Toward a Multiparty Democracy

While the recent midterm elections were a welcome relief for American democracy, our political system remains mired in a toxic partisanship that is destroying the American government’s ability to act in the national interest.  As Lee Drutman has cogently written, the United States government has for the last thirty years been in a two-party doom loop that will only get worse as long as our electoral rules strangle the possibility of a multi-party democracy.

With this post, I am beginning a series on the restoration of functional democracy by reforming the electoral process to move us toward a multi-party political system.

Political science experts now recognize that a national two-party system like the United States’ — in which both parties are ideologically sorted and non-overlapping — inevitably devolves into the kind of venomous rancor that now dominates our politics.  As Drutman writes:

Once the parties polarize in a two-party system, polarization becomes a self-reinforcing dynamic.  And the more parties take strongly opposing positions, the more different they appear.  The more different the parties appear, the more the other party comes to feel like a genuine “threat,” demanding vigilance in response.  The more extreme the other party seems, the greater the need to defeat it.  The more extreme the other party, the more vindicated your side feels in taking strong, even radical, action in response.  Both sides fall into their own separate worlds of facts, full of reinforcing us-versus-them narratives.  The more totalizing partisanship becomes, the more totalizing it grows.  (p 27)

It has not always been so.  While the United States has had only two major parties for most of its political history, until the last thirty years, Drutman writes, 

The two parties have been capacious, incoherent, and overlapping.  This overlap lent a certain stability to American national politics, because it worked with, rather than against, our compromise-oriented political institutions.  (p 2)

From the early 1950s until the mid-1980s, for instance, the two political parties actually hid within them four overlapping elements:

• liberal Democrats in the cities, upper-Midwest, and West Coast,
• conservative Democrats in the South and rural areas,
• liberal, establishment Republicans in the Northeast
• conservative Republicans in the West.

None of these groups had a majority and so they had to work with each other and compromise, creating shifting coalitions to get things done.  Famously, for instance, liberal Democrats teamed with liberal Republicans to pass the Civil Rights legislations of 1964 and 1965.  Congresspeople were careful not to alienate their opponent on one issue because they might be needed to vote together on the next issue.  What was effectively a multi-party system in American politics lasted until the mid-1980s.

Following the Civil Rights legislation that brought an end to Jim Crow, however, the Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy” began a realignment of the parties as the Democratic Party became more urban and more diverse while the Republicans became more rural and white.  By the mid-1990s, liberals had largely fled the Republican Party and conservatives had fled the Democratic Party.  The parties had become ideologically sorted with little overlap.  Party membership had now as much to do with identity as it did with political viewpoints.  And so began the doom loop of toxic partisanship.

Readers of this blog will know that I have been extremely critical of the anti-democratic tendencies of the Republican Party over the last fifteen years.  In writing about toxic partisanship, I am not about to engage in blaming both parties equally for the dangerous democratic failures of the last decade.  But I no longer believe that we can get out of this mess by trying to destroy the Republican Party (as tempting as that possibility may be to my inner child).  Rather, we need to get out of the doom loop of toxic partisanship altogether.  Fortunately, electoral reform that could be instituted by an act of Congress without constitutional amendment — Ranked Choice Voting, multi-member House districts, reforming primaries, and enlarging the House of Representatives — would encourage multi-party democracy and provide a way out of our toxic politics.

The next posts will begin to explore what that might look like.

American Democracy: Off Life Support

The midterm election of 2022 was truly a miracle.  American Democracy is still very ill, but intense efforts by small-d democrats to organize and get out the vote pulled our democracy off the ventilator, leaving it breathing on its own.  It is possible to see a way forward to some health.

The election was not a fluke nor, depending on which polls you read, was it a huge surprise.  While the pundits were speculating about a red wave, in fact, the best polls’ predictions were close to a toss-up.  In the end, it appears that large parts of America want to come back to a functioning democracy.   Not a single election denier won election to a position in a swing state that would have given them control over election procedure as governor, attorney general, or secretary of state.  Even the telegenic star of the Trump show, Arizona candidate for governor Kari Lake, went down in flames.

