Political scientists usually define a party as a team united around common principles for the purposes of winning elections.
If that’s the case, then the 2016 Republican party is the exception that proves the rule. For the Republican is not really trying to win this election—and it shows.
Right now, Donald Trump is trailing Hillary Clinton by roughly eight points in the head-to-head matchup, where he is only pulling in 41 percent of the vote. Alan Abramowitz’s Time for Change Model, one of the most precise and elegant tools to predict elections, projects that the Republican nominee should win about 51 percent of that vote.
Think about that: Trump has alienated roughly one-in-ten would be Republican voters. That is extraordinary.
It gets worse. Two-party competition is the way that we hold elected officials accountable in our system of government. Republicans are supposed to prosecute the case against the Democrats, and vice versa. But the Republicans have stopped doing that, and the Democratic party’s reputation has improved drastically as a result.
Before the San Bernadino shooting, Obama’s job approval was about 45 percent, compared to 50 percent disapproval. But after Trump came out for a ban on Muslim immigration, Obama’s standing made a drastic turnaround, which continues to this day. The Fox News poll released this week had Obama’s job approval at an astonishing 57 percent—despite persistently weak GDP numbers, a job market that has cooled down, andnumerous problems for Obamacare.
This should not come as a surprise. Just look at the front page of your local paper, or watch the top story on the evening news. It’s not about any of these things. It’s all Trump, Trump, Trump—the nearly daily revelation about some awful thing he said or did. Because the Republican party nominated Trump, the Democratic party’s record is not being subjected to the scrutiny it deserves.
So 2016 is the year the Democrats will win by default, because the Republican party stopped trying.
This is unprecedented in 226 years of party history. Never has a party been presented with a realistic chance of winning control of the government, and instead chose to forfeit to the other side.
