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The Democratic machine is too good at generating votes to actually collapse. The voter's preferences aren't really relevant to that.
That won't save the party alone. It might save the name.
The Tories in the UK are basically in that spot right now. They have a machine and no shot at relevance. Therefore everybody expects Reform to essentially buy the machine and maybe the name attached to it, as has happened before (they are after all officially "The Conservative and Unionist Party").
I doubt that happens to the Dems because Americans have their two party system bolted down to the institutions pretty solidly so there's little path for a takeover, but you can't run a party on machine politics alone, not a government party anyways.
Another trajectory is what happened in Malta, another famous two-party system where one party just consistently wins and another consistently loses but not by large enough a margin as to make the loser party politically irrelevant. And essentially you just start seeing the winner party leadership make deals with the loser party to keep power, in a classic example of the high-low vs middle mechanism.
All that said, it seems very early to call the Dems permanent losers at all. They're in disarray but I don't think they've been dealt a killing blow the likes of which the Tories got. I can totally see a Clinton or Blair type figure come up with a novel coalition formula and reinvent the party.
This I would consider a hostile takeover in the same vein as Trump. Someone on the outskirts of the party enters the running and totally shatters the central machine despite its opposition. I do not think that such an individual can come from the party center, due to their excessive purity testing and effective shadow networks. See the top-level for evidence there. Secondarily, the party center is attached to a convenient notion of a coalition that simply does not exist, or which exists in irrelevant form: the nonwhites plus the women plus the gays who specifically want to organize against white men. In reality, each group and subgroup listed has internal priorities that have nothing to do with targeted resentment (except, maybe, some of the women - which is a different and serious issue), and therefore have nothing to organize around. Gays in particular have already “won” their battle as a group in a decisive manner. Gay sex is legal, gay partnerships are official, and so any gay man or woman has everything required to live a normal life - meaning their own priorities take over and they vote as members of different blocs. Meanwhile, there is no real effort or ability to reach uneducated white men and the people who do not reflexively hate them.
So, how likely is a hostile takeover? In my eyes, not likely. Sanders tried it ten years back and was effectively frozen out after a serious grassroots effort. I remember there being a serious attempt to primary Biden last election which was totally shut down and the instigator punished - before he was eventually proven right. So the party is very powerful at self-policing. A potential challenger would have to break through all that, including an increasingly ideologically concentrated and radicalized primary voter base (the less committed have been driven off - because why would you hang around in areas where people scream hate at you for disagreement), to win. They would need to create a parallel mobilization network to capture disaffected voters for the primary, to weather unequal debates, to get their message out despite hostile legacy media, and to possibly even attempts to procedurally take them off ballots, which has become an actual practice of the Democratic Party! I consider this fairly unlikely, unless some cataclysm befalls the central hierarchy and renders them incapable of organized resistance. I guess a civil war that shatters any unity between young and old could do that, or mass prosecution by Trump, but I doubt it. Thus, a slow continuation of decline ending in irrelevance.
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Uhh, which one is which? The timeline here shows both Nationalists and Labour holding power for long stretches. I checked some of the recent elections and Labour seems to win bigger victories when it wins, but still, winning is winning.
Texas since ~2000 has had a de facto three party dynamic with moderates, conservatives, and democrats, and the moderates consistently the kingmakers in legislative coalitions while whichever wins the Republican primary holds unitary roles. That’s probably a better example of a stable two party system where one party always loses.
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Labour are the winners and NP the losers since 2013. The roles switch around every few decades or so. I didn't mean to imply that it's a one party state with some subsidized opposition like Singapore. It's just very stable for long stretches which allow for the dynamics I described.
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The UK Tory machine doesn't deliver votes any more. To the extent they are irrelevant, it is because nobody can see a scenario where they win a majority at Westminster and form a government (except possibly as a junior coalition partner to Reform, or heaven forfend as a junior partner in an anti-Reform grand coalition with Labour if they find themselves swinging that way). To the extent they are relevant, it is because people can see a scenario where they will continue to hold 100+ seats by inertia and hold the balance of power between Labour and Reform.
The Democrats are likely to take control of the House in 2026, and the 2028 Presidential election winning party market is currently a toss-up on oddschecker.com, which aggregates the big UK sportsbooks. (In contrast, the "Most Westminster seats after next UK election" market is a toss-up between Labour and Reform.) The Dem machine in its current state can deliver 48% of the popular vote for a poor candidate.
Right now, the party which is most likely to blow itself up is the Republicans, because they need to manage the succession to Trump. The MAGA GOP relies on Trump's reality-TV star charisma to turn out the down-with-everything loser voters who are now part of its core vote, and there is no obvious successor who has that. The Democrats OTOH have a decent shot at the 2028 Presidential election with a replacement-level candidate, just like they did in 2024 (where Trump was never as much as a 2-1 favourite after Biden dropped out).
Yeah that's essentially what I have in mind with the Thatcher into Blair analogy.
That said, as a counter-counter-counter-point, succession fights can also be positive if they are sufficient free for alls instead of entrenched factionalism. We must remember here that Trump himself comes out of this kind of situation.
The way the splits in MAGA are shaking out though, I think we'll get factionalism. Techies vs Neocons vs Populists is just too clearly drawn with Trump the sole unifying figure. Unless Vance (or anybody else) manages to soften up the two other factions, it's going to be mean. There won't be any Dem radicals to sue the opposition into unity this time.
Rubio, Abbott, and Youngkin can all foreseeably unite the three factions with the always-second-string religious right. Desantis is also a strong maybe on that front.
I don’t see Vance doing this, I don’t see Cruz, I don’t see Hawley.
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