Ed Kilgore does a great job of summarizing why George Pataki got nowhere in his effort to run for the Republican nomination and decided to drop out before a single vote was cast. He was running for the nomination of a party that no longer exists. But there’s a follow-up question to that. Is there any way to recreate the old Republican Party?
There’s an article in the upcoming issue of the Washington Monthly that suggests that we might get less gridlock in DC and more bipartisan legislation if lawmakers had more access to information and more control over the legislative process. I don’t want to suggest that this solution wouldn’t work. I think it would be quite helpful.
But I also think that it will take more to recreate a space for politicians like George Pataki or Jim Webb or Lincoln Chafee.
If I were a billionaire and I wanted my grandfather’s Republican Party back, I’d start by focusing on the House of Representatives. My first target would be California’s 53 congressional seats. Candidates in the Golden State run in open primaries and without formal party affiliation. I’d try to find as many candidates to run in the primaries as I could who would be willing to make me two promises. The first promise is that they take climate change seriously and that they support reproductive rights. The second promise is that they would not vote on the first ballot for anyone for Speaker of the House who wasn’t on my slate of candidates.
Just as the Freedom Caucus was able to force Speaker Boehner out, a more liberal rump could veto a Republican speaker and insist on a leader of their liking. This rump would also be available to vote sensibly on climate and reproductive choice, but their real mission would be to force the leadership of the House to break with the conservatives.
Once this was accomplished, these sitting lawmakers could make other demands, including on how the RNC and the RNCC allocate funds and other resources. In particular, they might be able to compel the official Republican organs to spend money on their reelections and on the election of like-minded candidates in other parts of the country.
New England doesn’t have the ballot access laws that make it possible to supplant conservative candidates in the primaries, but they have electorates that might support more moderate, independent candidates if enough people could be convinced to take a second look at the Republican Party and participate in their primaries. Short of that, independents like Angus King and Bernie Sanders still exist up there, and politicians like Jim Jeffords, Lincoln Chafee, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe would be more comfortable caucusing with my California slate than with the Tom DeLay-types that dominate the party today. Those are senators or former senators, of course, but I might be able to break through with a small handful of congresspersons who would agree to my conditions.
The basic idea is get enough people in Congress to blackmail the conservatives who run the Republican Party into making concessions about who will run the leadership. Then the new leadership would rely on my group for the votes they need to keep the government running without constant threats of default or shutdown. At first, the governing majority in the House would be made up mostly of Democrats, but that’s already the case. The difference would be that the leadership could do this unapologetically and without fear of being removed in a rightwing coup.
With this little trick, bipartisan consensus would restored, at least to the degree necessary to operate the government. Bipartisan legislation would follow, and conservative chairmen who were unwilling to compromise would be steamrolled or simply find themselves completely ineffectual.
I can foresee a lot of obstacles in this plan and even more potential for unintended consequences, but it’s the best I can come up with for now.
The Republican Party can’t really represent California or New England anymore, and the people there should have a real choice. If they’re unhappy with their Democratic representatives, they shouldn’t have to overlook the alternative’s climate science denialism or anti-women’s rights stances. And, as it stands now, you can elect a moderate Republican if one happens to show up, but if they go to DC and vote for Paul Ryan as Speaker, you’re not getting moderate representation. The people need a softer right alternative to the modern Republican Party. And the country needs to find a way to break their ability to cause gridlock on the federal level.
As the Freedom Caucus demonstrated, it doesn’t take all that many members to force a change in leadership, and that’s how I think people should proceed if they want to restore the GOP to sanity and get our government working on a reality-based basis again.
My father was a Democrat. His father was Finean brotherhood.
Only my stupid brother is a Republican. He thinks the party is just fine.
Not Gonna Happen! The Republicans are going to have to play this out to the end, eventually losing their majorities in both Houses of Congress. Then there will be a potential for reform.
I think they will loose the purple state houses first. They have out sourced state jobs, doing their best to out source public ed, sold off state assets, put tolls on the roads and bridges, stripped local government the ability to tax, and a made sure everyone has a gun….whats left? It just might be their jobs.
Actually, the I think the purple states will be the last to go. Kansas and Oklahoma will be first, Missouri last. Mississippi never.
Didnt you write a recent post about how the GOP was basically always like this?
Part of it was like this. Not all of it.
