the enemy, in particular for legislative jobs that by their nature require compromise and dealing with the other party. Hence the cliche that conservatism cannot fail, only be failed.
At what point do “movement conservatives” moderate their extremism? So far their only response to repudiation at the polls has been to double down. Until proven otherwise, they’ll keep doing that, even as their party becomes totally irrelevant as a result (c.f. the GOP in California, which held statewide office within the last decade but couldn’t even get a candidate past the top-two primary for US Senator this year). Trump is a symptom rather than the cause of a long-term realignment. At least in the short-term, there’s zero evidence old-line Republican elites can take back their party from the Krazees. That’s why the smarter ones are starting to not just come out for HRC, but leave the Republican Party entirely. They know it’s not going to get better any time soon.
That means a totally intransigent caucus in Congress for a President Clinton, and, in all likelihood, another dangerous demagogue in 2020. IMO Pence, and people like him, are a bigger long-term policy threat than the Trumps of the world because of their more cohesive agenda – but the base is increasingly unlikely to vote for anyone tainted by the experience of having actually held a job in government before at any level. A religious grifter like a white Ben Carson, or a celebrity grifter like Trump, seem much more likely to be the future direction of who the base will get behind.
“I didn’t leave my party; my party left me” is how the old cliche goes. We’re seeing this now on the Republican side. I think we’ll also see a less significant but still sizable increase in defections on the Democratic left as the party absorbs Republican defections. Leaders like HRC will be inclined to cater to those former Republicans, not only because their own ideology is closer but because their votes are more mathematically important than those of people on the left who have nowhere serious to go. Staying home hurts a politician; voting for their opponent hurts twice as much.
It’ll be hard to balance appealing to former Republicans with the increasing power and militancy of the Democrats’ own younger, more multicultural base. Obama was a master at it. HRC has yet to show she has anywhere near Obama’s political chops on that score. If ever the two-party system is to be seriously challenged in this country – and the odds are heavily stacked against it – this next decade would be the time.
The Republican base is going to stay Krazee, the defections are going to continue and accelerate, and that’s going to trigger a bunch of other changes as well. I’d love to be able to say this is a good thing, and certainly keeping the Krazees as far away from positions of power as possible is a paramount need. But as Boo has often said, this country needs two rational political parties. Right now, when it comes to existential crises like climate change, we barely have one. And an awful lot can go very, very badly wrong in a number of ways in this situation.
Even assuming Trump goes away – and he’s exactly the type who would try to foment civil war before he’d acknowledge that he’d lost – his voters are symptoms of a global threat that’s going to get worse, not better. With the geographic and economic displacement now being driven by technology and, increasingly, climate change, white privilege is going to be under assault as never before. A lot of white people are going to be unhappy with that. Can they drag human civilization, or human existence, down with them? Of course they can.
And part of it is the commitment of Democrats to business as usual and not seeing the signs of the shitstorm to come. And certainly not calling out the failure of movement conservatism.
I’ve tried to point out where the point might get inside the carapace of the ideological grip in which the Republican Party frame still dominates American thinking. President Obama is deft because he made a virtue of the necessity of preventing his own lynching. (At this point, I don’t think this is overblown. I do appreciate the fact that he had the good sense to put black officials at DOJ and finally at DHS. They know the score.)
For all my ideas about strategy, I don’t see it happening, and at the moment the losses on the left of the spectrum are a known 3% to third parties plus unknown non-voters. I’m really thinking that the popular vote would make it close enough to steal if the critical swing states weren’t so locked in to Clinton already because Trump shed the votes of people of color.
I had to go back and refresh my memory at Leip’s Political Atlas as how the South Carolina 1968 vote came out. It was a Democratic vote–between Humphrey and Wallace; Strom Thurmond and Rep. Albert Watson, and frustrated candidate William Workman did indeed deliver the votes in the Columbia metropolitan area to Nixon. It was just enough to deliver the state to Nixon.
On incumbency, it is a little more complicated. The trust behind incumbency extended to any figures who were already active in politics and known in the state for policies other than civil rights. Governors in most states were limited to one term; most sought national office or waited to be appointed to judicial office. In 1962, Donald Russell was elected governor of SC succeeding Hollings. Hollings sought the US Senate in 1962, running in the primary (still tantamount to winning election) against Sen. Olin Johnston, a pro-labor Senator. Johnston died in 1965. The sitting governor, Donald Russell resigned and his Lieutenant Governor, Robert McNair, appointed Russell to the remainder of Johnston’s term. In the 1966 special election Hollings defeated Russell in the primary on the issue of his appointing himself to the seat. Russell soon was appointed to his judgeship. The Republican candidate in both 1962 and 1966 was William Workman. The last Democratic governor of South Carolina was in 1998. Jim Hodges, who worked as general counsel for Springs Mills, a textile company that made sheets. The prior Democratic governor was Richard Riley, Clinton’s later Secretary of Education. So from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, South Carolina was considered a “two-party” state.
