Potential Futures for the GOP

Plus a 12-foot-tall plastic skeleton to put out in the yard.

A boxful of AAAAAAAAIGHHH from Home Depot

Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…

… and one of those ways to portend doom.

J.T., a longtime friend (and longtime reader of this newsletter), asked me this week So when’s the GOP going to die and be replaced by a Spirit Halloween? So I thought I’d get into that this week.

• Now, for those of you who live in rural areas and don’t know what a Spirit Halloween is, Spirit Halloween is a seasonal store/rash that magically appears in random empty big box superstores across the country close to Halloween, sells scary Halloween crap and costumes as fast as they possibly can, scares the children who enter, and then disappears into the night before Santa Claus can get too close. So — for you in rural areas — Spirit Halloween is our Dollar General.

Before I leave the topic of Halloween crap, my wife finally got off the waiting list after two years and successfully bought one of those 12’ tall poseable skeletons from Home Depot. She wants to reposition it in the yard each season so that it’s out there all year long. Halloween Skeleton! Santa Skeleton! Valentine’s Skeleton! Ides of March Skeleton!

I just brought it home. It’s still in the box on the back porch… staring at me. It won’t stop staring at me.

Its eyes move.

Pray for me. Pray for my neighborhood. Pray for the republic.

Anyway, on the topic of skeletons. I mean the GOP. I mean skeletons.

It’s always a bad idea to declare a political party dead. Somebody always tries to call time-of-death on the losing party every four years and they’re never right. Except when they are. If you remember the Whigs. Which you don’t because none of us were alive the last time an American political party died and had to completely reinvent itself as something else.

• But just because none of us have seen it happen with our own eyes doesn’t mean that it hasn’t or that it can’t or that it won’t.

There’s a very good chance that the GOP may go Full Whig soon.

And it’s not for big, advanced-math, complicated reasons — it’s just for a few simple ones.

• Caveat #1: This is my extremely cursory look at this. But I am sure that somewhere deep down inside the vaults of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and in the back rooms of a bunch of thinktanks or under their beds in cardboard boxes are a lot of formal projections and forecasts on the future of the Republican Party but I’ve seen none of them.

• Caveat #2: Sometimes an extremely cursory look is all you get because some of those secret forecasts and secret plans that we’re all sure must exist don’t exist at all, never did, and there ain’t nobody at the switch. Exhibit A: The Trump campaign apparently had NO plan — and still don’t — to switch to campaign against (a) Vice President Former-California-Attorney-General-Will-Kick-Your-Ass Kamala Harris, (b) Minnesota Governor/Coach/Grill Dad Tim Walz, or (c ) Senator Violates-Couches-and-Snuggles-with-Fascists J.D. Vance. And those Trump campaign folks are professionals.

• Caveat #3: There’s a huge difference between the future of the conservative impulse and that of the Republican Party. Here I’m only talking about the latter. Mostly. And a bit about the former, too. Maybe.

Republicans are being demographically displaced...

Three authors at the Hoover Institution back in 2021 did an overlook of support for each party over time and found that the younger the American generation, the far more Democratic they lean. To summarize one of the points they made (page 8 in their report), the Boomers lean 40% Blue and 53% Red and Generation X leans slightly more Blue than Red — 48% to 45%. But then the percentages really invert. The Millennials go 50-40% Blue to Red, and Gen Z 60-30%. These authors don’t (and I’ve never seen someone do this in public) lay down those percentages next to the sizes of each of those generations. The Millennial Generation and Generation Z are exponentially larger than the Baby Boom (which is slowly fading from the voting scene), and Generation X is the smallest voting-age generation. So when you lay those percentages down next to those generational sizes you don’t get a nice, gentle pig-going-through-the-python kind of political phenomenon; you get two enormous 800-pound Blue gorillas about to demographically stomp the smaller Red contingents into the kind of dust you find in the bottom of a bag of Triscuits after that box had a bad day on the interstate.

• I would attempt to figure out what those numbers are but I cannot math. But I’m sure someone has mathed that. Maybe some software coder out near Reston. They live for that sort of thing.

My point is that the GOP isn’t behind a demographic 8-ball; they’re behind a demographic boulder. And they’ve known this for at least 15 years. That’s why they’ve been gerrymandering and sabotaging/”cleaning” the voter registration rolls everywhere as fast as they possibly can. And challenging the legitimacy of elections and screaming voter fraud. They’ve been trying to push back a tipping point they absolutely know is coming.

Because the tipping point already arrived decades ago but has been obscured by the continued existence of the Electoral College.

• No Republican has won the popular vote in a presidential election in 30 years except George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004. If we hadn’t had the Electoral College these past few decades then our last Republican president would have been George H.W. Bush.

• If you remember following Election Day in November 2020 — those few agonizing days between Tuesday night and Saturday when the election was finally called — there was a meme floating around that simply read World waits in suspense to see if the candidate who got seven million more votes will win.

That’s part of why the GOP has treated the past few presidential elections as if they’re existential threats to the GOP — because they have been. Because they are.

… unless the GOP can reinvent itself.

And maybe it can. It’s so far chosen not to. After Obama defeated Mitt Romney, the GOP took a hard look at itself, decided on some changes it needed to make, issued an internal report saying they need to become less, uh, lots-of-stuff — and then threw the report away and instead doubled and tripled down on several of its most extreme positions. And that’s part of how we got Trump.