The Republicans will have a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives.  The likelihood is that this will make Kevin McCarthy speaker of an ungovernable hodgepodge.  Probably, we face two years of obstructionism and government chaos led by Republicans in the House.  But I have a fantasy that a small group of traditional Republicans might be willing to cross the lines and sometimes vote with the Democrats to keep the worst impulses of the Republicans at bay.  Ultimately the way back to a healthy democracy will come from true conservatives regrouping in a new configuration.  Could that new configuration begin with a coalition of Democrats and true Republican conservatives in the House coming together to make governance possible?

The Democrats will at least retain control of the Senate with the Vice-Presidential tie-breaking vote.  But if Georgia re-elects Senator Raphael Warnock over Trumpist Hershel Walker in the December 6 run-off election to give the Democrats a true 51-49 Senate majority, the Democrats will not have to share power with the Republicans.   This will have impact in three ways:

• The current 50-50 split of the Senate has given extraordinary power to two single Democratic senators (in practice, that has been either West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin or Arizona Senator Kirsten Sinema) to block the Democratic agenda.  In a 51-49 Senate a single senator will no longer have the same veto power, a major practical shift.
• Issuing subpoenas requires a majority vote of a Senate committee, which has meant that, in the evenly divided senate, Republicans could block an embarrassing subpoena (of, say, Donald Trump).  With the Republican controlled House of Representatives likely to spend an inordinate amount of time investigating the Democrats (for instance, Hunter Biden’s laptop), the ability of Senate Democrats to pursue their own investigations could be significant.
• The power-sharing agreement between Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has called for an equal number of Democrats and Republicans on each of the Senate committees and sub-committees.  This has slowed down committee functioning although the practical consequences of this haven’t been obvious.

While the Georgia senatorial contest does not have the same existential importance as it did when it determined Senate control in 2020, it is, nevertheless, a consequential election.

Former President Donald Trump is playing his part in the drama (see my post from September Has Trump Destroyed the Republican Party?) by announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, thus guaranteeing a brawl which will most likely end with either Trump as a nominee who cannot win re-election in 2024 or the ever-loyal Trump base deserting the party.

American democracy is still very ill.  Ultimately, democracy cannot function with the extreme partisanship of America’s two-party system.  As I will explore in the next post, eventually the United States will have to make the changes in the electoral process to allow a multi-party system as proposed, for instance, by Fair Vote.  There is still a long way to go to recovery.  But, for now, Americans who believe in democracy have fought hard to get it off life support.  Because of them, American democracy is breathing on its own.

“Election Denial” Is a Lie, a Pernicious Threat to Democracy

What does it mean to be an “election denier”?  Both the New York Times and the Washington Post report that the vast majority of Republican candidates — over 370 out of 550 — on the ballot next Tuesday as candidates for the US House and Senate, and the state offices of governor, secretary of state and attorney general have questioned and, at times, outright denied the results of the 2020 presidential election despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  It is crucial that we recognize the deep threat that such election denial poses to our democracy.

Denial of President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election is not an error in judgment; it is a lie.  More than sixty court cases instigated by former President Trump and his allies were turned down, several accompanied by severe judicial rebukes to the lawyers for bringing frivolous claims.  The January 6 commission has clearly documented that Trump knew he lost the election and perpetrated the “Stop the Steal” movement as part of an unconstitutional, antidemocratic plot to overthrow the US government and stay in power.

According to Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger (one of two Republican on the January 6 Commission), the vast majority of Republican congressional representatives who espouse the Big Lie, do not in fact believe it themselves.  Kinzinger said,

For all but a handful of members, if you put them on truth serum, they knew that the election was fully legitimate and that Donald Trump was a joke. The vast majority of people get the joke. I think Kevin McCarthy gets the joke.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Republican voters do not get the joke.  Serious statistical attempts to determine Republican voters’ actual beliefs about the 2020 presidential election indicate that less than a third of them believe that President Joe Biden won.

It is a bedrock principle of democracy that voters decide elections and candidates accept results.  Especially in a polarized country, doubt about election results is a pernicious attack on the democratic structure itself.  If citizens harbor doubt about the validity of an election, they cannot commit themselves to the decisions the government makes.

