Republican Party

That’s the question I ask in my latest column at The Week. As you might guess, my answer is affirmative.

The usual response to these sorts of claims is that polling this far out doesn’t really mean much. Contests can get especially volatile as we approach an election date, nobody is paying attention yet, and Trump is riding primarily on name-recognition. But the distinctive feature of the 2016 Republican primary polling has not been its volatility but its stability — at least at the top, where Trump sits.

The Republican Party today poses a bit of a conundrum.

On the one hand, the party has gone from strength to strength at every level of government. It dominates state legislatures, is over-represented in governorships of states of all regions, types and sizes, has a virtual lock on the House of Representatives and a majority in the Senate. And it has achieved these goal in spite of a multi-year insurgency from the Tea Party right that has plainly cost it some winnable seats.

If you read nothing else today, make it this brilliant column by Michael Brendan Dougherty, who says the late far-right nationalist writer Sam Francis wrote the script for Donald Trump’s campaign 20 years ago, for Pat Buchanan, but Buchanan was too much a Republican Party man to follow it. Excerpts:

Republicans are fond of emphasizing that the party was founded by Lincoln, who freed the slaves. But the GOP’s role in the history of civil rights is even richer than the Great Emancipator. If Republicans can remember this legacy, perhaps there is some hope that the party might again attract the black voters who have felt unwelcome in its ranks for decades.

Since the 1960s, the Republican Party has sought out and corralled the angry white vote which was back-lashing against the civil rights movement and black progress. But now that disaffected base is turning on the wealthy GOP elites and no one should be surprised, writes Michael Winship. By Michael Winship Now, On May 21, 1946,…