Are the Republicans disintegrating before our eyes?

It’s impossible for us to predict the outcome of the party-nominating process at this time, but both Trump and Carson are making it clear that they may pursue independent runs. This will cause more problems for the Republican nominee than it would for the Democratic nominee.

I think it’s premature to declare the Republican party as having disintegrated. Their nominating process is not a simple one at present, but that doesn’t mean the party is doomed in the long run. I think changing demographics of our population will have more to say about their long-term stamina.

@Hawaii_Jake – maybe, but I’m not so sure.

I think we’re seeing the beginning of a (possibly permanent) fundamental split among republicans – I’ll call the two groups the Ideologues and the Pragmatists.

The ideologues worry about ideological purity and will take radical steps to enforce that, The pragmatists want to govern and win elections.

I think we saw pieces of this in 2012, but it is only getting more pronounced (and causing acute problems for the “Party bosses” in 2015–2016.

In the Presidential race, the Republicans have five losses and one win since 1992.

ONE win 25 years.

Sadly they will persist as a party. They have a major broadcast and cable network. They have thoroughly infested local and state offices.

And there will always be a significant percentage of the population who will only vote for candidates who proudly trumpet jingoism, racism, belligerance and willful ignorance.

Also, business interests will support any candidate who can deliver short-term gains, regardless of the long-term destruction wreaked by conservative policies.

Basically, SOMEBODY has to represent the worst people in the population.

I heard part of an interview with two Republican leaders on NPR the other day. I’m afraid I never caught their names, but they sounded intelligent, well-spoken, and reasonable, at least during the portion I heard. Their fear is not so much that Trump will win the Republican nomination as that he will turn independent and draw off a large segment of their base population.

If they truly don’t want to lose voters to a demagogue like Trump (one of them called him a demagogue), I think they ought to concern themselves a little more with telling their base population stories that will wake them up instead of feeding them their own homemade baloney.

Unfortunately there is an idiotic trend in current American politics in which the notion of “representing” a voter grows narrower by the minute. When people talk now about a candidate who represents them, they seem to mean somebody who is like them in ever-increasing ways: has the same views on issue after issue, has the same religious and sexual orientation, likes the same things, eats at the same fast-food places, drinks the same beer.

Do I want somebody who is just like me to win an election? Hell, no. That would mean I think I am qualified to hold public office. I want someone who can hear me and my neighbors, even when we differ, and find solutions that work for the greatest number of us without trashing the rights of any. You don’t have to drink beer or raise a soccer player to do that.

As much fun as it might be to think about voting for the maverick hero that we glorify in the movies, we have to remember that self-aggrandizing obstreperousness is not leadership. It’s a favorite American myth that has long since lost its basis in reality.

In my opinion, no.

It looks like a bunch of Republicans like Trump. I’ve been saying for over 15 years the Republicans need some candidates for president that are more moderate, who don’t play into the religious right. That the so called base of the party is probably only about half of the party, and so there is another half. I’ve been saying, and yet they continue with the same schtick and he voted in to offices. I think most of us Democrats just really don’t understand a lot of how the right thinks.

@Jeruba GA

@Jeruba can represent me on this response. In fact, so can @Hawaii_Jake.

I’m always a little bothered by the responses in this forum of those who think that the Republican party and those who support it are somehow “off”, or “wrong” in any number of fundamental ways; that they are somehow monstrous. I can assure those people that most Republicans (aside from a few zealots whom they may feel to be somehow representative of the whole body) do not feel that way about Democrats or the Democratic party. I don’t see that kind of response from the avowed Republicans on the board; I hope I’m not just blind to it. (In fact, I would take it even further and suggest that we probably would do better to have more parties involved in our politics, even without a formal parliamentarian form of government.) For my part, I accept the existence – and fully respect their right to be as wrong as they usually are about most matters of government – of both major parties.

