OP does specify that the collapse is at the federal level. Obviously the GOP has been far better at adapting at the state level. But a symptom of the stuff I described in the OP is that their should-be rising stars (Christie, Kasich) have no chance of getting through a GOP presidential primary.

Maybe I just think it'll prove more adaptable; I don't think it's inevitable that the GOP primary process gets worse at picking candidates of broad appeal. Certainly on the Senate side, that was a problem this year.

But Republicans still have the Supreme Court and half of Congress (for now).

If the party elites think that the presidential primaries will produce losers, they'll fix the process. This was already roundly observed regarding, say, Romney and Paul.

I can just remember this prediction of collapse from 2000, when Gore won the popular vote. Turns out it was a little premature.

OP is pretty lol....A close to perfect democratic candidate wins 2 fairly close presidential elections? Obv 1000 year reich going forward LDO.

Make no mistake, there's a problem with where it is. I mean Jesus Christ, Romney had his own polls showing how he was going to win the election. They are making up their own reality.

If anyone did this in almost any other category you'd call them crazy. The party breeds idiots. They don't even believe in stuff like facts and science. It's a complete joke.

Then they should have hired better pollsters. But bias in Romney's polling doesn't even matter. They still have to finish the game, and systemic bias in polling still lets him prioritize resources appropriately. From a morale standpoint, it might even be better than publishing the real numbers internally.

I'm not a fan of the GOP's anti-science/anti-intellectual/anti-gay etc. positions. But there's a constituency for it. That's the present reality in the US. For something like marriage equality, public opinion is shifting. Only if the GOP fails to shift as well will there be long-term problems.

I remember reading an article saying in the mid 2020s Texas is going to be a swing state just to changing demographics alone.

If Republicans lose Texas they are basically ****ed, right?

So far it seems like party standard bearers are resisting this shift; you have the hannity/limbaugh types pre-empting this with the usual 'no true conservative fallacy', and fighting any moves towards more socially liberal demographics with, "then we'll just all be democrats, what's the point?"

The conservative ecosphere has dug some pretty deep battle lines around some of these issues over the years (read: gone full ******), it's pretty hard to just be like, opps i guess we actually are cool with more reasonable policy on gay marriage/ immigration/abortion/healthcare, ect.

The Hannity/Limbaugh mob and all the rest of them, couldn't care less if the GOP ever wins another election. They are in it strictly for the money and the celebrity status. Harder for them to be an anti government twit if the GOP is the Govt

If a black muslim with a name straight out of al-Qaeda is only close to perfect, it's hard to imagine what perfect would be.

Perfect would be Bill Clinton without his philandering leak.

Bobby Jindal think the GOP should stop being the "stupid party"

Bobby Jindal's unintentional irony is strong.

Was reading time magazine today. There were 1 million at the inauguration but the problem is it was down 40% from 4 years ago. Obama increased welfare roles thus gained voters thats about it.

I think republicans can take California. They get seem to get corrupt republicans to run as they have all the money. Ron Paul could win California.

Yeah, and some people are gonna do the math and realize it would've taken <1 million votes to flip enough swing states to get a Romney win. C'mon, all we need to do is convince just the right tiny group of voters and we might... win 271 electoral votes while losing the popular vote by 3 percent? That not a long term plan!

A black dude named Barack just won re-election in a ****ty economy where he showed up for the first debate looking like he just pulled an all nighter. You know how some of the more lol clueless GOP poll guys where like "Where did all the McCain voters go? Did we not talk about Benghazi enough?"?

By 2016, those missing McCain voters are going to get joined by a big ole group of missing Romney voters. The demographic trends of America getting more secular and less white aren't going to reverse themselves. These are going to be voters who grew up under the Bush Presidency, who don't remember the Reagan years of GOP success because they were born in the 90s.

I felt compelled to update the title of this thread.

You guys might remember that each of the last two elections a common rebuke from right wingers was "you aren't running against George Bush this time"...

But really, Obama was running against Bush. "What was Bush wrong about?" is a real stumper for a modern GOPer. What policy goals did W pursue that were mistakes in the eyes of today's Republicans? Being unpopular was not part of the Bush/Cheney platform, it was a consequence of their governing. In 2016, Hillary will have Bill and Barack speaking in front of her at the convention about why supply side tax cuts and wars of aggression and anti-contraception policies are bad ideas.

Is there no stopping the culture warriors even if the culture they cling to is being destroyed and assimilated by actual culture? Flagship institutions of the religious right are crumbling. Gay marriage defeats on every level. People are out everywhere! All those prayer warriors left with doubt rather than faith- so more and more open their minds and hearts , even if a little, to neighbors and family, loved ones. Quality community relationships are formed, rather than superficial ones based on distance and judgmentalism. Anti-gay GOP institutions are running out of track? Who is getting off the train?

I would love to see the republicans lose but I worry that this thread we will be resurrected in 2014 for some lol riverman fun..... Akin to the joe flacco terrible at football thread in sporting events

The highlighted is a proven fallacy. You can just look at the spending numbers from Bush 1 to Clinton to Bush 2 on through Obama.

