After the recent conventions for both main parties, I personally believe this election could be the end of the Republican Party. That might sound extreme, but watching how each party handled the task of drawing together their deeply divided bases convinced me that the GOP has begun a downward spiral from which it may not recover. And the party that will replace them if they do fail is already ready and waiting in the wings.
Both the Democrats and Republicans faced a similar issue this election cycle of having a severely divided party. For the Democrats, it has mostly come together behind Clinton’s well-oiled political machine, especially with the endorsement of Sanders. There is no doubt that the Clinton campaign with be well funded and well strategized, and that no major democrat will refuse to support her. Sure they might lose a little support to third parties, but generally most left-leaning folks have accepted Hillary’s inevitability despite her shadiness.
The Trump campaign, on the other hand, is a train wreck in slow motion. If you watched or heard about any part of the RNC, you know. Even before the convention began, it didn’t look good, given that 20 out of 54 senators and 63 out of 247 representatives refused to attend (meaning a record number of absentees). There were relatively minor things like Melania’s plagiarism or the ongoing tech failures. And then there were the various attempts from anti-Trump delegates to somehow circumvent his nomination. And then there was Ted Cruz’s speech where he refused to endorse Trump by saying, “Don’t stay home in November. Stand, and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.” This speech added Cruz to the ever growing list of prominent Republicans who are disavowing Trump by saying they will vote for Clinton or for neither one. And that “neither” category is the most interesting one, since it provides a clear opening for another party.
The nomination of Trump might be the final blow, but the party has been struggling for a while. Both the Trump campaign and the party as a whole are losing badly in terms of fundraising, and there’s no sign of that trend reversing. This lack of funds might be driven by the identity crisis that has been brewing for years. After the 2012 election, they released a post-mortem paper where they laid out what they would need to change to be more successful in the future. One of the main points was the clear lack of appeal to women, minorities, and young people. In their own words, “The minority groups that President Obama carried with 80 percent of the vote in 2012 are on track to become a majority of the population.” They realized then that in order to survive they needed to fight the notion that the GOP is a party of old racist men.
And then they proceeded to do the exact opposite. Because it’s hard to fight a demagogue who preys on and stokes the fears of the party base. Now that the primary voters have spoken, the moderates and party leaders are left wondering how in the world it happened and what they will do next.
For a growing number of them, it seems like the answer to that question is “abandon ship.” Rather than sticking with a party whose social policies come from evangelicals and xenophobes, trying to change it from the inside, some are choosing to change their allegiance entirely.
And the clear option to change to is the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. The list of Republican (and a few Democrat) politicians that have chosen to endorse him grows daily. In polls that actually include him, Johnson’s had a recent upward trend. If the Republican party doesn’t get its act together in the coming months and years, it’s possible that we could see a changing of the guard as dissatisfied party members go for something new.