In what ways is the center-right of the Democratic Party not ‘Your Daddy’s GOP?’ There already IS a party for Pataki, he just refuses to join it.
If I were a billionaire and I wanted to nudge Republican Party toward sentience, I’d pour all my money into strengthening the leftmost fringe of the Democratic Party, even if it made certain bloggers faint about blowhards like Grayson.
Pataki, Snowe, Collins, and millions of apocryphal center-right ‘Daddys’ would happily support the current, mainstream policies of the Democratic Party IF they were offered by the Republicans. But they can’t support them if they’re Democratic policies.
There’s no space there for the sane Republicans to breath, there’s no political oxygen.
Republicans can only claim a spot in the center-right if Democrats abandon it.
Marie3 suggested that the Democratic Primary is between Richard Nixon and George McGovern.
And she is right.
Sometimes an abbreviated comment doesn’t stand so well on its own. In the abstract, there aren’t that many people that are not “electable.” All elections come down to a comparison: A or B or X, Y, or Z. For example, if not for his “macaca” moment and loss to Webb, the fretting that Obama wasn’t electable against the GOP nominee, George Allen, would have been more apt. As it was, a weak GOP field, both Clinton and Obama were very much electable in ’08 and DEMs that argued during the primary season that either wasn’t were tiresome.
Anyway, my comment was:
Nixon as Clinton not in the corrupt liar sense, but as the middle of the rode moderate.
Clinton isn’t a racist like Nixon. (But she and Bill have been known to play the race card.) So, I’ll give her a brownie point for that. Otherwise, not much difference.
I’ve been thinking about this. I don’t believe you’ll ever get back your “fathers GOP” … primarily because it never existed.
NE Republicanism was in many senses, a backlash against the Irish dominance of Boston and NYC. They had as much reason to be in the Republican party as Strom Thurmund had to be in the Democratic Party. It was a marriage made in Hell and when the South bolted to the bigoted, racist tent that would actually welcome them, the “Daddy’s Republicans” spent 25 years not believing it. Now they do.
There appears to be a 23-30% voting population of racist, misogynist, homophobic, nativist assholes. They now own the Republican party.
According to Marie3 and others here, HRC’s wing of the Democratic party is the natural resting place for “Daddy’s Republicans”. I think they may be correct. Putting the actual conservatives of the former GOP into the Democratic party will re-establish the Blue Dog wing as dominant in Red state non-racist politics and probably national politics (at least for a time). When this happens (probably in this + the 2018 election cycle), it is then time to split the Dems into the Corporate Democrats and the democracy Democrats.
Leading to (potentially) 3 parties: Racist (will be called Republican), Corporate (will be called Democratic) and Progressive (god only knows what THAT will be called).
We are in for interesting times.
The immediate challenge of a disintegrating Republican party will be that it tugs mainstream Democrats further to the corporatist centre.
Much like national politics circa the 1860’s with the demise of the Whigs and the appearance of the (Progressive!) Republican Party.
I tend to agree on the “never existed” part.
My mother’s family were your traditional Rockefeller Republicans. Her father was a wealthy doctor, and they couldn’t stand the New Deal. Later, they naturally took up the side of police against hippies and people of color. I really don’t think these kind of Republicans were as moderate as they are now portrayed. They liked their racism more soft-spoken than it was done in the south at the time, but they were racists (remember that these are the folk who subscribed to Buckley’s rag). They hated social security and medicare, although now the ones who are still living embrace those programs. However, they will always be against social programs that help people poorer than them. It’s who they are.
On rare occasions you’ll meet someone who claims to be a moderate Republican and says she/he despises Fox News. All good. But dig a little bit and you’ll find they still believe almost all of the lies – how Obummer dramatically increased the size of the government and poured trillions of tax dollars into the ghettos, etc.
My mother’s family were your traditional Rockefeller Republicans. Her father was a wealthy doctor, and they couldn’t stand the New Deal. …
They fought back and by the mid-’40s began winning. That’s why today we still don’t have universal health care (and it health care gobbles up a higher percentage of GDP than anywhere else on the planet) and unions are so weak. Polite but overall one of the more destructive political forces in the country since then.
“Your Daddys GOP” died a long time ago and it isn’t coming back. This type of talk is a pipe dream.
