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2016 wasn't a flash in the pan, it was a brick wall that all the momentum the right had been building since 2010 smashed to pieces against.
There was no momentum in 2010. In fact, there's a pretty clear descending line from 1984 Reagan to 2024 Trump, with lower highs and lower lows each cycle.
The natural constituency of the Republicans is dying of old age and being replaced with immigrants who have fundamentally different values.
In this light, it's a small miracle that the Republican Party even exists at all, let alone is relevant. As much as I hate Trump, I think he's able to reach people that normie Republicans are not.
The post-Trump world will likely look like a permanent blue victory. The Republicans didn't do anything wrong. They just don't have a big enough tribe any more and people are convinced that socialism is the path forward.
The Republicans won the largest seat number in the House they had won since 1946 and the largest individual seat gain for either party since 1948. And, of course, the momentum didn't stop there: They won more seats total in the House in 2014 than they'd had in any year since 1928. The GOP went from controlling 10 state legislatures in 2010 to controlling 25 after the 2016 elections, they took enough individual chambers to drive the Democrats down to unified control of just 5 total state legislatures, and went from occupying 23 to occupying 34 gubernatorial seats. Obama apparently presided over the Democrats losing more than 1000 downballot offices in his two terms.
The Republican Party was at an apex of its power going into 2016 that it hadn't seen in a century. Trump barely squeezed out an EC victory from that and ran behind the rest of the party everywhere, then presided over a Democratic landslide in 2018.
This:
is nonsense. They totally failed to live up to the expectations of a big portion of their base and so they got saddled with Donald Trump, who drives turnout for the Democrats at least as well as he does for Republicans, and dramatically better in midterm years. Had they done something to appease enough of the base that Trump's impact on the 2016 primary was as big as his impact on the 2012 primary and the Party went into the 2016 election with anyone more acceptable to the broader public, we'd be in a wildly different place.
Do you remember who was expected to win before Trump showed up? There's no way that Jeb Bush was going to achieve or do anything substantially meaningful if he was elected, and even that's a tall ask - I don't think he beats Clinton in the 2016 election. In the counterfactual world where he takes office the biggest changes I can see are that Russiagate never happens, the Syrian war gets escalated and the Ukraine war kicks off early.
Bush's lead had disappeared by the time Trump started taking off. It was essentially an open race and, to be honest, would probably have ended up being either between Rubio and Cruz or a three way between them and Kasich, depending on if Kasich and Rubio could consolidate. However, Rubio's pro-immigration image would have turned off the people who went for Trump in real life, so I could see it easily going to Cruz.
He's a weak vessel, but we didn't know that in 2016. He could probably handle Clinton fairly easily, especially if he focused on immigration like Trump did.
I was under the impression that this was in no small part due to Trump's attacks on Jeb. Without Trump there's no differentiation among the republican candidates at all, and that means Jeb's structural advantages deliver him the nomination (so he can lose to HRC). As for Cruz, we absolutely knew he was a weak vessel in 2016 - though I'm not sure that becomes as obvious with Trump out of the picture. At the same time, I don't think Cruz would even adopt the positions he did without Trump establishing them as primary-winners first.
I hate to say it because I would prefer that it didn't matter to people, but given how politics actually work, I'm not sure that Ted Cruz has the looks to win the Presidency. Trump looks weird too, but the difference is that Trump has figured out how to own his looks and make them work for himself. Almost everything weird about Trump's looks plays into his "the blue collar man's billionaire" macho persona. His obesity, his cheap-looking spray tan, his thin hair. I don't know if Ted Cruz would have been able to pull off making his looks work in alignment with his persona.
I agree that looks matter, but I think Trump also gets to coast on past glories. He was a big deal in the past, and while his appeal didn't manage to reach me, he was apparently attractive enough to spawn a flood of erotic dreams (https://www.yahoo.com/news/heres-why-always-sex-dreams-160500781.html).
That's a good point. Trump has the advantage of having an established reputation as a lothario playboy. Cruz doesn't, although given that he's a wealthy famous politician I'm sure that if he wanted to go that route he would have no shortage of opportunities.
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