The GOP died this weekend
Those Republicans mortified by the presidential nomination of Donald Trump have been pondering a series of questions over the past few months:
Have Republicans put party above country in backing Trump?
Can the GOP survive Trump?
Should the center-right let bygones be bygones after the election?
The answers have become clear over the past few days. Trump’s campaign put out an egregiously false statement on Thursday claiming Trump “ended” the birther controversy in 2011 and blaming Hillary Clinton for starting the racist smear. Trump, without explanation or apology, on Friday announced the president was in fact born in the United States. A series of surrogates, including Kellyanne Conway, Gov. Chris Christie and vice presidential nominee Mike Pence, fanned out on Sunday to double down on the lies, reiterating this was all Clinton’s fault and insisting, despite Trump’s multiple utterances since 2011, that he had not fanned the racist fires and built his political image on birtherism.
Have Republicans put party above country in backing Trump?
Can the GOP survive Trump?
Should the center-right let bygones be bygones after the election?
The answers have become clear over the past few days. Trump’s campaign put out an egregiously false statement on Thursday claiming Trump “ended” the birther controversy in 2011 and blaming Hillary Clinton for starting the racist smear. Trump, without explanation or apology, on Friday announced the president was in fact born in the United States. A series of surrogates, including Kellyanne Conway, Gov. Chris Christie and vice presidential nominee Mike Pence, fanned out on Sunday to double down on the lies, reiterating this was all Clinton’s fault and insisting, despite Trump’s multiple utterances since 2011, that he had not fanned the racist fires and built his political image on birtherism.
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The disingenuous commentary regarding the Democratic party is just the regurgitated commentary used against the Republican party the past 8 years - must a missed it with all the whiny toddler fare going on.
The comments about 'autopsies' & is the Democratic party dead BS is meant to be cheeky, I hope -otherwise it is worse than I could have imagined -
The 👏back clowns Have No original thoughts left or Reich & perhaps they have breed with (Lord of) flies & become the "Regenerating Lemmings" for sure.
Stop buying into your own screwing - at the very least - leave Decent people (those who don't enable 'rape culture enthusiasts' 2013 Congress or perv's who have to trick 13 year old girls with bogus modeling contacts while taking 'Star' privileges with strange women's Nether regions!)
out of it!
Why can't some have their lil purity parties in their original homeland's or do they not want their convoluted fascist/confederacy Cuckoo-Cuckoo either!?
Not too shabby for a dead party.
Republican Party the Strongest It's Been in 80 Years
In 2014, we put together an index to measure the electoral strength of the parties . Rather than focusing on the presidency, we broke partisan control into five categories: presidential, Senate, House, governorships, and state legislatures. We have updated our index using the mostly complete data for the 2016 elections and can conclude that the GOP is in the strongest position it has been since 1928. In many sub-categories, it is near an all-time high.
The following four paragraphs, taken verbatim from the previously linked article, describe our methodology:
“Our index is the sum of five parts: presidential performance, House performance, Senate performance, gubernatorial performance and state legislative performance. The first is measured by the party’s performance in the previous presidential popular vote. (In this, and all other measurements, third parties are excluded.)
“House performance is the average of the popular vote for the House and the average of the share of the House won by the party. This helps mitigate the effects of gerrymandering. Senate performance is the share of the Senate held by the party.
“Gubernatorial performance is the party’s share of governorships (again, with third party candidates excluded). We do not weight for population, for reasons explored further below. For state legislatures, we average four numbers: the share of state Houses and state Senates held by each party along with the share of state House seats and state Senate seats held by each party.
“This gives us five metrics, all of which run on a scale from 0 to 100. Adding them together gives us a scale from zero to 500. We then subtract 250 from the total. All this does is assign a score of zero to a situation where the parties are evenly matched, rather than 250. A positive score then means that the Republican Party is stronger while a negative score means the Democratic Party is stronger.”