However, I will agree that the Republican party has been beset since before Reagan’s day with a perceived alignment with fundamentalist Christianity. (Not that I’m knocking fundamentalist Christianity in this response; I’ll do that plenty of other places but fundamentalist religion of all kinds is pretty much anathema to any nation that is as large and diverse as this one is. And too simplistic, too.) The Democratic party platform generally contains its own ideological blind spots, including the current treatment of “climate change” as unquestionable received wisdom from on high, and the exceedingly silly attempts to “tolerate” all kinds of absolutely intolerable behavior and policies that seek to normalize acceptance of all cultures, even those that explicitly seek to destroy ours.

The question of “ideological purity” applies to more than just evangelical Christians in the Republican party, though. What some call the “pragmatic” faction a lot of us who stand apart from both major parties see as just “Democrats-Lite”. In other words, “Doing the same thing, just a bit slower.” Mitt Romney had a point – though he walked away from it – when he made the claim during his campaign that some “47% of the population is beholden to the federal government”. A lot of us (non-Republicans) wished that he had pursued that line of attack.

Social Security recipients, for one thing, though in general they currently support the status quo because it feeds them, frequently recognize unhappily that they are wards of the state. That’s not a comfortable place to be. Years ago I used to suggest that those of us who were decades away from retirement should make a bargain to sacrifice all that we had at that time paid in to FICA with a promise that we would never make a claim against it, as long as we didn’t have to pay any more. Sadly, I’m moving towards retirement now myself, and I’m less inclined to make that bargain – but that’s what constitutes “support” for Social Security now. That’s why Social Security is “the most popular program” that the federal government administers. Hooray for that kind of popularity.

Likewise most other federal programs that could be named. The more that government attempts, the more it screws up, and the more it has to do to fix the last screwup.

Yes, there is a place for the federal government in upholding some basic safety net for the absolutely disadvantaged, disabled and hopeless among us. But some “ideological” Republicans (properly, I think, and if this was the extent of their ideology I might even join them) want to start to dismantle the overarching welfare state, while those considered by some here to be “pragmatic” just prefer to go-along-to-get-along. I think that’s wrong, too.

Getting back to the question: The Republican party isn’t going anywhere soon. There’s too much “there” there – including “too much government” with too much of its own inertia. This is not the United States of 1860 where a regionally fractious issue has arisen to split the nation as dramatically along party lines as slavery did then, and where a champion against the weaker region’s defining issue can further split the Whig party to become “the Republicans” in the first place.

I expect that we’ll keep electing both Democrats and Republicans to the White House (and then handing control of Congress to the other party on a slightly different cycle) because the nation is so closely divided on so many issues that radicals on either side can tempt the swing voters in the middle to one side or the other.

As @Hawaii_Jake suggests, the jockeying for position right now is not indicative of the entire race to be run from now until next November. Way too early to call for anyone yet, except those who have already dropped out.

So it all comes down to some middle-aged woman in Columbus, Ohio, and her small circle of friends to determine who will be our next president.

Thank you, @CWOTUS, for the well-thought-out answer. I agree completely that the current difficulties in the Republican party have most to do with their alliance with the religious right. I said it when Reagan won that their alignment with the religious right would come back to haunt them. Fundamentalist religious zealots cannot effectively govern. Leading a nation takes compromise, and those people who believe they are fighting God’s fight never compromise. It’s ultimately an untenable stance, as far as governing is concerned.

@jaytkay You wrote:
“In the Presidential race, the Republicans have five losses and one win since 1992.
ONE win 25 years.”

How do you figure? Seems to me 1992 was Clinton, then Clinton 96, Bush 00, Bush 04, Obama 08, Obama 12. That’s 2 wins in 6, or 1 in 3, all being 2-term presidents. Also before that were 3 Repulican wins in a row: 1984 Reagan, Reagan 88, Bush 92.

@Zaku

I think @jaytkay is saying Gore won the popular vote in 2000, and that Bush “won” via political subterfuge.

Correct, Gore won the popular vote.

And yes, I am understand the electoral college. Regardless, more people voted for the Democrat for President in every election but one.

Trump and Carson should divorce themselves from traditional Republican politics.
Take Cruz with them.

Don’t they have enough money to buy start a 3rd party?

