Then which kind of map is it?

https://twitter.com/philipaklein/status/1334491201332973571

Truth.

Not necessarily. As long as the GOP wins these 2 GA runoffs in the end, they will have come out of the Trump years in far better shape than anyone could have hoped for, and better than they deserve.

Yes, Trump will continue to rail on Twitter or TrumpTV, but I dont think he seriously wants to become president again in 2024 when he's 78. I, for my part, expect his reelection campaign to be a grift.

The health of a political party involves more than simply the number of seats picked up, at least in my opinion.

i thought his first campaign in 2016 was a grift, then he won. perhaps against his own wishes.

my prediction, he starts TumpTV, grifts again in 2024, and wins by accident, again.

- the base is still energized as fuck, and as long as the party nominates the right candidate, someone who is able to strike populist tones without being an incompetent, erratic nutcase, they have a very good shot at winning back the WH in 2024.
- the party made its biggest inroads with latinos and even blacks in decades. with Donald freakin' Trump at the top of the ticket. in spite of a huge health crisis on which the GOP president completely dropped the ball.
- the 2018 and 2020 elections have made it clear that the voter realignment we saw under Trump is here to stay. fortunately for the GOP, this realignment exacerbates their structural advantages in the electoral college and the Senate.
- the party had a really good year in state legislatures, ahead of redistricting - which means that they can consolidate their power for another decade.
- in most critical Senate and House races, the downballot Republicans ran ahead of Trump, showing that the 2020 election was more a repudiation of Trump the person rather than Trumpism the principle. the GOP brand doesnt seem damaged as badly as people like you thought (or hoped) it would be.
- the Democrats will have to govern with a president who's a lame duck since the day of his inauguration and an extraordinarly fractious coalition. we can already see their caucus being on each other's throat.
- structurally, the Democrats are now the party of college-educated white liberals to a larger degree than ever before. the influence of this group will hamper their ability to win back any of the WWC vote and cause them to struggle more and more with latino voters going forward.



Ideologically, neocon warmongering is dead and Koch-styled fiscal conservatism is dead as well - from my point of view, that's a good thing and will help rather than hurt the GOP going forward.



Another interesting effect of the Trump years is that they defused one of the party's major strategic long-term problems. For the longest time, most pundits thought that demographics were destiny and that the GOP would eventually lose its competitiveness without winning a larger share of the latino vote. But since immigration hawkishness was one of the major issues animating the party's white voter base, the GOP seemed destined to fade into irrelevance because it would be impossible to assemble the kind of coalition that it needs.

The fact that Donald "build the wall" Trump made large inroads with hispanics in 2020 while emphatically rejecting wokeism dispells this notion that the party needs to embrace amnesty and multiculturalism to appeal to latinos (something its WWC voters would never have accepted). Accidentally, Trump in 2020 has shown his party the obvious path forward: populism and nationalism which is open for based people of all colors, as opposed to white nationalism.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Dec 3 2020 10:08am

I just think that his moment will have passed by the time the 2024 election comes around. Also, the party establishment will have absolutely none of it. They will not get caught on the wrong foot again and allow a factional candidate to prevail over a fractured field. I expect the so-called "shadow primary" to start extremely early, and the party apparatus to rally around a strong front-runner before the official primary even kicks off, so that the nomination will, at worst, come down to a 1v1 between this candidate and Trump.

But I could be wrong on all of that, I'm admittedly not super confident in this prediction.

they did that in 2008 and 2016. nominations of designated losers behind the scenes

The party was decidedly not united behind JEB! in 2016. I'm talking about Hillary Clinton in 2016 levels of "clearing the field before the primary officially kicks off".

And she lost.

I don't see anyone who can take up the mantle, but we'll see.