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In mid-August, with two months to voting day, pollster Nate Silver’s Fivethirtyeight.com reports that Hillary Clinton has an 87.5 per cent chance to become the next U.S. president. It’s certainly within the range of probability that Clinton will win the U.S. presidential election by a landslide not seen since Ronald Reagan in 1984 — and Franklin Delano Roosevelt before him.
Yet historically, there’s no incumbent advantage in running for a third Democratic term after a two-term Democratic President. No Democrat in that position has won since the nineteenth century.
The challenger should have the advantage in this contest. For some reason, the Republicans threw it away and chose to run as the “natural ruling party” — that is, the party of white male privilege. They preached fire and brimstone to scare strayed sheep back into the fold, instead of trying to seduce new voters with their message. They had nothing to offer but fear of the unfamiliar.
The Republican presidential candidate, let’s call him DT, projected the Shock Jock model of getting attention by promising to protect “America” from everyone who doesn’t look like him — women, people of colour, people with disabilities, people with accents, war heroes, people who show some symbol of their faith — thus alienating the Americans he mocked and also any white able-bodied person who cared about, say, a disabled child, or a Muslim army captain who died shielding his troops from a massive suicide blast. As a result, DT’s Shock Jock approval rating is riding lower than a dragging muffler right now, at less than 33 per cent. That’s a disapproval raiting of 56 percent.
By contrast, the high-riding Democrats have embraced the changing demographics, in policies, practices and platform time — an approach they are no doubt aware has been highly successful in Canada. Indeed, former Obama advisers have worked as consultants with the federal Liberal and the Alberta NDP parties.
Both Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and Rachel Notley’s NDP learned their demographics lessons, and both parties scored stunning electoral upsets. Watching Barack and Michelle Obama raising Hillary Clinton’s hand on the platform, I had no doubt their whole strategy and communications teams are supporting Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Which brings us to the question: what in the world is going to happen to the Republican party? I can think of a hundred reasons the party’s political license should have been revoked after Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scam, if not after Richard Nixon’s Watergate resignation. But to have a presidential candidate who constantly challenges the limits of decent behaviour is a whole new Gordian knot that nobody wants to cut open in public.
Hence the question: can the Republican party survive this election? Yes, because…
1. The two-party system is essential to the U.S. electoral system, although the parties have not always been as polarized as they are now. The GOP, the Party of Lincoln that freed the slaves, Nelson Rockefeller’s party that pushed for more implementation of the Civil Rights Act, has evolved before and it can evolve again.
2. Lewis Powell’s framework and the Koch brothers’ infrastructure have proved to be amazingly powerful and sturdy, from think tanks to states-rights co-ordination to “spontaneous” Tea Party uprisings that are covered by friendly Fox News.
3. The party may seek new directions because the libertarian Koch brothers are backing off, after seeing some expensive failures from their multibillion dollar investments meant to influence U.S. fiscal politics. Old tactics aren’t working. Republican spinmeister Frank Luntz, who invented negative campaigning, predicted this campaign would devolve into some of the dirtiest negative advertising the U.S. has ever seen. He was wrong. In 2012, spinmeister Karl Rove took $300 million for media management and not a single one of his candidates won. Without the Kochs’ thumb on the scale, the party may regain its own buoyancy and leadership.
4. History teaches us not to write off the landslide loser. Here in Canada, the Conservative party re-emerged even after the catastrophic 1993 federal election that wiped out almost the entire Conservative caucus except for two MPs, Jean Charest and Elsie Wayne. The Conservatives actually lost official party status because they lacked the required 12 MPs. Yet the Conservatives re-emerged in 2004 as a new party under Stephen Harper.
On the other hand: Can the Republican party survive? No, because…
1. The Republican party was already a very loose coalition after the 1960s, a grand compromise between New England (think Red Tory) patriarchs’ fiscal policies, and Southern evangelists’ social policies. Since the 1980s, that compromise was hijacked first by the Libertarian Koch brothers and now by Donald Trump’s Russian, white supremacist, and NRA connections. Too many ideologies spoil the broth.
2. The Tea Party is over. The Koch brothers invented and funded the Tea Party, whose popularity has plummeted from two-thirds of Republicans to a scant one-fifth. Without Koch money to sustain it, the artificial bubble of far-right liberterianism is deflating.
3. Frank Luntz invented negative advertising with the express purpose of discouraging voters. Republican voters may well stay away from the polls this November to show their disgust.
4. Republican-led voter suppression laws in several states are evidence that the party itself believes it cannot survive if all eligible Americans are allowed to vote. On the other hand, courts have struck down those laws in five states so far, out of 17, and court challenges are underway in another seven states, so the voter-suppression efforts may well backfire.
5. U.S. demographics have changed dramatically in a decade. Nearly one in three voters now belongs to a minority group. DT has not only alienated constituencies, he’s alienated entire demographic groups (such as African Americans and Latinos), possibly for generations. The Republicans may never regain those groups’ votes, which means they may never win enough votes nationally to take the presidency again.
6. Republicans are clearly running out of political dynasties. Nelson Rockefeller was the last of the liberal wing to try for GOP support. On the conservative side, no longer do we see George Romney’s boy Mitt or George H. Bush’s boy George W. (or even Jeb) stepping up to the nomination with the calm assurance of one born to the job.
Since Republican bloodlines have run thin, the party has shown very little concern about vetting its candidates. The party that claims to represent business sense, tradition, and a certain decorum, has nominated a brash, vulgar, deceitful, volatile, womanizing, huckster who has filed bankruptcy so many times — to avoid legitimate obligations — that he can no longer obtain a loan from any U.S. bank or financial institution. The party’s traditional voting base is liable to look askance at future candidates.
Every election is a crapshoot, of course. No one can foresee what will happen in the next two months, let alone afterwards. But unless the Republicans widen their voting base, sooner or later the party is doomed. FiveThirtyEight.com and The Atlantic both point out that Republicans have relied on a dwindling, aging segment of the population for their support.
The party could have just faded away. Strapped for talent, they could have chosen a woman to take the fall, the way Brian Mulroney did. But choosing a loose cannon like DT to lead the Republican Party to public humiliation and destruction looks like a much more spectacular way to go.
My guess? It’s time to don helmets and prepare for flying debris.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