The times they are a-changing. The Republican party is not going away, but it is going to have to make adjustments. All their core demographic groups are declining. Religious belief is falling and the percentage of non-college educated whites is falling. Overall whites are on their way to becoming a minority. If the Republicans continue their present ways they will keep losing presidential elections and are likely to be losing control of the Senate. The only reason they will be holding onto the House for awhile is due to gerrymandering.

The Democrats will be affected by change as well. Although Sanders has no chance of being nominated, the beliefs of people like him and Elizabeth Warren present a real challenge to the neo-liberal agenda.

The economy is more skewed toward the wealthy than at any time since the Depression. The recent recession is taking forever to go away and the jobs that are being created do not for the most part pay very well. College tuition is sky high and being a college graduate no longer guarantees a good paying job. There is a large number of people in their twenties who are living at home with their parents.

Something has to give. The rift in the Republican party is only a part of it.

While it is premature to announce the collapse of the GOP, the cracks in the groaning superstructure of the operation are glaring and expanding as we watch. Fundamentally, the party’s manifest difficulties amount to the chickens coming home to roost regarding the infamous Southern strategy. One of the rocks rarely overturned for inspection is that a major consequence of that strategy was the party being saddled with lots of repulsive bozos formerly confined to the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. But the strategy zoomed past the mere recruitment of racists and bigots to include the entire spectrum of colorful lunacy at which our nation excels. It may well be argued that loss of control of the party by Northeastern elitists was inevitable. The irony in this is that the resulting democratization of the GOP granted those Goldwater affectionately labeled ” the lunatic fringe” a voice. And the shrillness of that voice rings loudly in our collective ears. Now while the Democratic Party may be nobody’s pillar of enlightenment, the breathtaking parade of indufficiencies on the part of their rivals should frighten us all.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not claiming that the majority of conservatives are whack job nut cases, but I am stating that the party is confronted with a daunting crisis in there are simply not enough fat cat votes to grant them political power, and Trump’s numbers all by themselves show you EXACTLY who must be mollified if the party is to retain political relevance. All I can say to our conservative fans here is “good luck with that!”

They are basically threats to the GOP to stop denouncing them or they will hand the election over to the left. Scary shit when you think about it. If they’ll play these if I can’t have it none of you can games just think what could happen if we give them the keys to the kingdom.

I think it would probably benefit the country if Trump, Carson and Sanders all started independent parties. Rand Paul should revive his, too.

The extremes need some place to wallow so that the majority of middle America can re-take the governance of the United States.

I do not think they are disintegrating.
I think they are now at a crossroads where they have their base so radicalised (Trump still leads the polls), that the management now has to decide whether they should give in to the radical base and become an overtly fascist party, or decide to push back and tell their base voters that they have become too extremist.
My money is on the former.

And they are the base, because 64% of republican voters, a clear majority, found nothing wrong with the demand to not let a single muslim into the country.
They did not find anything wrong with putting refugees into concentration camps.
They did not find anything wrong with “registering” all Muslims like Jews in the 3rd Reich.
Facists and Neonazis now make up the majority of the republican base.

I agree that Trump’s fans fulfill both definitions of “base”. The problem for the GOP is that there is no Republican candidate going anywhere without them. There’s still nearly a year to go, but the typical ability of both parties to force candidates on the electorate appears severely eroded. The usual “trump” card (how ironic) of “where else have they to go” is being savaged by both Trump and Sanders who are not about to be sidelined.

Americans are incredibly spoiled and incredibly insular, and they are just trying to maintain the status quo.

Both machines are betting that when it comes down to the wire, their constituencies will fall into line rather than risk the Presidency handed to the other side. It looks as though this time the risk of failure confronting “my way or the ogre” is substantial, and the threatened wreckage of traditional politics in the country is colossal.

Salon magazine has an article talking about an historical precedent for the current situation. There really do seem to be deep parallels. I confess that I was not aware that Breckinridge ran for president, let alone that he came in second. All I remember learning about that election are the Lincoln/Douglas debates, which lose a lot of their significance given the final vote tallies.

France’s recent election is said to guarantee the end of their (only) 2 party system.
I hope that happens in the US.

Article discussing Republican demographic problem. In the short term things do not look to good for them.