Wide-spread election denial is a new phenomenon in American democracy.  Gracious concession speeches have always been the norm, even in bitter and hard-fought campaigns.  After the 2000 presidential election, in which the Supreme Court’s widely criticized intervention gave the presidency to George W Bush before the Florida recount was complete, Democrat Al Gore immediately accepted the results and pledged to work with the new president-elect.  

Election denial essentially originated with Donald Trump, who actually began his accusations by insisting without evidence in 2012 that Barack Obama had stolen the election.   In 2016 candidate Trump prepared for the possibility that he would lose the election by refusing to commit to accepting the results if he lost and repeating many times that the election was being rigged.  Even after he narrowly won the Electoral College, he continues to falsely claim that he won the popular vote, which he, in reality, lost by three million votes.

Claims of election irregularity and fraud must, of course, be taken seriously and, if necessary, adjudicated through the courts, especially in close elections.  But ultimately a commitment to democracy requires that a losing candidate accept the results and cede the election.  While the mass Republican denial of the 2020 presidential election is the current existential threat, Democrats have not been immune.  The small number of Democrats who refused to concede the 2020 Gore-Bush election and Democrat Stacy Abrams's ongoing refusal to acknowledge her gubernatorial loss in the 2020 Georgia election are also forms of anti-democratic election denial that undermine our constitutional order. Ultimately, losing candidates committed to democracy concede their loss and acknowledge the democratic process.

Many Republican candidates — for instance, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin — have “moderated” their election denial by acknowledging Biden’s legitimate election yet saying that “election integrity” is a major problem.  Giving the lie to their claims of moderation, both have recently campaigned on behalf of election deniers.  Such “moderation” should not be allowed to stand; “election integrity” in the 2022 midterms is just a codeword for “election denial.”  

Unfortunately, the meaning of “election integrity” will change after next Tuesday’s election when election deniers will most likely be placed in charge of some state elections in 2024 and the integrity of elections will, indeed, be a legitimate issue.

Let’s be clear: election denial — the assertion that Donald Trump won the 2020 election — is a malicious lie that eats away at the fabric of American democracy.   I fear our democracy cannot withstand the corrosion.

Minority Government — The Republican Advantage (Part II)

(Continued from post of October 28, 2022)

Hardball Politics and the Supreme Court

Despite the facts that no Republican president has won a popular majority since 2004 and Republican senators have not represented a majority of Americans since 1996, Republicans have appointed six of the nine current Supreme Court justices.  From 2017 to 2020 Donald Trump who lost the popular vote in 2016 appointed three justices who were confirmed by Republican senators who represented less than 45% of the American population.

In February 2016, during the last year of Democrat Barack Obama’s presidency, conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to allow the Senate to consider any appointment to the Court, claiming the appointment should await whomever was elected president ten months later, thus ultimately stealing the Democratic appointment, giving it to Republican Donald Trump who won the November 2016 election and subsequently nominated Neil Gorsuch, who was quickly confirmed by the Republican Senate.  Although McConnell’s action was technically constitutional, it was unique in American history and obviously went beyond the Senate’s responsibility to “advise and consent” on appointments.

When liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in mid-September of 2020, McConnell had no such qualms about awaiting the new president, rushing the confirmation of conservative Amy Coney Barrett through in less than thirty-six days, finishing just a week before the election of Democrat Joe Biden.

The minority party has firm control of the Supreme Court, most likely for a generation.

Statehouses Lock In Electoral Control

Since the “disputed” 2020 election, Republican controlled statehouses have implemented a raft of new laws that would make voting more difficult and other laws that take away control of the electoral process from traditional, nonpartisan, actors and give it to Republican partisans — setting up the potential for the Republican Party to control the electoral process in disputed elections.

US states have enacted more than thirty new voting restrictions since 2020, from stricter voter ID requirements to limits on mail-in voting.  Seven states have enacted laws that facilitated the de-listing of voters, without necessarily notifying the voter.  Twenty-five states have enacted laws that shifted power away from traditional election managers and, in many cases, ceded control to partisan actors.  All of these changes have been made in the name of election security, but it is important to remember that there is no evidence of significant election insecurity … prior to these laws that will now be in effect for next week’s mid-term election.

There is much debate about the actual impact of these legal changes (see here and here). What is not in debate from any except partisan election deniers, is that these laws are unnecessary and likely destructive to our democracy.

