Modern marketing for political campaigns will adapt either way. It's pretty easy for campaigns to target demographics, and I'm sure that a GOP candidate could pull the right strings to get a plurality vote. Hispanics, for example, are the weak link in the Democratic tent, as are asians who vote democratic but live in a fairly conservative way.
There was a bunch of hubub on the Right in the fall about a Democrat win leading to Democrats tilting the tables in all sorts of ways that would lead to a "permanent Democrat majority".
I always came back to the same point as you, two-party politics will naturally self-balance at a pretty even split.
At a city / state level, you might be able to maintain one-party control through various levels of corruption / influence, but the nation itself is way too fickle to put up with that for long.
The weak link in the current majority will always tend to switch sides as soon as it appears that they might gain an advantage by doing so.
I am not holding my breath.
No, it doesn’t, unless the Republican Party doesn’t adapt to changing conditions as it has continuously since it’s founding. It probably guarantees the Republican Party will realign slightly around some peripheral issues to shift it's geographic focus slightly while retaining it's core economic message, and continue on without breaking stride.
Dislodging the duopoly (that is, opening the electoral system to 3rd parties) will require proportional representation full stop. Nothing else will do.
Maybe, but people probably thought that about Democratic-Republicans and Federalists, or Democrats and Whigs. The subsequent realignments have so far been more gradual adaptations within the existing major parties, but a radical and suddenly realignment destroying (and replacing, either immediately or in short order) one of the majors is still possible.
> Dislodging the duopoly (that is, opening the electoral system to 3rd parties) will require proportional representation full stop.
Something like that, yes. (Not necessarily party-list PR, but electoral systems with greater proportionality than FPTP.)
If you disagree with that last point, I sincerely hope you're right, but one need only cite the weight of history and Duverger's law to support it.
And the Supreme Court, and many lower courts, which have been packed with Republicans.
Not to mention the military and the police, and probably the intelligence agencies too.
I am aware that is not necessarily true, but it is also in the self-interest of the judges to be perceived as impartial, otherwise they loose their authority.
Police, military and intelligence agencies are government agencies, and are part of the executive. They should do their job irregardless of who is in power. A lot of high ranking people have worked through several administrations because they simply do their job, irregardless of their political leanings. Partisanship is harmful for those people, as it threatens their job security.
If that were true you wouldn't have liberals appointing liberal judges and conservatives appointing conservatives, and fighting tooth and nail over it.
Also, the Supreme Court effectively makes the law, not just follows it, and that's true to some extent of lower courts as well, as most cases never make it to the SC.
It's not a coincidence that now that we have a conservative Supreme Court it's widely expected that Roe v Wade is going to get overturned soon. The law didn't change, but who's on the SC did.
"They should do their job irregardless of who is in power."
They have a lot leeway as to how to do their job, and many of them will use their power to pursue vendettas against people they don't like, as we saw with Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Bagram, black sites around the world, and all the torture and murder that the police engage in.
Prison guards and employees of ICE and Homeland Security are also probably mostly Republicans, and it's hard to argue that their politics and world view doesn't affect the way they do their job or why they are in those jobs in the first place.