The GOP Future
By Nayyer Ali MD
In a few days America goes to the polls. Actually it’s been going to the polls with early voting for several weeks and over 80 million people have voted early. Enthusiasm and interest in this election is off the charts, total number of votes cast may go past 150 million.
While America elects a President every four years, this is probably one of the most important elections of the last 70 years. Will America validate a politics of racism and ignorance and white nationalism, or will it definitively reject Trump and throw him out of the White House?
While Democrats are scarred from the Clinton defeat in 2016, when the widespread assumption was that Trump had no chance, 2020 is not 2016. With only a few days left in the race, Trump is too far behind, and has no argument that will change voter preferences. In 2016, Clinton’s polling lead collapsed in the last 10 days due to a letter from FBI Director James Comey stating that the FBI had a new laptop with Clinton emails they were investigating. That was enough to turn a few percent of the country against her, and her lead in the polls dropped from 6% to 3% by election day. When the votes were counted, she won by 2%, so the polls were actually quite accurate, but because of the Electoral College, she could not win enough states to give her the White House, and Trump squeaked by.
This time, Biden’s lead is huge, averaging about 10% nationally. The individual state polls also show him safely ahead in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, the three Democratic leaning states that flipped to Trump in 2016 and gave him the election. Biden is also doing very well in several southern states. He is ahead in Florida and North Carolina, and appears to have things very close in Georgia and Texas. Biden also is quite competitive in Iowa and Ohio, states that Trump won easily in 2016, and is leading in Arizona. If Biden wins all these states, he will blow out Trump in a landslide of 413 Electoral Votes to 125 for Trump.
Another big shift is helping the Democrats. Ticket splitting, where a voter votes for a different party for Senate or House than they do for President, has declined dramatically. In 1972, the Republican Richard Nixon won a 49 state landslide, but the Democrats still kept the majority in the House and Senate. This time, a Biden landslide will mean that Democrats will keep control of the House and likely add 10-15 seats, while grabbing control of the Senate. They look set to win at least four races in Maine, North Carolina, Colorado, and Texas, and have a good shot at Iowa, both seats in Georgia, and perhaps Montana. In a real Biden landslide, they may even pick up Senate seats in Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina, but those are unlikely.
This massive defeat that is heading toward the Republican Party has long-term implications for the American political system. Most healthy democracies have two large parties or coalitions, one conservative and one liberal, representing the two main choices of political thought. In America, however, the party of conservatives, namely the Republicans, has gone off the rails. Under Trump, it has become the party of racism, White nationalism, religious bigotry, rejection of science (either with climate change or with the COVID pandemic), and plutocracy, whose main real purpose is to cut the taxes of its wealthiest donors. When the Republicans had total control of the government in the first two years of Trump’s rule, they did not pass a single piece of significant legislation, other than a tax cut for corporations that benefited the wealthiest Americans at a time when they had no need of it. The party is totally bankrupt of ideas or policies, so much so that they did not even bother creating a party platform of what Republicans stand for, an exercise both parties have done for over a hundred years with each election. When asked what his second term agenda was, all Trump could come up with was “making America great again”. What utter nonsense.
The Republican Party squeezed out one last win of the White House in 2016 relying on its base of White voters, mostly non-college educated or evangelical Christians opposed to abortion. This strategy has run its course. The GOP can never capture the White House again with this playbook. After its massive defeat in a few days the party will have to sort out what kind of future it wants. If it does not undergo fundamental change, it will continue to shrink to a rump party confined to the small rural conservative states, but no longer competitive at the national level.
At some point, for American democracy to be healthy, a new conservative party must be rebuilt. Whether that begins as a totally new party, or is a result of internal reforms in the Republican Party, remains to be seen. But it will have to be a party that is comfortable with an America that treats all its minorities and women as equals, that accepts the right of women to have abortions, that is willing to deal with climate change, that supports universal access to health care, and that does not think that cutting taxes on the wealthy is the primary goal of economic policy. Such a party might be able to win elections in the future, but may not emerge until the 2030’s, after the Republicans spend a decade in the wilderness and their base voters finally accept the need for fundamental reform.