Minority Government Is Locked In

The Republican advantage is currently baked into the Constitution.  Extreme gerrymandering and hardball politics have made it worse, and the lies of the 2020 election fraud are cementing it ever more deeply.  Absent the collapse of the Republican Party due to Trump’s craziness, Republicans will continue their minority control of government for years.

Minority Government — The Republican Advantage (Part I)

If it seems to you that the Republican Party has more political power than it should, you’re not just a bitter partisan.  There is a powerful bias built into the US Constitution that currently benefits the Republican Party in both US Senate and in presidential politics.  In addition, through gerrymandering and hardball politics, the party has parlayed that constitutional bias to significant advantage in the US House of Representatives and the Supreme Court.  The party is also seeking to hardwire further advantage through changes to state electoral laws.

The US Constitution

The Senate

In the original politicking that created the US Constitution, low-population states — afraid of being overpowered by an out-of-control populism — structured the Senate so that every state had two senators, regardless of population.  Over the two-and-a-half centuries since the founding, the population discrepancy between states has widened so that California, the most populous state, now has approximately one senator per twenty million people while Wyoming, the least populous, has approximately one senator per 290,000 people.  In other words, a Wyoming resident has almost seventy times the power in the Senate as does a California resident.

There are, of course, small Democratic states, such as Delaware.  But overwhelmingly today, less-populated, rural states are Republican while larger urban states are Democratic.  In the current 50 – 50 Senate, Democrats represent almost 42 million more people than do Republicans.  In fact, as documented in The New York Intelligencer,

Republican senators haven’t represented a majority of the U.S. population since 1996 and haven’t together won a majority of Senate votes since 1998. Yet the GOP controlled the Senate from 1995 through 2007 (with a brief interregnum in 2001–02 after a party switch by Jim Jeffords) and again from 2015 until 2021.

The US Constitution has given the minority Republican Party control of the Senate for seven of the most recent twelve legislative sessions.

The Electoral College

The Constitution provides for the indirect election of the president: Voters select electors who then actually choose the president.  Every state sends electors to the Electoral College equal to its number of representatives in the House of Representatives plus its number of senators.  The number of Representatives is roughly proportional to the state’s population (and is thus democratic) but, again, the two senators give smaller states disproportionate, non-democratic power.  While not as egregious as the Senate (due to the moderating effects of the House of Representatives number), the Electoral College still gives Wyoming three votes (or one for every 190,000 residents) while California receives 55 votes (or one for every 715,000 residents); the Wyoming voter has almost four times the power in electing the president.  States small in population — and thus, current Republicans — have disproportionate impact in choosing the president.

Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is the process of drawing voting districts to benefit one party.  As I have showed in some detail in this previous post, gerrymandering is accomplished by packing the opposition party’s voters tightly into one or several districts while spreading your own party’s voters out  over the remaining districts.  Thus, the opposition wins its proportionately fewer districts in landslides while your party wins its proportionately more districts by narrower margins.  Both parties gerrymander (the Democratic gerrymandering of Maryland’s Third District wins the prize for the most bizarre shape), but Republicans have in general been far more aggressive and successful in their gerrymandering.  Furthermore, as I explained in my last post, in 2010 the Republican Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP) project, went after local state legislative races (as opposed to US congressional races), 

rais[ing] $30 million and target[ing] local state legislative races in sixteen states, including swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, funding negative ads in lower-profile state legislative races.  The Republicans commissioned polls, brought in high-powered consultants, and flooded out-of-the-way districts with ads.  Democrats were caught unaware and flatfooted.  All told, in 2010 Republicans gained nearly seven hundred state legislative seats.

The Republican Party has not won the popular vote for president since 2004 (George W Bush’s reelection) and Republican Senators have not represented a majority of the country’s voters since 1996, yet Republicans now control 62 state chambers (House or Senate) to the Democrats’ 36.  There are currently 23 Republican trifectas (where one party controls governor, House and Senate), 14 Democratic trifectas, and 13 divided governments where neither party holds trifecta control.

Dominant Republican statehouse control gives the minority Republican Party control of American politics.  Furthermore, its capacity to continue gerrymandering state legislative districts gives it the power to remain in control of statehouses.

(To be continued here.)

