Cait wrote:The problem is that you've got the sequence reversed there. 2012 was the 'trust us, a realistic candidate like Romney can win' cycle. And he didn't even come close, which empowered the Trumps and Cruzes of the party.
What I'm saying is that, if Trump does worse than Romney, the pendulum may swing back the other way.
Of course, that's reductive. There are a lot more factors that have led to Trump's success than just disaffected Republican primary voters. The size and weakness of the pool of candidates is very important, and Trump is pretty fucking unique as a candidate. There are a lot of factors that could lead to a return to the status quo four years from now; a Trump loss would be one of them, especially if he lost by a significant margin.
But, as I said, I don't think the problem is establishment versus Tea Party, except insofar as the establishment is trying like hell to make the Republican Party look more inclusive. The problem is that demographics are making it increasingly difficult for Republicans to win the Presidency. It's a party that's continued to alienate minorities even as they've grown both as a share of the relative population and of the electorate, and in a race between Trump and Clinton you'd better believe it's going to lose a sizable share of women voters, too.
The Republican Party can go back and forth all it wants about whether it can't win the Presidency because of guys like McCain and Romney, or whether it can't win the Presidency because of guys like Trump. But the answer's a lot bigger than any single candidate. It's George Allen calling a guy "macaca". It's Rush Limbaugh mocking Michael J Fox's Parkinson's. It's Kim Davis being feted as a hero for not doing her goddamn job. It's SB1070 and "All lives matter" and "Finish the dang fence" and hell, it's "young buck" and "welfare queens" and Willie Horton. And yeah, it's David fucking Duke.
The party has spent the past forty years systematically alienating everybody who's not a straight cis WASP, and now it's losing women too. There are guys in the establishment who see the writing on the wall and are trying desperately to tone down the exclusionistic rhetoric, and the response to them has been to vote for a guy who says Mexicans are rapists and Megyn Kelly has blood coming out of her wherever.
But Paco cited some pretty interesting stats the other week about
the Latino community's priorities and the Republican Party's history with Latino demographics. And those convinced me that, even if the overt racism vanished overnight, Republicans would still have a pretty hard time reaching out to minorities -- because their fiscal policies are racist, their foreign policy is racist, their policies on drugs and crime are racist, etc.
Those are way bigger problems than Romney or Trump's individual appeal as a presidential candidate. And it's hard to see them going away.
But, at the same time, congressional districts still heavily favor Republican demographics. That could start to change after the next census, but there are no guarantees of that; as noted, most states have legislatures that draw their own districts, and the seven states with independent redistricting committees (Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Jersey and Washington) don't seem like states that will see big partisan changes in the next four years. Arizona
could swing Democratic in the US House (we've currently got 5 R's and 4 D's, so it would only take one seat shifting), and I expect the Dems to gain some ground in the state legislature, but we're talking about modest changes, not a seismic shift.
And we'll still vote Republican in Presidential elections for the foreseeable future. I've been hearing people call Arizona a swing state for my entire adult life; I'll believe it when I see it. (And maybe not even then. If Clinton beats Trump here in November, I'll be surprised, but I won't see it as a sign of things to come, I'll see it as a rejection of Trump in particular, not Republicans in general.)