Let’s walk the through the sub-scores, one by one. In the state legislatures, Republicans modestly improved their positioning from the already strong position they had achieved in 2014. Their sub-score is 63.2 (again, on a scale of zero to 100). If we exclude the Reconstruction period, the Republican Party has achieved a higher score in the state legislatures in three elections: 1894 (64.7), 1904 (64.6), and 1920 (66.5).
Likewise, in the governorships, the GOP emerged from 2016 stronger than it was after 2014. This is unsurprising, since Democrats were reduced to just 16 governorships. The GOP’s sub-score of 67.3 was surpassed only in 1920 (70.8) and during the late Civil War and early Reconstruction period (1864, 1866, and 1868).
The House, Senate and presidential charts pretty much speak for themselves:
If we put everything together in our final index, the GOP has a Trende-Byler score of 36.0, the highest score for the GOP since 1928 (when it scored a staggering 51.8). You can see the trend line here:
Note that the 2006 and 2008 elections now look decidedly like aberrations. It is hard to square this with an overall view of an ascendant Democratic Party, though there is still a lot of history to be written.
Here is the overall trend line, dating back to 1856.
The mean score over time is -3 points, and the median is -6. On a 500-point scale, this is basically nothing. This is consistent with the idea that elections over time tend toward parity. The standard deviation is 45, which is consistent with the idea that the GOP is in a strong position, but not an unusually dominant one.
With this, we can make some preliminary assessments of the Obama presidency. Obviously, this was not a successful period for party building. But how bad was it in a comparative sense? The index swung 70 points against Democrats from 2008 to 2016. Among two-term presidents, only Dwight Eisenhower (78.2), Franklin Roosevelt (98), Ulysses Grant (118.1) and Woodrow Wilson (137.2) presided over larger swings against their party. If we look only at FDR’s first two terms, he drops out, having lost only 40 index points. Given that President Obama oversaw reasonably robust growth throughout his term, unlike Eisenhower, Grant and Wilson, this is a jarring outcome.
Nixon/Ford’s loss would barely be larger (72.4) if we lumped them together. Of the 30 presidents in our sample, only nine fared worse than Obama (Lyndon Johnson, Grover Cleveland in 1892, Eisenhower, James Buchanan, William Taft, FDR, Grant, Wilson and Herbert Hoover). Of course, the largest swing for any president occurred under Hoover; in four short years the index swung nearly 137 points against the GOP.
Put a fork in them they're done. 🍼
Republicans Now Control Record Number of State Legislative Chambers
(CNSNews.com ) – Republicans added to their historic 2014 gains in the nation’s state legislatures with the addition of five state House chambers and two state Senate chambers in last week’s election, while Democratic control was reduced to levels not seen since the Civil War .
Republicans are now in control of a record 67 (68 percent) of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers in the nation, more than twice the number (31) in which Democrats have a majority, according to the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).
“That’s more than at any other time in the history of the Republican Party,” according to NCSL. “They also hold more total seats, well over 4,100 of the 7,383, than they have since 1920.”
Next year, the GOP will control both legislative chambers in 32 states - an all-time high, according to NCSL - while Democrats will have total control of just 13 state legislatures.
In 24 of the 32 states with Republican-controlled legislatures, voters have also elected Republican governors. In contrast, Democrats have a “political trifecta” in just six states.
Since 2009, when President Obama took office, his party has lost a total of 919 seats in state legislatures nationwide, according to NCSL data. Since 2009, when President Obama took office, his party has lost a total of 919 seats in state legislatures nationwide, according to NCSL data.
In 2009 , Democrats had total control of 27 state legislatures, and held a majority in at least one chamber in eight more states where power was divided. In contrast, Republicans controlled just 14 state legislatures.
During Obama’s first year in office, Democrats held 1,024 of the 1,971 total state Senate seats in the nation, compared to 889 in Republican hands. They also held 3,058 of the total 5,411 state House seats, compared to 2,334 for Republicans.
In addition, there were 28 Democratic governors, compared to 22 Republican governors.
However, near the end of Obama’s two terms in office, the partisan balance in the nation's state legislatures has been completely reversed.