The Independent State Legislature Theory

In June of this year, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear a case from North Carolina — Moore v Harper — that could give state legislatures sole authority to set electoral rules for state and congressional elections even if their actions violated state constitutions and resulted in extreme partisan gerrymandering.  This case, invoking the so-called “independent state legislature theory,” arises because the North Carolina state legislature tried to gerrymander the purple, evenly divided Republican/Democratic state to give ten of the fourteen congressional house seats to the Republicans.  The Court has already ruled that partisan political gerrymandering is beyond the reach of federal courts.*   In response, North Carolina voters went to their state courts to contest the Republican gerrymandering.  The state supreme court agreed that the gerrymandering was illegal under the North Carolina state constitution.  In Moore v Harper, however, the state’s Republican controlled legislature is now claiming that it has absolute authority to write election laws and is not limited either by its own constitution or the state court system.

The claim seems so bizarre that the US Supreme Court’s willingness even to entertain it sent shock waves throughout the nation’s prodemocracy forces.

So, what’s going on?

The “elections clause” in Article I of the United States Constitution reads,

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.

The proponents of the independent state legislature theory fasten on to the word “legislature” as if the state legislative body were independent of its state constitution or not subject to its state courts, ie subject to the same checks and balances that safeguard our American system of government.

The nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice writes:

The independent state legislature theory runs contrary to the constitutional text, history, practice, and precedent.  The framers famously distrusted state lawmakers, so much so that when they drafted the Elections Clause, they insisted that Congress retain the ultimate power to set the rules for federal elections.  The framers would not have established — and indeed did not establish — a regime that would permit state legislatures to regulate federal elections without the ordinary checks and balances that apply to state lawmaking power.  State practice, from the country’s founding to today, also refutes the theory.  For example, many framers — including James Madison — voted to adopt state constitutions that regulated federal elections, as North Carolina’s does today.

On top of this overwhelming historical evidence, the theory makes no sense: it would be absurd for a state legislature to be allowed to violate the very state constitution that created it.  Other problems doom the theory, as an avalanche of recent scholarship demonstrates.  For these reasons, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the theory for over a century, including as recently as 2015 and 2019.

The theory has been widely discredited, yet Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch have indicated support for it.  Brett Kavanagh has seemed on the fence and Amy Coney Barrett hasn’t expressed herself about it.  The theory really only came to more public attention with Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.  For the Court to accept the case, four judges would have had to vote for it.  Although votes to accept cases are not public, presumably Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanagh voted to accept it.

The conservatives of the Court claim to be “originalists,” that is holding to the original intent of the founders.  But one cannot read the Constitution or the history of its writing and see an iota of “original” support for the independent state legislature theory.

The crucial political backdrop to this case is the significant Republican advantage in gerrymandered control of statehouses.  Both parties gerrymander when they can, but the redistricting that occurred in 2010 followed a particularly powerful national Republican effort to take control of state politics.  After the losses of the 2008 election, the Republican Party looked to be facing a long period in the political wilderness.  Reviewing David Daley’s Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in the New Yorker about how things looked prior to 2010.

In twenty-seven states, Democrats held the majority of seats in both houses of the legislature, and in six more they held a majority in one house.  The Presidency, the US Senate, and the House of Representatives were all in Democratic hands.  To describe their own party, Republicans were using words like “wounded” and “adrift.”

And, as bad as things looked at the time, the GOP’s prospects down the road looked even worse.  In 2011, new census figures were due to be released, and this would trigger a round of redistricting.  Republicans, Daley writes, were facing “a looming demographic disaster.”

The Republican response was REDMAP, the Redistricting Majority Project.  In several state legislatures, Democratic majorities were thin.  Taking advantage of the radical-right energy of the Tea Party movement and the Supreme Court’s January 2010 Citizens United decision allowing unlimited political dark money, REDMAP raised $30 million and targeted local state legislative races in sixteen states, including swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, funding negative ads in lower-profile state legislative races.  The Republicans commissioned polls, brought in high-powered consultants, and flooded out-of-the-way districts with ads.  Democrats were caught unaware and flatfooted.  