Your plane has already exploded in the hangar before its first flight because you left out one crucial component for your resurgence: you also have to extract a promise from your candidates to go no further right than the most conservative prominent Democrat on racial minority rights whether it’s immigration reform or Islamophobia or police brutality. It’s California, you can’t get away with racial dog whistles because you won’t win many seats outside the super-red, super-white portions.
Of course, you may have already seen the problem(s) even if you grant this idealized stipulation. Aside from the fact that an anti-abortion, anti-white supremacy, anti-climate denial faction like this would get creamed in the GOP primary, aside from the fact that this formula will only be competitive in level-playing field (i.e. no recent scandal or economic disaster) if the Democratic Party continues to run New Democrats indefinitely, there’s the fact that… well, you basically just described a conservative Democrat.
The rich don’t really care about race. The only color they care about is Green.
BooMan is trying to have his faction win enough New Republicans seats in California to be taken seriously by the party. This means cutting into the current Californian electorate and going into counties where Dems are on the margins. And this is not going to happen in a meaningful amount without the GOP explicitly abandoning racial/religious revanchism — which runs into the problems that I mentioned.
The only passive demographic help BooMan’s project gets is that the median age of California is accelerating significantly faster than the nation at large, though it’s still less.
So-called Old School GOP ain’t never coming back. It’s why the billionaire$ spend so much money on propaganda to keep their marks agitated about how horrible terrible the so-called “Democratic” party is. Fact is, the D-Branch of Uniparty is now pretty much what ye olde GOP used to be when I was a rug rat.
Fact: the R-Team didn’t give much of a stuff about Roe v Wade when it was first handed down. I can remember my minister and his wife supporting the decision. Now it’s used as a giant wedge issue in order to create a strictly artificial – and these days, mostly faked/lied about – divide between the D and R branches.
And so on. The R-rubes have to be constantly brainwashed – I’m serious – to hate, loathe, despise, detest and otherwise spit on anyone in the disgusting D-party just because. It’s deranged and unhinged.
When polls are taken semi honestly over a larger swath of the population, most citizens actually agree with more progressive measures/ideas/laws, etc. But if the horrid Ds are offering such measures, fahgeddaboudit. The unhinged rightwing will be carefully choreographed to shriek and whine just because.
We’ll never get back to anything that’s sane or rational about the GOP. It’s too far gone.
The best we could hope for – and I think even this is unlikely – is the D-Branch actually being viewed for the NeoCon/NeoLib pretty far right of center party that it is. And maybe somehow have a party that really DOES represent those with more liberal/progressive/whatever you want to call it viewpoints.
I don’t expect to live long enough to see this happen, but I wish future generations best of luck. Too much money is involved. The ONLY question to ask: cui bono?
One more thing… I don’t own a tv, but I read on the ‘tubes that Trump is getting a ton of air time on all of the cable nooz stations, including allegedly LIEbrul MSNBC.
These stations are owned by various billionaires via their various corporations (who pay no taxes mostly). What does it say that these various billionaires are giving Trump a ton of FREE air time during a POTUS race?
This isn’t just about ratings and ad buys. These billionaires clearly want Trump at least to get a leg up on the race. Why? I effen don’t know. I know the effete losers in the chattering classes are all “upset” over Donnie schlonging the race, but clearly some sub-section of the .0001% is in his corner. I have no insights into why this is so.
Just saying… Cui bono.
These billionaires clearly want Trump at least to get a leg up on the race. Why?
A heads they win and tails the people lose general election. (There’s a faction of GOP voters that in their guts sense a piece of that, but when it gets to their brains they think that Trump is being offered to guarantee a Clinton win. That’s a reason why 70% or GOP primary voters are split among the other candidates, none of whom they much like.)
well, the NH Union Leader guy claims it’s because they want Hillary to win. make sense to me, sounds likely. edge out Sanders and Cruz completely
I’m as willing to roll with a counterfactual as the next person but
if I were a billionaire exactly why would I want my grandfather’s Republican Party back? The Republican Party I’ve got right now controls the Supreme Count, the House, the Senate, around 33 governorships, around 30 state legislatures. Maybe it won’t control the Senate after 2016 but if I’m a little patient — and history shows that I can be very patient — I stand a good chance of getting it back in 2018. True, I won’t control the Presidency for the next four years but I know I control enough of the key chokepoints in the system that the party that does control the Presidency will not succeed in driving much of its agenda. What’s not to like?
