NY TIMES
Everywhere you look, in the year of Donald J. Trump, observers are talking about a national party realignment or a Republican death spiral. Our two-party system has not undergone a major realignment since the South became solidly Republican. There has not been a major-party demise since the Whigs collapsed on the eve of the Civil War.
Mr. Trump (or Ted Cruz) could very well lead the party to a decisive and divisive defeat. If it was catastrophic enough, it could lead to changes in party strategy. Yet predictions of a Republican crackup should be greeted with skepticism. While rumors of the death of the Republican Party have been common in recent presidential elections, they have proved again and again to be vastly exaggerated.
The gap between expectations and political realities reflects two mistakes: The first is to overestimate the centrality of presidential contests to our system of checks and balances.
The second is to misunderstand the recent Republican electoral successes — which rest less on effective governance than on attacking government, and especially the occupant of the Oval Office.
Think back to 2008. George W. Bush’s exit was humiliating. The party’s approval ratings had fallen to modern lows.
The verdict was clear: The Republican Party had to change or die.
Only it didn’t do either. Rather than reform and moderation, the party started a campaign of confrontation and obstruction of the new administration.
Two years later that strategy paid off. In a midterm election President Obama called a “shellacking,” Republicans gained more seats in the House of Representatives than any party had since 1938.
But this unimpressive presidential record has not signaled a party on the verge of collapse. On the contrary, Republicans have done quite well — holding the House, the Senate or both for much of the past three decades while increasing their tally of governorships and state legislatures. They have done so, moreover, without undertaking the kind of adjustment Democrats did after Walter Mondale’s landslide loss in 1984 (nurturing “new Democrats” like Bill Clinton).
Instead, on major issues, the party’s standard-bearers have moved steadily to the right, at least until Mr. Trump came on the scene. Solving this puzzle is key to understanding why grand electoral losses haven’t killed the G.O.P..
The White House is a major prize, but in our system of checks and balances, the president legislates with Congress. In the context of a divided electorate, highly polarized parties and nonstop combat in an unending string of elections to fill national and state offices, presidential contests are less likely to usher in dominance than to invite opposition.
That’s in part because presidential election years — with high and demographically diverse turnout and more or less equal weighting of votes across the country — look very different from the more frequent elections that fill these other institutions. As the political scientist Thomas F. Schaller argued in his book “The Stronghold,” the Republican Party has become centered in Congress, reflecting the geography of its changing base of support.
Over the last generation, Republicans have gained strength in rural areas. This creates a formidable advantage in the Senate, where less populous states get just as many seats as more populous ones.
This structural edge applies to the House. Many Democratic votes are “wasted” in majorities piled up in cities. Republicans can maintain a majority even while Democrats win more votes. In 2012, Republicans had a more than 30-seat edge in the House despite receiving a minority of votes cast in House races.
Our frequent elections offer another structural advantage for Republicans: Voter turnout has always steeply dropped from presidential elections to off-year elections. What is new is the big advantage Republicans now enjoy in the low-turnout environment of nonpresidential years, fed largely by the shift of older voters (who have the highest turnout rates) from the Democratic Party to the Republicans. The imbalance helps explain Republican success in elections for governor, more than four-fifths of which do not coincide with presidential elections.
The electorate is changing in ways that will weaken the Republican advantage in the future — in particular, it’s becoming much more diverse. But Republicans have managed to hold back this tide to some extent by making voting harder (with voter ID laws and the like) and by mobilizing their core voters even more aggressively. And they’ve mobilized them not in spite of their presidential disadvantage, but often by virtue of it.
It is not simply that the G.O.P. enjoys these structural advantages. More and more, it feeds on the failure of its presidential standard-bearers. Party leaders sincerely lament these repeated losses (and may come to lament them more with the Supreme Court’s balance now on the line). They are not trying to win by losing. But they are doing just that, and this tells us a lot about how the contemporary Republican Party works.
Republicans excel at generating and then exploiting hostility to government, and thrive on being in opposition, especially to presidents. Almost without fail, recent presidential losses were followed by a “backlash” election — in 1994, 2010 and 2014 — in which the G.O.P. swept to victories in Congress and statehouses.
The one revealing exception is 1998, after President Bill Clinton’s re-election. Republicans actually lost seats, forcing Newt Gingrich to resign as speaker of the House. The reason, however, was truly extraordinary: Republicans impeached the president of the United States.
Given the current dysfunction of the Republican Party, many both inside and outside Republican ranks are probably hoping that a big defeat will force the party to change. But waiting, as the current president once put it, for the “fever” to break may be fruitless.
Try this setup instead: It’s 2017. After Mr. Trump’s landslide defeat, President Clinton has a Democratic Senate and House of Representatives. The Republican National Committee has just released its latest post-mortem — it probably looks a lot like the post-2012 soul-searching exercise, the Growth and Opportunity Project, which encouraged moderation in tone and inclusiveness in policy.
But that blueprint is ignored. Instead, the party quickly regroups in opposition to the incoming administration. Most Republican voters hate Mrs. Clinton even more than they hated Mr. Obama. The conservative apparatus for sowing discontent with a new administration is in place, flush with cash and battle-tested.
But that blueprint is ignored. Instead, the party quickly regroups in opposition to the incoming administration. Most Republican voters hate Mrs. Clinton even more than they hated Mr. Obama. The conservative apparatus for sowing discontent with a new administration is in place, flush with cash and battle-tested.
For Republicans in and outside government, it will be a time not for facing up to hard truths but for doubling down on hardball tactics.
American voters choose presidents, not kings (or queens). American political institutions are, and were designed to be, a complex system of interlocking parts. The drama of presidential campaigns should not blind us to these longstanding and deeply rooted dynamics or to their perverse effect: They allow the Republican Party to thrive even as its presidential candidates do not.
More worrisome, they reinforce a dangerous spiral. The most effective Republican response to its own unpopularity in presidential elections is to take steps to make the American political system more unpopular still.