Kolbert writes

All told, in 2010 Republicans gained nearly seven hundred state legislative seats, which, as a report from REDMAP crowed, was a larger increase “than either party has seen in modern history.” The wins were sufficient to push twenty chambers from a Democratic to a Republican majority.  Most significantly, they gave the GOP control over both houses of the legislature in twenty-five states.  …  The blue map was now red.

We most often consider gerrymandering in relation to congressional elections for the US House of Representatives.  But gerrymandering of state legislative districts is in some cases more pronounced and important.  In Wisconsin and Michigan, for instance, Democrats have recently won all statewide elections (eg, governor and attorney general where gerrymandering doesn’t come into play), but both statehouses remain firmly in Republican control.  The majority of voters in those states are Democrat but the Republicans control the statehouses, which — if the independent state legislature theory is approved by the Court — will control election policy in the 2024 election.

The consequences of the Supreme Court approving the independent state legislature theory would be chaotic since state legislatures would be able to ignore not only the state constitutions and courts but also public referenda, independent redistricting commissions, delegations of electoral authority to secretaries of state and election commissions.  Other state constitutional rights, such as the right to a secret ballot, could also be on the block.

It all seems so bizarre that it’s hard to believe the Supreme Court would really decide this way.  But three justices have already indicated support for it and a fourth apparently wants to look at it.  It’s important that we recognize how extremist the Supreme Court has already become.  We know that Justice Thomas’s wife Ginni is deeply involved in election denial and attempts to overturn state elections, so presumably Justice Thomas is at least sympathetic to these views.

All six of the conservative justices have been members of the Federalist Society, which has as a major goal federalism, that is, returning power to the states.  So, as in West Virginia v EPA dismantling the federal administrative state and Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning the constitutional right to abortion, these conservatives are about radically reducing the power of the federal government to govern.  

The independent state legislature theory is not about originalism; it is about partisanship, pure and simple.

___________

* Racial gerrymandering has been ruled unconstitutional but political gerrymandering has not.

Has Trump Destroyed the Republican Party?

The Republican Party is in an existential crisis: Former president Donald Trump is alienating the moderate and swing voters the party needs to remain viable, yet the party can't ditch him, either.

Trump is currently in significant legal jeopardy from several different directions, most recently because of concealing and refusing to turn over highly classified government documents that he had no right to keep, but also from the state of Georgia regarding his interference the 2020 election, from the state of New York regarding false tax filings, and from the congressional January 6 Commission regarding his instigation of the Insurrection at the US Capitol.

Trump is undoubtedly convinced he is most secure from legal jeopardy if he is the Republican candidate for president in 2024 and can falsely characterize all his legal troubles as “political witch hunts.”  He has strongly hinted he will run, and I expect him to formally announce his candidacy soon, probably before the November 8, 2022, election.

It's clear, however, that increasing numbers of Republican officials would like to dissociate themselves from Trump's candidacy.  Many “Trump Republicans” would actually prefer “Trumpism” — that is, an antidemocratic authoritarianism with election denial, voter suppression, partisan interference in the voting process, and a scorched-earth partisan political process — but without Trump.  

Even Fox commentator Laura Ingraham has opined, “maybe it's time to turn the page if we can get someone who has all Trump's policies, who's not Trump."

The problem, however, is that Trump owns the Republican Party.  Any attempt to keep him from the nomination will shatter the party.

The Caveat

There is a risk in predicting that Trump cannot win another term as president.  These are unique political times.  The United States is bitterly divided.  We have never before had a political party dedicated to anti-democratic principles.  Anything can happen in two years!!  One of the great uncertainties at this point is the degree to which the Supreme Court will allow the states to manipulate the presidential election in 2024.  If the Court were to vindicate the fringe “independent state legislature theory” (which they will be considering this fall), all bets would be off.

Certainly, the Republican Party should not be underestimated.  One sign of their political power: even after four years of the Trump administration, Republicans held onto all of the statehouses up for re-election in 2020.  They now have a 20-18 statehouse advantage over the Democrats, which is leading to extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression, and even partisan control of the voting process.  Remember, the Supreme Court has ruled that political (as opposed to racial) gerrymandering is constitutional.  

Nevertheless, I don't believe the Republican Party can survive Trump.

