The Trump-era Republican Party does occupy a very different niche from the Party of 1964. When Trump was sworn into office, the G.O.P. held both houses of Congress. In 2018, the Democrats won back the House; the Senate is now a fifty-fifty split. But the Party still controls thirty state legislatures and twenty-seven governorships. In November, Trump, facing multiple, overlapping crises, all of them exacerbated by his ineptitude, won seventy-four million votes. Still, the Republican Party confronts a potentially existential crisis. Last year, Thomas Patterson, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, argued in his book “Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?” that, over time, the Party has set a series of “traps” for itself that have eroded its “ability to govern and acquire new sources of support.” The modern Republican Party was built upon the Southern beachhead that Goldwater established more than half a century ago. Johnson rightly worried that his embrace of civil rights would lose the South for the Democrats for at least a generation. In 1968, Richard Nixon won the Presidency, employing the Southern Strategy—an appeal to whites’ racial grievances. By 1980, the G.O.P. had become thoroughly dependent on the white South. In 2018, some seventy per cent of “safe” or “likely Republican” districts were in Southern states. Prior to last year’s election, Southerners composed forty-eight per cent of House Republicans and seventy-one per cent of the Party’s ranking committee members. The South remains the nation’s most racially polarized region and also the most religious—two dynamics that factor largely both in the Party’s political culture and in its current problems. “The South,” Patterson writes, “is a key reason why the GOP’s future is at risk.”
In addition, the G.O.P.’s steady drift toward the right, from conservative to reactionary politics; its dependence on older, white voters; its reliance on right-wing media; its support for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans; and its increasing disdain for democratic institutions and norms all portend increasing division and a diminishing pool of voters. Republicans, Patterson says, have been depending on a “rear-guard strategy” to “resist the ticking clock of a changing America.” Time may be running out for the Party, as its base ages and dwindles. “Its loyal voters are declining in number and yet have locked the party in place,” Patterson writes. “It cannot reinvent itself without risking their support and, in any event, it can’t reinvent itself in a convincing enough way for a quick turnaround. Republicans have traded the party’s future for yesterday’s America.”