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.
On the other hand, that same multi-year insurgency has so roiled Republican Presidential politics that this year, a candidate running explicitly on dethroning the party leadership for incompetence and corruption is not only leading in the polls nationally and in virtually every state – but no other competing candidate can get any traction by attracting the support of that party leadership.
The GOP, in other words, faces a very real prospect of decapitation, a takeover of the party by a man who owes virtually nothing to anybody of any consequence in the Republican hierarchy, nor among the world of GOP money-men, nor among the shock-jock army that has been relatively friendly to his candidacy largely because they don’t want to get on the wrong side of their own viewers and listeners.
That is a very strange position for an apparently strong and growing party to be in – which is what the party seems to be if you look at its actual electoral performance over the past several years. It almost makes one wonder how relevant the party has been to its own success.
So my question is: whether Trump wins a general election or loses, what happens to the GOP afterwards? In particular, what happens to down-ballot races, to the entrenched leadership in the various states? Could the GOP, organizationally, survive such a decapitation reasonably well? If it did, what would that reveal about where the power really lies in American politics? And what would change as a result?
David Brooks is not wrong to panic. Not so much because a Trump victory would mean the end of the GOP – but because it very well might not.