This Just In: The Republican Party Is Dying — Again

L iberal writers spend an inordinate amount of time convincing themselves that the Republican Party is on the verge of extinction. The imminent death of the GOP is now in at least its fifth decade and counting. If it isn’t Watergate that kills it, it’s demographics, it’s the geriatric base, or it’s the alleged “radicalism.”

And if they needed any more confirmation, a recent Gallup poll found that Democrats lead Republicans by nine points in party ID and leaning, the largest advantage in a quarter since 2012:

This might be the big one. But let’s look to see what former historic lows mean in context.

In 1993, Gallup found that a record low 39 percent of Americans either leaned or identified as Republican. The next year, the GOP won 54 seats in the House — the largest increase by either party since 1948 — and gained eight seats in the Senate, putting an end to the Clinton administration’s agenda and launching the “Republican Revolution.” By 1996, the Democratic president had to say things such as the “era of big government is over” in his State of the Union address to placate the electorate.

In 1998, a mere 40 percent of voters leaned or called themselves Republicans. In the 1998 and 2000 elections, both closely contested, Republicans held on to both houses of Congress.

In 2008, Republicans hit another record low of 39 percent. Intellectuals began writing books with titles such as The Death of Conservatism, and reporters began pondering the implications of a nation without an opposition party. In 2010, the GOP won 63 seats in the House — beating 1994 to become the biggest shift in Congress since the 1948 elections — and seven seats in the Senate. Republicans spent the next eight years accruing historic gains in state legislatures and governorships across the country.

In 2012, again, only 40 percent of Americans identified as Republicans, the lowest level until today. In 2014, the GOP gained nine seats in the Senate, the largest increase in 32 years by any party, and picked up another 13 seats in the House, holding their largest majority since the early 1930s.

Now, I’m not predicting that Republicans are going to win another wave election in 2022, though it certainly wouldn’t be an ahistorical event if Democrats, now holding one of the narrowest majorities in recent memory, lost control of both houses. One strongly suspects that no matter how annoyed conservatives become at the Republican Party — it’s not conservative enough, it’s too conservative, too Trumpy, not Trumpy enough — they aren’t yet prepared to support government-funded late-term abortions, gun grabs, progressive health-care plans, widespread infringement on economic freedom to “tackle” global warming, and so on. Parties are loose coalitions of compatible interests. In the end, though, politics are about choices. And things change. Events occur. Policies fail. Communities evolve.

Yet, some Democrats seem perpetually surprised that another party even exists. For a while, we went through the What’s the Matter with Kansas? phase, in which liberals wondered why so many of their fellow citizens voted against their alleged best interests. Fox News and corporations had been bamboozling the yokels into being Republicans before settling on blaming the Russians and racism. When all else fails, liberals will grouse about the supposed undemocratic inequities of the Constitution.

Democrats have internalized the results of years of push-polling that show an overwhelming majority of Americans sharing their vision for the future. “Do you want to tackle climate change?” asks the pollster. “I sure do!” affirms 75 percent of voters who have yet to learn about the specific intrusions and colossal cost the Democrats have planned for them.

Indeed, so confident are liberals about the decency, efficacy, and popularity of their positions that they’ve begun arguing that the throwaway, and often fleeting, poll answers Americans give are more reflective of the electorate than the politicians who represent them. “The White House,” The Hill reports, “wants to change how people perceive bipartisanship, arguing that if they put forward proposals that are backed by Republicans and independents, they should be seen as bipartisan even if GOP lawmakers in Washington don’t vote for them.”

Of course, in the bubble of political commentary, people tend to convince themselves that average Americans will get just as hysterical as they do. “The Republican Party Is Now in Its End Stages,” says the title of a recent Tom Nichols Atlantic piece. “The Republican Party has become,” he writes, “in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s.” The Washington Post’s Dan Drezner asks: “Are American conservatives facing an extinction-level event?” And Max Boot argues that “the GOP can’t be saved” for the thousandth time.

And for the thousandth time, modern political parties don’t work that way.