The Likelihood of the End of the Republican Party

Predictions of the imminent demise of one of the major political parties come along every few years, especially for some reason for the GOP. The most recent predictions—which are the first in a long time to actually come before the given catastrophic election—say that Donald Trump’s nomination and subsequent collapse will exacerbate the problem that the party already has with black, Latino, and other minority voters, as well as women and to a lesser extent college-educated men. Chuck Schumer is now only the latest to raise this, talking openly about a coming “Golden Age” for the Democratic Party.

Anything is possible. But it’s worth remembering just how often similar predictions have been made and taken as fact, and how shortsighted those predictions seem today.

In 1860, the Democrats split in two over the issue of slavery, with Northern and Southern Democrats nominating competing candidates for President. This enabled Abraham Lincoln to be elected the first Republican President. Democrats were widely blamed, justly or not, for the Civil War that followed. They went on to lose the next three presidential elections (not even nominating a candidate of their own in 1872), only to win the popular vote in 1876, lose by two one-hundredths of a point in 1880, and win outright in 1884. The party also regained a great deal of strength in Congress and at the state and local level.

In 1932, with Republicans widely blamed for the turmoil and poverty of the Great Depression, incumbent President Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt in a landslide, and Republicans were swept out of power in Congress. By 1936, the GOP held only 103 seats in the House, and 25 in the Senate, and would go on to lose the next four presidential elections. But by 1953, the party had regained control of both Congress and the Presidency.

In 1976, political scientist Everett Carll Ladd said, “The Republican party cannot find, outside of the performance of its presidential nominee, a single encouraging indicator of a general sort from its 1976 electoral performance…what we see manifested here is a secular deterioration of the GOP position. The Democrats have emerged almost everywhere outside the presidential arena as the ‘everyone party’.” The next three presidential elections would see landslide GOP victories, along with a retaking of the Senate, dramatic growth at the state and local levels, and, eventual, a historic capture of the House in 1994.

In 2004, with the reelection of George W. Bush and Republicans majorities in both chambers of Congress, some began confidently predicting a permanent Republican majority. Just two years later, Democrats retook Congress in a wave election, and in 2008 gained supermajorities in both chambers, while Barack Obama won the Presidency by seven points.

In 2008, following Obama’s election, it was the Democrats’ turn to predict that the Republican Party was finished, and pushed an aggressive liberal agenda accordingly, culminating in Obamacare. But in 2010 they lost the House in convincing fashion, and narrowly avoided losing the Senate as well. After an essentially status quo election in 2012, Republicans in 2014 retook the Senate, won governorships in thirty-one states, and gained the largest House majority for the party since the 1920’s.

Of course, this also doesn’t discount the possibility that the Republican Party will be fundamentally changed by Trump’s nomination, only the likelihood of the party itself ceasing to exist. The Democratic Party of today bears little resemblance to the ancestral party founded by Thomas Jefferson. But it does illustrate the likelihood that both major parties will likely be around in one form or another for decades to come.