Both Clinton and Obama have reigned in spending, (Clinton even left the country with a SURPLUS rather than a deficit, if you can get your mind around that one) and both Bushes incurred huge unnecessary expenses, including the prescription drug entitlement (a gigantic giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies which costs us trillions, and was designed to shore up their profits in the face of threats from cheap Canadian generic drugs) and the Iraq war, a vastly expensive boondoggle featuring hundreds of billions spent on "rebuilding" Iraq and mostly going straight into the pockets of corrupt crony capitalists with government connections. Meanwhile, the Republican rhetoric about social programs is mostly meaningless scare tactics appealing to racism and xenophobia, and do not address any of the actual problems.

There is some validity to the aggression / drone war point, but Obama has already ended one "endless" war, and is in the process of ending a second. He is transferring drone strike capability to the military from the CIA, for greater accountability, and has made sounds about drawing down forces in Europe and Asia. The "Democrats" are also noticeably less hawkish about Iran, and Netanyahu has famously made several frowny faces in Obama's presence (fodder for millions of pages of hyperbolic "right wing" articles, radio shows and Romney speeches). The Obama administration also seems to be somewhat more transparent and democratic, and also somewhat less militarily ostentatious and vainglorious than the Republican Bush administration was, less show offy, and less inclined to encourage Fox News to post color coded hourly "terror alerts" and that sort of thing than the Bush Republicans were. Of course Obama has also clearly demonstrated that he is not ****ing around when it comes to terrorists, and has given no quarter where some have whispered that Bush did.

All in all it seems as if we are actually heading into a time of peace and prosperity, as difficult as that may be to accept after the utter disaster that was the Bush white house years. Your point about cronyism and corporate corruption is of course always something to be aware of, but again, the Republicans have proven themselves to be the kings of that sort of thing.

Democrats certainly aren't perfect, and I agree there should be two parties. Actually, if you'll notice there are actually THREE parties right now, that is part of the problem, the Republicans are caucusing with the Tea Party which is why they are so confused.

LoL that Fox created the Tea Party as a hoax to "reinvent" the Republican party and now it's out of their control and is becoming an actual party, that is splitting their caucus down the middle.

It's trivially easy to predict a huge wave of overt "gayness" throughout the "Red States" in the next 10 years.

Once people in Kentucky, Alabama etc start getting gay married and come to realize that they have actual human and civil rights, and don't have to fear their yahoo neighbors with a bunch of guns, then the brittle and outdated cultures there of religious tribalism and racism will crumble because they don't have much substance to them do they.

Ron Paul can't win ****.

All you need to do is explain clearly and coherently what his positions actually are to the voters, then allow Ron Paul to clarify your points during a debate for you.

Guy is the biggest fraud ever. He knows absolutely full well that his message and beliefs have been radically misinterpreted by the "libertarians" but he never bothers to correct anybody because he likes the attention.

Chris Christie will be it's salvation...if the buffoons allow him to win the primaries.

yeah, wait until he spends his entire career as an irrelevant sidenote, then let's hear what he thinks.

And wow, if we ever get a Romney video of Jindal it's liable to blow your socks off. Like maybe he'll suggest a Republican platform featuring a caste system or something, with gays and minorities as the "untouchables" and what not, and those of pure white complexion or who have been blessed with the name "Jin-Dhal" will make up the elite class of rulers.

What a joke, these more clever new guys are jumping in to redefine conservatism intellectually, but *oops* their entire voting constituency is basically consisting of the lower 30% of the US population. And so, yeah, we'll do a rigorous intellectual platform and publicize our beliefs (HAHAHA what a joke) and then get some more of those 1 percenters on our side.

I agree it's a start to attain some kind of coherent ideology though. Right now the declared Republican/conservative ideology seems to be "racism (white europeanism), religion (fundamentalism wrestling naked with catholicism), unregulated capitalism and corruption, and the projection of US force around the world in the service of "american style democracy" -- an idea that has practically defeated itself during the "arab spring".

Romney even took it to the next level selecting key Bush advisers and allies for his campaign staff including his veep. ****, he got asked in a debate how he is different to Bush then the next weekend he was campaigning with Condi Rice while Cheney was doing a fundraiser for him. Basically the only figure not working with Romney from that administration was Bushey himself who thought it was a good idea to go chill with rich guys in the Cayman Islands possibly visiting Romney's money for him.

Then the irony is that what Bush was getting right, the brand of caring conservativism even if it was a paper thin myth and the outrich to the Latino and Hispanic vote is what the Republican Party need to do, yet those are the things they have cut out of the Bush legacy absorbing only the ****ty parts that poll the worst nationwide.

Two thoughts:

1. I have to remind myself that it's not just the conservative politicians who are crazy. These politicians simply mirror their constituents. The people are the problem. I think politicians are following the lead of the people more than the other way around at this point. And that leads into my second thought...

2. The power of conservative media in all this can not be overstated. People like Limbaugh/Hannity/O'Reilly indirectly control the entire party because they have so much influence over the way conservatives think about things. And of course the media makes more money and are more intersting the more extreme they go, so that's what they do and the people follow suit. This has happened on the liberal side as well but not to the same extent yet. The "bubble" isn't just a term thrown out there to mock people - it is a real phenomenon. If I had to oversimplify, I would argue that conservative influence is flowing like this right now: media --> people --> politicians.

Maybe this all changes with leadership. I'm not sure. The Republicans haven't had a real voice of the party since Bush left office, so conservative media are filling that void.