Parties in Crisis - What's Next?

Parties will continue to lose their relevance. There are a number of indications of this happening. The Gallup figures is one. Here in California, the fastest growing voter registration preference is NPP (No Party Preference). The old style party politics is giving way to something new.

What's interesting is that the GOP and the Dems have managed to corner the market when it comes to a candidate's viability. By any and all reasonable indicators, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders should not have run within the party structure that they did. Why did they? Because to do otherwise would have made achieving a win almost impossible. Yes, there's money and organization to be considered. But more than that, there's the fact that nobody gets invited to the debates without a D or R next to their name. That keeps candidates like Trump and Sanders within the old party structure, as to do otherwise would represent a complete waste of time.

Yup. That's right. The two parties are going to hold on to control until their final gasps.

No. Decent people don't want to waste their time. The game is rigged; either you play the game the way it's been designed to be played, or you waste your time and money and energy getting nowhere. So people run as Ds and Rs, whether or not they have any business doing so.

 

What you ignore is that the Democratic platform is extremely popular. Their MESSAGING sucks.

If you have to explain...you lose.

It's so much easier to appeal to emotion than intellect "Lock her up!!". "Build a Wall!!"

 

They did not. Those same Republicans you mentioned refused to pay for it

 

And many of the poor people rely on it too, It is also the only way that millions of Americans (like my son and his wife) can afford healthcare insurance

 

As far as the Republican Party goes, I've been writing about the Republican Civil War for quite a while now. It's still ongoing with the populist nationalists taking charge of the executive branch, but not the party or Congress or the Republican establishment and intelligentsia. So it's a weird situation in which every aspect of society and the Republican Party is allied against the sitting President who has zero institutional support... just voters.

With the Democrats I really think it was a return to business as usual. They always have a primary that features some young upstart that the college kids love, but who eventually succumbs to the establishment candidate. In this case, the young upstart was old Bernie Sanders. He was more left that usual, but otherwise played his part well.

 

You want the country dismantled or the people?

 

I can only hope someday your wrong. Sadly , you are probably right. Good response though.

 

Popular with who? What platform? I guess Perez and Ellis didn't like it as they fired everybody. What do you think the Democrat stands for.

 

Intelligentsia? Where did you find that on Capital Hill?

 

Unlike the Democrat party that is nothing more than a totalitarian corrupt banana republic political organization where all of the hate mongers are in lock step the Republicans are a diverse group from neocons who are nothing more than liberals to palo-conservatives.

But the obstructionism just isn't in Congress but also in state legislatures like California who hired Eric Holder to obstruct the Trump administration and on the streets and universities like Berkeley where sedition seems to be the agenda.

 

The two major parties biggest advantage is ballot access. Automatic ballot access where any third party or independent candidate has to jump through hoops with petitions and signatures which vary from state to state as do the election laws. Each state also has their own time frame for getting on the ballot. Some are fairly easy and other almost impossible. Ballot access is probably the main reason Trump and Sanders ran for the two major parties nominations.

To get on the ballot in each of the 50 states cost millions. It is also time spent getting on the ballot and not on the campaign trail. Then there are always a lot of law suits. More money has to be spent.

Independents or your no party preference are at an all time high, a record high of 42% of the total electorate. Yet independents for the most part have no say in whom the two major parties nominate. Over the last four years independents have risen from 35% to 42% as more and more Americans are getting fed up with the two major parties. From 1972 through 2012 independents stayed between 30-35% according to Pew Research. Between 1957 to 1972 independents were between 21-29% and before 1957 in the teens percentage wise of the electorate. So independents have been on a slow rise for quite a long time. But I think the continued polarization of the parties along with the majority of Americans viewing both parties unfavorably or in the negative has caused a quick spike of 7 points.

Still, with our two party system it doesn't really matter if 60% of all Americans discard the two major parties, they still control the nomination process, ballot access, the presidential debates, get all the money from the moneyed elite like corporations, wall street firms, lobbyists, special interests etc. That is what stops a viable third party from rising, along with the Republicans and Democrats writing our election laws as a mutual protection act.

Perhaps a multi billionaire could ran and win as an independent for president or as a member of a third party. That is if that multi billionaire was will to spend 3 billion plus on getting elected. Perot spent 300 million of his own money in his run.

 

Well, if that's the case then there shouldn't be any issue if the democrats do not cooperate as the republicans expect them to.

 

Then the republican party should learn to deal with it without blaming the democrats for all the republican failures. There is something to be said for marching in lockstep; if republicans followed that mindset, all your legislation would have passed very easily.

 

Always?

Obama fit that pattern in some ways but did not "succumb"

Who are the others?

 

Oh I absolutely agree on Obama. That's why I said this last election year was a return to business as usual. "Business as usual" for the Democrats was upended in 2008 when the role of the young upstart who was beloved by college kids actually won the nomination and became President. Of course in Democratic primaries black voters are the kingmakers, not the college kids, and they usually go with the establishment choice. In 2008 the moved from Hillary to Obama. In 2016, they stuck with Hillary.

 

Dude I don't expect them to. It's the damn Rino's that piss me off. They have little in the way of decent ideas of their own and won't listen to anyone else's Their cast iron stupidity and short sightedess are as much a part of the problem as the dems.

 

How would it make health care better to simply not have any?

 

A statement largely reflective of ignorance and bigotry.

 

Republicans hold the White House, Senate, House of Representatives, a majority of state houses, and governors, they are far from a crisis scenario. Liberals on the other hand lost what was supposed to be a sure thing, they gained nothing anywhere, so yep, there is definitely crisis there.

The liberal crisis stems from a few significant issues. First liberals backed illegal aliens over hard working Americans with their calls for 'amnesty' and whatnot. Secondly liberals backed the racists of BLM over law and order. Add in all the scandal, dishonesty, and overall failures associated with Hillary and you have a recipe for crisis. It didn't help that Obama was the worst president the US has had in almost 100 years...

 

The GOP is a very diverse political party.

Do you know how many liberals fled the Democrat Party and came under the GOP tent when the "New Left" (radical left) hijacked the Democrat Party and turned it into a corrupt fascist banana republic totalitarian leftist hate mongering syndicate ?

Holly **** !!! Where did the Democrat liberal base go ???

The original neocons were a band of liberal intellectuals who rebelled against the Democratic Party's leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s. At first the neocons clustered around Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat, but then they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront Soviet expansionism. The neocons, in the famous formulation of one of their leaders, Irving Kristol, were "liberals mugged by reality."