Exactly. And it’s not as if Obama or his Admin has been exactly hostile towards the .0001%. Let’s get real. Jamie Presidential Cufflinks Dimon, anyone??
Why would the mega rich want the “old” GOP back? They’re happy with the status quo as far as I can see. Why would the mega rich give a stuff about white supremacy and fascism? They’ll do just fine under those conditions.
You will control the Presidency. Hillary is going to win.
>>Candidates in the Golden State run in open primaries and without formal party affiliation.
this is NOT a true statement so if you’re basing a strategy on it you have a weak foundation.
Congressional candidates DO list their party and do face a normal party primary. The weirdness is that then the top 2 vote getters among all primary candidates, regardless of party, move on to the general election. This has resulted in numerous 2-Democrat general elections and also some 2-Republican generals.
OT:Well, the Governor of Kentucky has followed through with his promise to destroy Kynect.
And I have not one single, solitary, any resemblance of an ounce of sympathy for them.
Nada.
Not for the muthaphuckas who never had insurance before Kynect, and couldn’t be bothered to get their azzes up to vote….
but, especially for the muthaphuckas who never had insurance before Kynect and voted for this asshole anyway…
2017…..
yeah, sure…whatever.
………………………
Bevin: Medicaid changes to come in time
Bevin, who campaigned on a pledge to reshape Medicaid and the expansion under the Affordable Care Act, said it will take time to change the program but he expects to succeed.
“We are going to transform the way Medicaid is delivered in Kentucky,” Bevin said.
Bevin has enlisted the help of Mark Birdwhistell, a former secretary of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services under former Gov. Ernie Fletcher.
Birdwhistell, vice president for health services at the University of Kentucky, said he’s ready for the challenge.
“The people of Kentucky need a Medicaid system that is affordable and sustainable,” he said.
Bevin and Birdwhistell said Kentucky will begin work on a waiver they will ask the federal government to approve to let Kentucky establish its own Medicaid plan, as Indiana and some other states have done.
They expect to introduce the plan in 2017.
Bevin Wednesday morning voiced support for a Medicaid waiver system similar to the one used by Indiana to hold down costs and said an effort during the coming six months will show “whether this will work or not.”
http://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/ky-governor/2015/12/30/medicaid-changes-discussed
-bevin/78064514/
The good news is that, while this announcement is dramatic, Governor Bevin hasn’t followed through in any way that will directly affect Kentuckians for quite a while, if ever. Bevin has the power to completely terminate the Medicaid eligibility expansion created by Governor Beshear’s executive order, but he isn’t doing so. The expansion will remain in place until the Federal Health & Human Services has an opportunity to review the policies in the proposed waiver Bevin eventually comes up with; these reviews take many months, which means that the current expansion stays in place until late 2017 or early 2018.
My understanding is that an HHS review would be required even if changes to the expansion were agreed upon between the Governor and Legislature.
What this ACA-required Federal review makes clear is that, counter to many on this site and elsewhere who claim that the Presidency is worthless unless the Party of the winner also gains full control of Congress, the future progress of the ACA’s success depends quite explicitly on the Democratic nominee winning in 2016.
We know that an HHS run by a Secretary nominated by Bernie or Hillary would block future requests for Medicaid waivers which abused the premises of the program. We can be just as certain that an HHS run by a Secretary nominated by any of the plausible Republican nominees would grant waivers which maximized privatizations, issued block grants, anything allowed by the law under the wingnut sun. In these ways, Republican control of the Presidency could substantially damage the ACA’s success even if Democrats maintained control of the Senate or House.
This link has some particularly concise and accurate reporting on the state of play in Kentucky on this issue:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/bevin-medicaid-expansion-plays
Money quote: “As health care policy experts told TPM after Bevin’s election, HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services won’t just grant any changes sought to Medicaid programs.
“CMS has been relatively conservative in not granting wide scale modifications to the program under the waivers,” Caroline Pearson, the vice president of the health care consulting firm Avalere Health, told TPM in November.”
OT:Well, the Governor of Kentucky has followed through with his promise to destroy Kynect.
And I have not one single, solitary, any resemblance of an ounce of sympathy for them.
Nada.
