> but the FPTP system means that one of the existing parties must die in the process.
2020 will be really interesting, assumes Trump loses this election... honestly I'd not be surprised when the Republicans break up.
2020 will be really interesting, assumes Trump loses this election... honestly I'd not be surprised when the Republicans break up.
What is true is that most people are more suspicious of all politicians, thanks to the Internet's information distribution peers. No shakeup of the orthodoxy will change that.
The Republicans have not been absurdly successful in an democratic support sense. over the past 25 yesrs, they've steadily increase their reliance on electoral college bias, voter suppression, and a Republican judiciary. When the party's success depends on Supreme Court decisions made by a previous President they helped get installed by the Supreme Court overruling the voters, they are on very thin ice democratically.
Republicans haven't won the popular vote for a non-incumbent since 1988, or 1980 if you consider VP GHW Bush as an incumbent.
By 2016 the Republicans had it all back as well as 34 governorships. It took only 2 years to get Congress back.
People spoke of a Democratic Party that had no future and even the chance of a constitutional convention if republicans could get a few more seats in 2016.
It’s easier to make a claim for power when you don’t have it. Governing is harder than organizing and campaigning. Both parties over the last 2 admins could have done whatever they wanted at certain points but still weren’t able to. We don’t have M4A and we never built the wall.
Democrats will get power, be accused of overreach at some point from republicans and of not living up to promise by some democrats creating disillusion. And then pass the power back.
I don’t think most Trump voters (or Americans) are racist, at least by the definition of the word most people outside the university system today use.
They hoped for change ("yes we can", "change we need"), but Obama failed to deliver as he was blocked by the Republican Senate for six years straight (thanks to "Moscow Mitch" McConnell). Trump and his "we will drain the swamp for real this time" message was exactly the right thing to offer to this voter group, especially as the Democrat candidate was Hillary Clinton - as "establishment" as one can be.
If there's one thing that Obama and the then-Democrat leadership abysmally failed, it is that they did not use the House+Senate+Presidency tripe majority to actually enact change in the first two years. I bloody hope that the Democrats can gain the Senate and especially that Biden will have learned his lesson!
This is where Trump and the now-Republican leadership failed as well. Unfortunately the mainstream media and the perpetual insane tantrums thrown by the losers have crippled his entire term.
> I bloody hope that the Democrats can gain the Senate and especially that Biden will have learned his lesson!
I bloody hope that the Republicans can keep the Senate and that Biden will fade into obscurity like "Crooked Hillary" Clinton!
The GOP needs to do what John Smith, Tony and Gordan did and kick out the entryist faction that is destroying the party but I suspect its to late.
The way I explain my view on the election is that it is a choice between a shit sandwich and a shit sandwich without the bread. Which one is which depends on the topic/policy that matters most to each voter, but they are both terrible choices.
Everyone they could put up would just get smeared and mercilessly attacked by the entire political and media right wing, from the far right Tea Party/QAnon/MAGA/Breitbart/Fox following of the Republicans to the fringes of the Democrats, as "socialist", "communist" or whatever. Even Joe fucking Biden who doesn't support something as basic as M4A gets called an "anarchist ally", it's madness.
I am not sure how the US is ever supposed to fix this, given literal decades of red scare brainwashing. I'm afraid that the only real way out of the current mess, assuming that either Trump "wins" (or wins for real) or Biden gets locked by a R-majority Senate under "Moscow Mitch" McConnell may/will be some sort of revolution - when there are millions upon millions of people who are out of a job and homeless, who have nothing to lose any more.
Personally I don't think America can be fixed at this point.
The gap between the tribes is now so extreme it's practically evolutionary speciation, and Democrats and Republicans are barely breeding with each other.
This is not a joke. The differences seem to be rooted in psychology - strongly correlated with parenting - and perhaps through inherited brain structure.
At some point "They are not like us" stops being rhetoric and becomes biological reality. I think we're closer to that point than we realise - in the US, and also the UK.
> This is not a joke. The differences seem to be rooted in psychology - strongly correlated with parenting - and perhaps through inherited brain structure.
I have a hard time believing this. my own two parents are on more or less opposite ends of the mainstream political spectrum. in my generation, it seems pretty common to find right-leaning (especially libertarian) men dating liberal women. the socially conscious girlfriend gently scolding her boyfriend for saying something non-PC is so common, it's almost a trope at this point. the far-left progressives and full-on MAGA types seem incapable of coexisting in the same room for more than five minutes, but I don't think there are nearly as many of either of these as you would conclude from watching the news and reading social media.
most people just want to live their lives and don't see a compelling reason to scream their political positions out into the world. I think one of the likely outcomes in the next ten years is that we collectively realize the polarization of US culture was mostly an illusion.
That is only signed up and dues paying members of the party vote to select candidates
So I guess what I'm saying is I would be surprised because I don't think any single camp within the Republican party is dominant enough to beat the rest of the party. But on the other hand I was surprised when the party picked Trump as their candidate, so I could be surprised again.