So as promised, ponderings.
So pollsters and other such folks tend to regard the Democrats as a coalition of three broad demographic groups. Republicans meanwhile tend to be organized into four broad ideological camps.
1) 'Establishment Republicans'- Sorry, I don't have a pithy phrase for this one. Center-Right. Generally take the middle road of the three below and temper them into something fit for human consumption. Ish.
2) Libertarians- Don't strictly fall on the usual left-right spectrum, but tend to vote Right to Center-Right. Mostly in favor of small government and deregulation in broad strokes. Libertarians have their own party, technically, but as a matter of pragmatism most actually just vote Republican, trading off supporting the odd right-wing social issue (in strictest terms an actual Libertarian has no business supporting, say, abortion bans, in practice the odd member of the Libertarian party that hits congress will and the ones that just vote republican do so as well) for support of more traditional Republicans backing their more radical deregulation schemes.
3) Evangelicals- Hard-Right to Right. People that use the bible as a textbook. Broadly generate most Republican stances on social issues, or rather most party lines on the matter are designed to placate them since a quarter of the coalition feels uncomfortable (though not militant) with liberal stances on those matters and another quarter are here tactically ANYWAY.
4) Tea Partiers- Here-there-be-dragons to hard-right. These are your terrifying racists, MRAs, and other people one hissy fit away from bunkering down in a trailer with enough small arms to be their own police force.
The ongoing Republican race is utterly fascinating in a slightly terrifying way. All the remaining candidates are basically bad (as they have to be, when you have Tea Partiers to court sane people jump ship) so nobody wants to knuckle down and consolidate the field. Unlike the Democrats, we can't just poll people to find out how old they are and their melanin tone, so there's not really math. But my best guess?
Trump is sweeping through group 4, with a sliver of groups 3 and 2 (the latter, I strongly suspect, are there because they want Trump to demonstrate the system is broken and leave them better able to sweep away the government afterwards).
Cruz is picking up the lion's share of group 3 and most of the rest of group 2.
Leaving Rubio and Kaish to fight over group 1 and stragglers from the others that think Cruz is too punchable.
And nobody seems to want to back down. Probably because Cruz's sheer punchability is so high. Also because he's a sociopath's sociopath, lacking not only the capacity for empathy but a willingness to DISGUISE his abject contempt for the rest of humanity.
But he's still better than Donald "Is Running Straight From the Nazi Playbook" Trump.
So at this point everyone seems to seriously be angling for a contested convention. There's an outside chance Rubio and Kaish drop and Cruz beats Trump head to head, and an even more outside chance Trump takes a clear majority due to snagging juuuust enough winner-take-all states, but it's looking doubtful.
So the thing is, the Republican coalition probably doesn't survive a contested convention.
There's a very, very real possibility that if Trump is blocked due to party shenanigans, he just runs on his own and takes about a third of the base with him. Even if he doesn't, the crazy runs deep and I think they bugger off on their own regardless.
Now, if Trump somehow wrangles the nomination out of that scenario (or wins outright), I also don't think the Republican party survives THAT. Donald 'Godwin's Law Personified' Trump is a death blow to the remaining shreds of credibility the party has among its more moderate members or the handful of genuine swing/undecided voters out there.
Trump accounts for about 35% of the Republican base, and while i don't think they'd all leave if shenanigans happen, the bulk do. Call it 25%. Now, that amounts to about 10-15% of the total voting base, but that basically puts the Republicans in a place where they can only pull about 35-45% in a general election.
Exceeeeeept.
No small amount of the Democratic base is basically people who saw the Southern Strategy, or Reagan, or more recently the Tea Party and went "Nope." With many of those elements buggering off, do they go back?
And realistically? the only thing that brought the modern Democratic coalition together at all was pure "fuck those guys". There's a pretty huge ideological range there.
Now, this sort of thing doesn't just resolve itself overnight, so there'd be an election cycle or possibly two of basically inertia causing sweeping Democratic victories.
After that... well, if the center-right splinter of the Republican party woos the more centrist part of the Democratic, you end up with something resembling basic parlimentary distribution: a right-winger group, a centrist coalition, and a gaggle of lefties. Neat, right? I mean, lots of people find the whole two party thing offends their sensibilities, I certainly do. Much more sensible system right?
Yeah. Except the US system doesn't really support three or more major parties. There's not proportionate representation here. Each seat is a discrete election with winner-take-all results. and over time that sort of system is just going to devolve to two-man races. One group or another will get fewer and fewer seats as the larger groups consolidate their positions through chicanery until they just lack the capital to compete on even terms in a meaningful number of places.
Still, I think we're definitely in interesting times here. Probably less interesting than I'm pondering here? But I think we're on definitely seeing that once-a-generation realignment happening here. I'm just sorta spitballing how it might take form.
