The GOP’s 2018 Autopsy: Democracy Is Our Enemy, Part 2

seandotpolitics:

[T]he GOP’s Midwest power grabs are indicative of a broader strategy for immunizing conservative power from the whims of an increasingly hostile public.

Republicans’ dominance in rural areas has allowed them to retain significant power in statehouses and the Senate. And the GOP is working doggedly to consolidate the former by restricting access to the ballot, while using gerrymanders to dilute the clout of Democratic constituencies it can’t disenfranchise. Meanwhile, control over the White House and Senate is enabling Donald Trump to fortify the conservative movement’s grip over the federal judiciary — which is to say, over the principle check on state-level voter-suppression efforts.

The Republican Party’s few bright spots on November 6 testified to the efficacy of these gambits: The conservative Supreme Court majority’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act enabled Brian Kemp to win Georgia’s governor’s race with the aid of voter suppression, while the Florida GOP’s success in formally disenfranchising more than 20 percent of the Sunshine State’s voting-age African-Americans allowed Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis to eke out razor-thin victories.

Demographic change might very well give Democrats a durable edge in national elections over the coming decade. But by exploiting (and creatively exacerbating) our political system’s structural biases toward rural voters — and the extraordinary powers of our federal judiciary — Republicans can plausibly retain a “floor” of power high enough to frustrate progressive reform without expanding its existing coalition, or moderating ideologically. And in a two-party system, if the GOP can maintain power in the courts — and remain (at the very least) in perpetual striking distance of a Senate majority — then it would only ever take one ill-timed recession for Republicans to regain unified control of the federal government.

All of which is to say: The GOP does not have a plan for remaining electorally competitive in a democratic United States. But it doesn’t necessarily need one.

The GOP’s 2018 Autopsy: Democracy Is Our Enemy, Part 1

seandotpolitics:

The Republican Party entered this year’s battle for House control with 22 seats to spare, a map gerrymandered in its favor to a historic (and arguably unconstitutional) degree, and the benefit of presiding over decades-low unemployment and robust economic growth.

It left with (at least) 40 fewer members in the lower chamber, a popular vote loss of more than 8 percent, and the ignominious achievement of having forfeited more House seats in a single midterm than it had at any point since 1974’s post-Watergate bloodbath.

The party has responded to this historic rebuke by rethinking … approximately nothing. Or so, the New York Times reports…

In truth, the Times’ assessment gives Republicans both too little credit, and too much. On the latter count, the paper gives undue credence to the party’s internal consensus that Donald Trump was the primary author of its electoral woes. The president’s garish rebranding of the GOP doubtlessly cost the party significant market share with college-educated whites. But then, so did Paul Ryan’s plutocratic agenda: The House Speaker forced many of his caucus’s most vulnerable members to vote for a historically unpopular health-care bill, and then, a giant tax-cut package that explicitly singled out the GOP’s blue-state base of affluent homeowners for tax hikes. (Exit polls, and the Republican Party’s own campaign messaging, suggest that the GOP’s botched Obamacare repeal effort was a major liability for the party in races all across the country, while its struggles in high-income suburbs indicate that rolling back the SALT deduction to finance windfall tax breaks for the superrich did not play well with the party’s merely rich constituents.)

A broader problem with laying all of the GOP’s troubles at the president’s feet is that the party’s popular support was in structural decline long before Trump came on the scene. In 2016, the Republican standard-bearer lost the national popular vote for the sixth time in seven elections. As of 2012, it was already clear that the GOP’s support among the fastest-growing segments of the electorate — nonwhite and millennial voters — was weak and getting weaker.