There’s been some signs lately that the GOP has been trying to reorient itself as the Party of the Non-College-Educated Blue Collar Folks in the suburbs (as opposed to just the blue collar among rural Real Americans) but Republican candidates and office holders keep shooting themselves in their own legs with their own racism, sexism, their own ending of Roe, their own Supreme Court, their own Project 2025 and the like and thus further alienating the non-white, the not-them, and the non-male. And a lot of the male.

It could help if the Republicans elected a few more post-Trump presidents who could cast-or-complete that new blue collar vision but the GOP doesn’t have a deep bench of people in the pipeline who could win the presidency.

• Trump doesn’t have actual political apprentices who are as politically capable or as mean as he is. Tim Scott? No. Ron DeSantis? He had trouble when his campaign hit oxygen. J.D. Vance? He has his own couch and dolphin related problems and he’s alienated Pikachu and now his fascism is showing and it doesn’t occur to him to tuck that back in.

• Among the GOP moderates, sure, Nikki Haley and Larry Hogan —regardless of whether you agree with their politics — could be very competent Presidents and as far as I can tell, are nobody’s bigots. I mean, think of it this way: if either Haley or Hogan became President, the world wouldn’t lie awake at night terrified that random covfefe would come raining down on their countries or economies or loved ones.

This means the GOP, post-Trump, probably won’t be able to elect a Trump apprentice because none of those apprentices are Trump. And they won’t be able to elect a moderate because the moderate won’t be able to get Trump’s base without assaulting a couch or a woman or Pikachu enough to demonstrate that they’re tough on upholstery, crime, women, and Pokemon.

• Note to Self: Learn what the hell Pokemon actually are. The cards are everywhere in the house. My kids have been trying to explain it to me and I’ve just wanted to beat myself in the head with a rotary phone until I achieve the sweet release of 1980.

• Question to You for the comments section: If Taylor Swift and Pikachu join hands do their powers unite or something and they shoot liberal lightning out of their hands or webs like Spider-Man? Does grass grow and Camelot is restored? I don’t know how a Pikachu works or a Taylor Swift works but I understand the latter is objectively awesome.

What I was thinking a few weeks ago was We have the last-gasp most-animating Republican candidate (Trump) of a declining movement running against the deserving-but-least-animating candidate of a rising movement (Biden). And if that logjam ever breaks, the GOP nosedives into the dirt and the Democrats get their plane up above the storm and into the clear.

Now we have Kamala Harris and Grill Dad. And we have a statistical tie with some good signs for her and for them for this election. After this election — if Trump loses — the math for the Republicans starts getting really, really bad.

• It may already be really, really bad and we can’t see it yet because the polls may not reflect reality. In case you’d missed it, Democrats have been overperforming by 5-10 points from polling in all of the special elections over the past nearly two years. It’s possible that right now in the reality-we-can’t-see-yet the Democratic ticket is 5-10 points ahead of where the polls currently indicate they are. If they’re only two points ahead of the Republican ticket, then Kamala and Grill Dad will probably take most of the swing states. But whether this disparity between polling and actual electoral results continues to happen depends on, you know, voters, and on how much magic Siena College’s pollsters actually have now and whether it’s become a wizarding school.

Now the GOP knows — because there’s no way back into safety and/or robust competitiveness with longevity — that the only way out is through.

• They can hope that Trump wins and can sabotage the 2028 election enough to become President for Life to keep the party alive to fulfill their agenda.

• They can try to reform the party if he loses.

In the latter case, this means there’s only two real questions left for them once Trump is off the political scene:

Do they want to reform? and Can they?

So let’s go Full Futurist here, intersect the possible answers to those two questions, and see what we get:

Where did I get some of the guts of that? I did a hard dig on what’s publicly available on how Republicans and/or conservatives have tried to reckon with the GOP’s future.

• There’s actually relatively little thinking on that of the sort a professional futurist can use. By that I mean there are few GOP forecasts beyond simple-minded We win and Jesus will be proud of us or We lose and then Satan rules upon his throne of recycled plastic forevermore. Or the secular analogues.

The three main pieces I found that contained the numbers, internal debates, nuance, and that identified the remaining open questions for the GOP going forward that I needed to be able to grok through the GOP’s potential futures are these:

• The Hoover Institution’s data-driven look ahead I mentioned earlier. It’s extremely worthwhile to read and save.

• University of Pennsylvania’s panel on the future of conservatism with Republican pollster and Fox News contributor Kristen Soltis Anderson (who I find eminently reasonable), The Bulwark’s executive editor Jonathan V. Last (who I find honorable but a bit too negative and perhaps in need of Prozac + Prilosec), and former advisor to Vice President Mike Pence Olivia Troye (who I know, think a great deal of, and long may she reign).

• Stephen Goldsmith from Harvard’s Kennedy School and Ryan Streeter from the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin’s consideration of what the GOP could aspirationally become and where American conservatism could go. (Interview with the Ash Center here, and their working paper here.)

• And I got some bits from listening to interviews with James Carville because sometimes a futurist has to listen to a world-class Old Coot/expert political analyst like him. (Carville will say I’m not an Old Coot; I am an Epic, World-Class Louisiana-Greatness Coot — and don’t you forget it.)

I suspect they’d — all of this and all of them taken together — agree that the GOP is in deep, deep trouble. Deep. If Trump loses this November.

Because if Trump loses this November, he may be our last Republican president for a long time.

But then again, Trump could still win and make all of this moot. And Republicans could still get their car demographically and politically restarted even with some of their own guys trying to short out the alternator and remove the distributor cap.

Anyway.

I’m not saying the GOP will be on the brink of death — at least when it comes to winning the presidency — if Trump loses three months from now. I’m not saying that at all. That would be a silly thing to say.

I’m just saying they’re doomed.