Losing the Moderates

Under ordinary circumstances, this should be a banner year for Republicans.  Historically, in off-cycle elections, the party in power loses seats in congressional elections.  This year would seem to be even better: President Joe Biden is not popular, inflation is not yet in control, and Americans do not feel confident about their futures.   The conventional wisdom that the Republican Party would take control of the House of Representatives and even retake control of the Senate in November, however, is in doubt.  Certainly, some of this is because the Supreme Court Dobbs decision revoking Roe v Wade is energizing Democrats much more than initially predicted.  But many of the Republican troubles can be laid directly at Trump’s door.

• Almost daily revelations that Trump not only improperly kept top-secret documents at Mar-a-Lago but also lied to the FBI about it and may have obstructed justice are having an impact.  The initial knee-jerk Republican attack on the FBI has subsided and some Republican leaders have gone silent, holding their fire.  
• The consequences of the House Jan 6 Commission hearings and the ongoing Republican defense of the Insurrectionists is affecting public opinion.
• Trump is still committed to the “Big Lie” of 2020 election fraud.  While two-thirds of Republicans still believe Biden is not the legitimate president, small but increasing numbers of them are ready to move on and getting impatient with Trump's unhinged responses, such as his “remedy” to the “revelation” that the FBI had warned Facebook about Russian disinformation regarding the Hunter Biden laptop prior to the 2020 election.  Just two weeks ago, Trump posted on his Truth Social account,

REMEDY: Declare the rightful winner or, and this would be the minimal solution, declare the 2020 Election irreparably compromised and have a new Election, immediately!!

There is of course no constitutional way to have a new election immediately.  Does The former president really not know that?

• His recent statement that he would issue full pardons and formal government apologies to the Insurrectionists has reminded voters of his ongoing support for political violence.    
• In their thrall to Trump/Trumpism, the Republicans have nominated several spectacularly ineffective Senate candidates merely because they were backed by Trump.  Democratic incumbents in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and, to a lesser extent, New Hampshire, are doing well and likely to retain their seats.  Trumpist candidates in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and even North Carolina are struggling to maintain Republican seats.  It is looking increasingly likely that the Democrats will maintain control of the Senate, even increase their majority, primarily due to backlash against Trump.
• And the Republican statehouses’ attempts to subvert the electoral process — primarily in response to the “Big Lie” — seems also to be having a negative electoral impact on moderates.

As Megan McArdle writes:

Trump is already turning GOP membership into a single-issue referendum on Trump: How far will you go to defend his erratic, self-centered and pointlessly belligerent behavior? How slavishly will you proclaim the lie that Trump actually won the 2020 election? This litmus test has alienated a lot of moderate voters.

A Minority Party

The Republican Party is already a minority party.  It has not won a popular presidential election since 2004, when the incumbent George W Bush was reelected.  Even in the current 50-50 Senate, Republicans represent less than 44% of the American population and have not represented a majority of the country’s population since 1996 (despite controlling the Senate for eight of the thirteen legislative sessions since then).  

Reconciling the Irreconcilable

At this point, there are three factions among Republican Party officials. 

• A small group, personified by Liz Cheney, is still publicly committed to democracy.  (Cheney has said she will run in the Republican primary for the single purpose of keeping Trump out of office.)  
• The dominant faction is publicly committed to Trump and his anti-democratic authoritarianism.  
• Large numbers of Republican officials, who will not identify themselves publicly, are still committed to the extremism of the Republican Party yet recognize that the party cannot survive with Trump as its head.  

The Republicans’ existential dilemma is that any attempt to get rid of Trump will force the betrayed MAGA base of voters out, shattering the party irretrievably.

So here are my predictions:

1. The coming mid-terms will find the Democrats increasing their majority in the Senate.
   
2. In the still unlikely event that Democrats maintain control of the House, American democracy will have a reprieve, two years of united government that will pass legislation restricting states from undoing democracy and limiting the impact of the reactionary Supreme Court.  If, as is more likely, the Republicans obtain control of the House, it will be a painful two years for American government.  The Republicans will continue to undermine democracy, subverting election integrity, restricting the vote, encouraging white supremacy, tolerating violence at its edges, and encouraging increasingly partisan division.
3. Trump will get the Republican presidential nomination and lead the party to broad defeat in the 2024 election.  

The shattering of the Republican party will be an event unique in American political history.