Not for the muthaphuckas who never had insurance before Kynect, and couldn’t be bothered to get their azzes up to vote….
but, especially for the muthaphuckas who never had insurance before Kynect and voted for this asshole anyway…
2017…..
yeah, sure…whatever.
………………………
Bevin: Medicaid changes to come in time
Bevin, who campaigned on a pledge to reshape Medicaid and the expansion under the Affordable Care Act, said it will take time to change the program but he expects to succeed.
“We are going to transform the way Medicaid is delivered in Kentucky,” Bevin said.
Bevin has enlisted the help of Mark Birdwhistell, a former secretary of the Cabinet for Health and Family Services under former Gov. Ernie Fletcher.
Birdwhistell, vice president for health services at the University of Kentucky, said he’s ready for the challenge.
“The people of Kentucky need a Medicaid system that is affordable and sustainable,” he said.
Bevin and Birdwhistell said Kentucky will begin work on a waiver they will ask the federal government to approve to let Kentucky establish its own Medicaid plan, as Indiana and some other states have done.
They expect to introduce the plan in 2017.
Bevin Wednesday morning voiced support for a Medicaid waiver system similar to the one used by Indiana to hold down costs and said an effort during the coming six months will show “whether this will work or not.”
http://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/ky-governor/2015/12/30/medicaid-changes-discussed
-bevin/78064514/
This is little more than nostalgia.
I am the grandson of a Republican Mayor of a Cleveland suburb. He was a Methodist, an educated professional, and he was pro-civil rights and pro-choice.
In 1976 the bridge club my grandmother played in broke up because of the arguments between the Ford people and the Reagan people. To my grandmother and grandfather, the Reagan people simply were bible bashers: fundamentally ignorant and uneducated.
My mother couldn’t vote for Reagan in ’80: she voted Libertarian. In 1982 I worked on the Stafford campaign – my only GOP campaign. I did so because I thought it was important that there be a GOP liberal wing.
But this is all dead. Before Jeffords left the GOP he called up Stafford. Stafford was, like Chaffee and Collins and Snowe, part of a GOP family dynasty.
Stafford told him he was a Democrat, and Jeffords was in denial.
Javits, Jeffords, Stafford et al could not even win a GOP family in a liberal state. When Stafford decided to resign, he did so in part because he would probably lose a GOP primary.
In Vermont.
And the truth is that even in California a “moderate republican” would struggle to win the nomination.
The idea that there is some repository of decency in the GOP is as dead as my Grandfather.
Okay, that’s where I get lost.. is there a billionaire Republican that wants this? And, in fact, as others have pointed out, the Democratic party has become fully and utterly the “other” party of business, so any corporate centric Republican wana-be can feel right at home (see: Rahm Emanual, DWS, a zillion others….). Sure, they might have to tell some little white lies, but they are professional politicians. They do it for a living (see: mouth moving)
My sense is that the Billionaire class driving the Republican party now want exactly the opposite of a “sane” party- they want destruction and radicalization. While this makes very little sense to most of us- after all, don’t they have the most to lose when the starving masses are at their gates? But really, I think most members of the billionaire class think that they are going to be the one that wins in the end. Probably irrational optimism in their ability to manipulate the system, but then again, they see a whole political system groveling at their feet right now and have yooge egos to begin with so they are probably completely incapable of knowing that they are unable to predict the outcome of the nightmare that they have unleashed.
Now certainly there is a Republican “establishment” that is concerned due to the dismal (unfortunately not dismal enough for my tastes) prospects at winning a national election, but that concern is chiefly employment related. And if they know one thing, the billionaires know how to take care of that.
The plutocratic hold on the Democratic Party is fragile. Dems like Rahm/DWS/etc. only hold power because of voter apathy and the decay of the Party machinery, not because they have ideological support. And given the demographics of the Democratic Party, future iterations of the party will be more and more hostile to their interests. They can only stay in place as long as they aren’t significantly challenged.
Someone like Sanders would’ve been crushed like a bug by the Democratic Party as recently as 2008, let alone 1992. Sanders still may not win, but he’s showing far too much strength for the plutocrats to feel secure about the future Democratic Party.
Well, I hope you are right.