Hodges and Riley made names for themselves in the legislature and both were elected in a time without FoxNews and Rush Limbaugh having their local imitators who focused on state politics.
Jimmy Carter used the two years after his single term to run for President on the fact that he stood strong for desegregation in Georgia (even as Lester Maddox was his lieutenant governor and messing with the legislature). Carter also came up through the state legislature. In 1961, Carter won an State Senate election that had opened up with a Supreme Court decision of one-man-one-vote. A local sheriff in a neighboring county had supervised a fraudulent count of the vote. Carter asked for a new election and won. He never had to please the “good ole boys”. They hated that about him.
What the “good ole boys” hated about Clinton was that he didn’t wait his turn but ran for Congress at age 28 and won as Attorney General at age 30. In Arkansas, as in most states, the office of Attorney General is one of the pads from which to launch a race for governor.
It seems that some of the successful Democratic governors at reducing segregation and racial politics provoked a reaction that burned over Democratic prospects. The capture of the media by Rush Limbaugh and FoxNews eventually institutionalized that racism.
What Clinton will face in an intransigent Congress are attempts to turn the clock back on women’s rights other than abortion and efforts to motivate women out of the workforce, using “Christian principles”. Her female “weakness” (see the health problems issue) will be peddled along with all the misogynistic spew of the past. And it will not race but rape that will be the signature issue that she must speak about even to the elites who are in her corner now.
Welcome to the coming sideshow that is the Time of Judgement for the American idea of government.
Geov Parrish, this is one time I would like for us to be proven wrong. It’s gonna be gawdawful.
I think Zika virus is gonna kill abortion as an issue permanently. Even the late term squishes, because of the diagnostic window.
Just like thalidomide made it thinkable way back when.
Hmm, Rush took the road you predict–loud and proud misogyny. How did that work for him? How did it work for those clueless Republican senate candidates back in 2008?
Women in the workforce? That ship sailed when two incomes weren’t even enough for security…
I am writing a piece for Bleeding Heartland about with an odd angle – and since some of the people in the thread here are really smart – and it is at least tangentially related to this article – I am curious what people think.
Historically in Canadian politics there were 3 parties: the NDP (socialist), the liberals and the Progressive Conservatives.
The PC was a Canadian version of country club republicans. They were pro-business, but they were not really a terribly socially conservative party. There was a reason for this: to win in Canada you have to win in Toronto. A right wing populist party will just not be able to do that.
In response, the Reform Party came into existence in the late 80’s. It was populist, far more socially conservative than the PC, and driven by alienation from Ontario and what might be thought of as big city elites.
The Reform Party essentially split the right of center vote in Canada for a decade. It was regional – in the Western Provinces. But there is a parallel here to the rise of Trump if you understand why regions matter in Canada.
It would take several elections for the right to come back together, and for a time the liberals really had little reason to think they would ever lose a national election.
The split was healed in 2003 and Harper won in 2006. But the liberals won 4 straight majority governments while the right was split.
Anyway, there is a parallel here, I think. You can see it in the polling among the young. Under 30 Trump often gets fewer votes than Johnson and Stein. There is a split waiting to happen, and anyone can see the basic tension between the Trump populists and the business interests that dominated the GOP.
Not sure I agree with you on Canada. I still think the “Liberals are the natural party of government” and it was the Liberal/NDP split that briefly allowed Conservatives to win. And the corruption in the Martin government followed by the terrible judgment of that era’s Liberals in their rightward move under that fool Ignatieff. When the Liberals returned to a normal stance last year they won overwhelmingly, though there was no split in the right.
Here in the US I think you’re generally right, because the Republican split is actually happening and more or less inevitable–there’s an intrinsic contradiction in a party that gathers libertarians together with theocrats and nothing but racism and misogyny to hold them together, and it couldn’t be sustained for much longer. (To me that’s where Trump came from–the national party committed suicide and Trump came on to say he’d conquered it for himself.)
Which doesn’t mean anything is going to be easy, but there are some really positive signs.
moronic [motto: “The best kind of moronic you could be!”(TM)] to me.
Surprising a party would adopt it as official name anyway?