As of Nov. 7, 2016 , there are just 823 Democratic state senators out of a total of 1,972 seats nationwide, according to NCSL data. Meanwile, Republicans have increased their ranks to 1,089.
Likewise, of the 5,411 state House seats, there are now 3,029 Republicans compared to 2,340 Democrats – a mirror image of both parties’ status in 2009.
The Democrats’ prior advantage in the nation’s governors’ mansions when Obama took office has also been lost. There are currently 31 Republican governors, 18 Democratic governors and one Independent ( Gov. Bill Walker of Alaska).
“Republicans grabbed more of America’s statehouses and governors' mansions during the Obama administration than at any time in the modern era,” the Washington Post’s Amber Phillips reported .
Last week’s historic flip of the Kentucky House - the last Democrat-controlled legislative chamber in the South - to Republican hands for the first time in nearly 100 years underscores the point.
In 2010, Democrats in the Kentucky House held a solid 65-35 majority. Six years later, the GOP now has a supermajority, and will control 62 of the chamber’s 100 seats.
“Democrats are now basically extinct in the South,” Phillips noted.
“Republicans bested expectations,” said Dan Diorio, a policy expert at NCSL. “Having already reached the peak of control in party history, Republicans will maintain a similar level of control in a year when many expected Democrats to net seats and chambers.”
”Anyone who said that Donald Trump was going to be a drag on down-ticket races is certainly eating their words right now,” Lisa Nelson, CEO of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) told CNSNews.com.
“When I talk to the states, most of them say they picked up state Senate or House seats because of Donald Trump. And I think that’s because of the forgotten man or woman people are talking about, who hadn’t shown up to vote in the past.”
Although most of the mainstream media failed to predict that Trump would win, those following state legislative races were not surprised by his victory, Nelson added.
“People in the states saw this race tightening easily a week before the election. In particular, I was talking to somebody in Wisconsin who said they were going to pick up seats because of Donald Trump on the ticket, and sure enough they did,” she told CNSNews. “A lot of those voters ‘came home’ in the last week or two. They were talking, but a lot of the media wasn’t listening.”
Looking good!
The real GOP is not dead, but they are in half hiding. They are ready to oppose Trump-ism. He is so sure that the Republican controlled Congress, both House and Senate will automatically rubber stamp whatever he wants, but is in for a big surprise. He is not a Republican and made that clear during is campaign. The establishment GOP hates his guts because of his hatred of them during the election and he is really just a small third party with an (R) after his name. Much of what he wants to do will never make it through Congress and the unconstitutional things, such as a Muslim registry will be rejected by even the most Conservative of SCOTUS'. He thinks he has been elected King or Dictator. He has no concept on the limitations of power on the POTUS. He is not only not my President, many long time GOP Congressmen and Senators feel the same way inside and when it comes to many of his most bizarre proposals and ideas he'll run into a brick wall. The old, real, establishment GOP is a lot stronger then him and he'll soon find that out.
Weren't you telling us about how the Republicans were going to lose big in the Senate too. Something about having more seats up for grabs this year?
Liberal predictions have lost most of their ability to be taken seriously.
As the famous P.T. Barnum once said "There's one born every minute", and Trump managed to scare enough of the White ones who are afraid of losing Maryberry RFD to the polls to win the EC, though not the popular vote. Scared White people are becoming more an more scarce and are a shrinking number of voters. Still the Democrats did pick up a couple of seats in the Senate (certainly enough to filibuster any SCOTUS nominee and make sure we have an 8 Justice court until the next election) and by the time Trump crashes our economy there will be more in 2018 and the Democrats should recover complete control in 2020 IMHO as well as the White House. Trump is not my our my wife's President and many people feel that way, but whatever he is IMHO he will be gone either through an impeachment of conflict of interest or not being mentally stable enough to do the job before the 2020 elections and Pence has no chance at all of winning.
Trump won the EC, but the establishment GOP won bigger in smaller races and will not tolerate him for long. He is simply not a Republican.
"...Trump managed to scare enough of the White ones who are afraid of losing Maryberry RFD..."
Another example of liberal racism. Will they never evolve?