But the alternative is that the corporate Democrats will just tell bigger whoppers and get away with it. So many Democrats have gotten expert at pretending they are progressive reformers when the camera is on and Wall Street shills when the camera is off (which it is for 99.9% of what they do) Zero accountability as long as there is a crazy Republican to point at (which is about all of the time now).
So many Democrats have gotten expert at pretending they are progressive reformers when the camera is on and Wall Street shills when the camera is off (which it is for 99.9% of what they do) Zero accountability as long as there is a crazy Republican to point at (which is about all of the time now).
Like Sinema in AZ!
Let’s digress for a little bit. The establishment wing gets its legitimacy from the fact that they have a proven track record of success. The ‘if we do it your way, we lose; if we do it my way, we win’ is a powerful trump card to get the not-so-partisan/pragmatists to go along with them even if the insurgents have a more appealing platform. Since parties and voters generally value winning more than they value ideological purity, it works.
And my hypothesis is that the establishment wing of the Democratic Party lost a LOT of credibly for the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections. And to hear the ‘sensible’ people in our party speak, they’re flat-out telling us that we shouldn’t expect more from them than some USSC appointments during Hillary Clinton’s Presidency because there’s ‘no way’ to win the House in 2016 and probably 2020. That is, we shouldn’t expect for things to get much better if she wins, only much worse if she loses.
Do you think that is a pitch that is going to go down well with the base of the Democratic Party? I don’t think that it is. Any way you look at it, Sanders should not be doing as well as he’s been doing. He’s a curmudgeonly septugenarian from a rural state with no established political or media base who had no national presence and is saddled with the dreaded ‘S’ word. He’s an enormous risk to the establishment’s interests and to the whole ‘can he win?’ factor. He should be a fringe candidate that the establishment wing of the party should crush like a bug, not getting 1976 Reagan numbers*.
Of course, the thing is that as long as the establishment wing continues to run the social liberalism + economic centrism playbook (and they will, because it’s the only way they can simultaneously have a prayer of winning elections and ensure that the plutocratic party gets anything) these debacles will continue until passive demographic change can allow them to win Congressional elections with this formula. Which won’t happen for quite a few more election cycles. Even if Sanders goes down, he already opened Pandora’s box.
*Indeed, if you look at the first month of 1976 primaries, Reagan did worse than Sanders is currently polling.
>>Is there any way to recreate the old Republican Party?
I would ask: Is there any reason to recreate the old Republican Party?
The idea makes you sound like one of those “Third Way” professional centrists who are sure there’s room for a party in between the existing two, and their vision is basically the old sane almost-moderate Republican party. It’s gone. It’s an idea whose time has passed. Most of those voters have settled into the the conservative wing of the Democratic party, except for those who can’t give up a visceral belief that Democrats are too liberal. They’re like parrots: “Tax and Spend! AWK!”
Yes. There IS a reason to reconstitute the R’s. To get the Southern bigoted racists into THEIR OWN PARTY. We all know they exist. By providing cover for them the R’s and D’s have enabled them since 1876.
If they have to stand on their own, Haley Barbour would be exposed for the ass that his really is (I knew Haley at Ole Miss) and not some re-incarnation of Terry Sanford.
The actual first step in changing the configuration of the Republican Party is to force them into successive massive losses to Democrats, at all levels of government, throughout the country, with climate change denialism, antediluvian positions on reproductive rights, and suicidal positions on gun safety driving those losses.
Republicans will change when the voters reject conservative media as being as the untrustworthy cesspool of lies and propaganda that it is and demand they separate themselves from the “conservative movement”. A better Republican Party can only rise from the ashes of this one. Sprinkling some billionaire cash here and there in less conservative areas is not going to help.
i agree that the pre-Reagan republican party of yore is never coming back. the birchers won – big time. true that these moderate r’s you speak of will need an alternative since some will never vote for a democrat out of tribal instinct. it’s not clear to me that an alternative will emerge. i have seen my blue blood Bostonian, registered r brother-in-law vote big D ever since dubya was wearing a wire in the ’04 debates. he’s got no where else to go. that these small blocks of representatives can punch so far above their weight points to a total breakdown of party discipline. i expect that will not continue, and the GOP of today will unfailingly double down on their radical positions and eventually get their ass handed to them as the national demographic changes grind on – slowly but surely turning them into a rump southern party. then what happens, who knows? interesting discussion though. sadly, i fear that the 27% nativist haters will always be with us.