Martin Longman has a thoughts on the coming landslide and what it will mean for the two political parties:
Trump will force loyal Republicans to support or tolerate or grudgingly accept many of the things they’ve spent their whole lives warning us would lead to armageddon. When that happens, many of them will change their core beliefs and their standards for what a Republican should be and what they should represent. When it’s over, assuming he loses, the party will never be the same. They will never go back to those three legs of the stool. And, if he wins, the party will definitely be transformed into something unrecognizable.
There are areas where this will cause actual party shifting. At first, free-traders will move to the Democrats simply because they’ll get a fairer shake and because they’re appalled by Trump. But they won’t find a party to go back to later, and they’ll rightly conclude that a taxing, regulating party that isn’t anti-business is a better home than a xenophobic gathering of anti-elite rageoholics. Neoconservatives will vote for Hillary out of genuine panic that Trump might get the nuclear codes, but they can’t afford to be politically homeless because their livelihood is built on influence. They’ll find that a party that supports the postwar consensus on American internationalism is preferable to one that wants to encourage nuclear proliferation and destroying our alliances in Europe, the Far East, and the Arab world. Conservative intellectuals (like George Will) aren’t the biggest demographic, but they’re important to the Conservative Movement. They will leave Trump’s party and try to rebuild something to take its place. Some will simply find the anti-intellectualism of the Republican Party has become too much, and they’ll make peace with the Democrats. Others will come limping along later when their efforts to remake what has been lost become obvious failures.
And this assumes that Trump actually succeeds in Etch-A-Sketching his racism out of the fall campaign. He’s stuck with the Wall, although he can try to deemphasize it. But if he can’t beat his rap for being an out-and-out racist, he’s going to lose “respectable” people from all over this country who now send their white kids to the most amazingly pluralistic schools. If the Republican Party gets branded as a National Front party, they’re not just losing the youth for generations, they’re losing an enormous chunk of tax-averse educated professionals. This is also how the Republicans could conceivably lose the House of Representatives, which was something unthinkable pre-Trump.
Now, I can anticipate some reactions to this.
A lot of Democrats, particularly Sanders Democrats, don’t want to hear that the result of their labors will be a party newly filled with free-traders, militarists, tax-averse white professionals, and conservative intellectuals. My response is twofold.
First, they have nowhere else to go but out of politics altogether, and that isn’t going to work for a lot of them. So, get your welcome mat out, because this is how a major party achieves LBJ-like dominance. It’s not by purity, but by winning the argument in decisive fashion.
Second, at least initially, the Sanders wing of the party will have more influence and juice than they had before. That’s because they will have representation at the convention and support for a lot of their ideas from the majority of traditional Democrats, including most of Clinton’s supporters. What will be interesting to see is how some of those ideas might fare if they are picked up by Trump and then rejected in emphatic fashion in November. That would be unfortunate if you care about fair trade, for example. Nonetheless, the progressive instincts of the Democratic Party will be enlivened at least for the initial stages of a Clinton presidency. The newcomers won’t be anything but padded numbers until substantially later, and no sooner really than when Clinton seeks reelection.
I just want to add one additional thought before retiring for the night. The Republicans have been here before and bounced back in short order. They won the presidency four years after Goldwater got thumped and six years after Nixon resigned. They’ve made huge gains on the state, local and federal level during midterm elections in the Obama Era.
But think about this.
They accomplished their turnarounds in the 1960’s and 1970’s by going after the Democrats’ soft spot in the South. Where is the Democrats’ soft spot now?
Certainly, you can look at the Rust Belt and the grumpy mood of the white working class, but there’s nothing on the scale of Jim Crow. How do the Republicans bounce back and begin a realignment of the realignment?
There is a lot to unpack here. Let’s start here: American political parties should really be divided into four parties. First you would have the Green Socialists, with figures like Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders and Ralph Nader. These are your ultra liberals, ultra progressives, socialists and communists. Next you would have your liberal-left-of-center party known as the Democrats, are are very much like our own Democratic Party today. It’s leading figures would be Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean. Your standard left of center realist progressives and pragmatic liberals, sprinkled in with some moderates. To the right of center you would have your business conservative party, the Republicans. I imagine this party to be what the Republican Party used to be like in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, before the Religious Right took it over and then the White Supremacists joined. The leading figures of that party would be Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and John McCain. And then you would have the White Christian Nationalists, with Mike Huckabee, Donald Trump, Pat Buchanan, Sarah Palin, and Ted Cruz being its leading figures.
If America was a parliamentary democracy, and we have a Prime Minister rather than a President as the chief executive, then surely these parties would exist, especially if you had some form of non-first past the post voting system. But we live in Presidential Republic with single member winner take all districts and states, meaning that whomever wins 50+1 wins it all, which will naturally always favor a two party system. Until we rip up our Constitution and start over, the two party system is the way our politics are structured. And that means each party has keep their two component parties intact in a coalition.
Right now, the Democrats are most assuredly doing a better job of that. The vast majority of the Bernie Sanders coalition will support Democrat Hillary Clinton in the fall, while some will stay home or vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who is especially evil for saying Hillary was a horrible mother on Mother’s Day (third party candidates have to say weird stupid shit to get noticed, and that is why they will remain third party candidates).
Meanwhile, the GOP coalition of Republicans and Christian Nationalists is falling apart now that a Christian Nationalist has actually won the nomination. You see, Republicans always used the Christian Nationalists for their votes and then treated them like rubes forever. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and Republicans don’t like it.
Now, Martin is right, in that some leading free trade and neoconservative figures will try to emigrate over to the Democratic Party, at least for a while. But I don’t think that is going to work because the Sanders wing is too strong for the Democratic Party to go full DLC Third Way again. The Democrats only went that way after 1988 because dyed in the wool liberals had lost time and again for three elections in a row and something was needed to win back the middle so as to convince the country that being a Democrat did not mean being evil. Within the Democratic Party, the Progressives have been ascendant since 2003, culminating with taking over the party literally in 2005, nominating a Progressive in 2009, and now nominating another in 2016 (yes, Hillary is progressive, she is just not pure enough for some, and too practical for others, with some transgressions in her past). So, the borrow a surgical analogy, if you try to transplant free trade and neoconservative Republicans into the Democratic Party as it stands today, it will be rejected. It might have worked in 2000 or 2002. Not now.
No, what this election is going to do is convince some moderate Republicans that they are actually Democrats. I have seen this affect happen in real time on my Facebook feed. On of my mentors in my legal career has been a life long Eisenhower/Nixon/Reagan Republican. She hates Trump, and she has become a fervent Hillary supporter. Now, in truth, she was already a Democrat, with socially liberal positions on reproductive choice and the like (she would say socially libertarian), but her cultural affinity to being a Republican is just too strong. She was always a Republican. Her family was Republican. But Trump was a bridge too far.
So that is what this going to provide: not wholesale movement of ideological blocs, but recognition of what is already reality. Just like in 1994 Southern Conservative Democrats realized that they were actually Republicans.