It is conceivable that the Republican Party could go so far to the right that it would guarantee electoral defeat for any of its candidates in all but the safest areas. That trend has continued.
The GOP survived the Great Depression for which it was heavily blamed, winning back the Presidency in 1952 when Dwight Eisenhower ran as a watered-down New Dealer with a squeaky-clean reputation and the greatest war record that anyone could ever have -- fully twenty years after Herbert Hoover vacated the White House. For years after 1932, Democrats castigated any Republicans who evoked nostalgia for the failed economics of the 1920s with the shout "Hoover! Hoover!"
In 2008 the GOP was voted out of the Presidency as the economy began to melt down. Should the Democrats handle the economy well, then they get to establish institutions that Republicans can't easily dislodge and get to establish political coalitions that will be difficult to break. The New Deal coalition that formed in the 1930s remained powerful until the 1990s.
But even with a swift economic recovery that suggests that concerns about the economy were overstated, the Republicans get blamed not only for bad decisions of the
1920sGWB era, but also for pervasive corruption, gaming the Constitution, and an unpopular war. Herbert Hoover, badly as he bungled the economic meltdown of 1929-1933, at least showed a moral compass and proved himself a man of peace.
The GWB era may have doomed the Republican Party to a regional party that cannot reasonably expect to win a majority. I can imagine one scenario in which the Republican nominee for President ends up in
third place -- that someone like Mitt Romney wins the Republican nomination in 2012 by winning primaries in states that the GOP has no chance of winning. Mike Huckabee gives up early and decides to run on the Reform Party ticket. Romney and Huckabee split the conservative vote while Obama sews up all else, with such results as these:
The results look strange, but have solid explanations. Obama largely holds onto the core Democratic states. He picks up Arizona, where neither Huckabee nor Romney has any obvious advantage. He holds onto Florida and Virginia, not part of the core of the South culturally or politically -- by thin margins. Virginia has drifted into the core of the Democratic Party. Note well that Mike Huckabee, although a Southerner running on a third-party ticket, is absolutely not running as a racist as did Strom Thurmond in 1948 or George Wallace in 1968.
Romney wins heavily-Mormon Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho by large margins, as one would expect and barely holds onto the Plains states (he wins NE-03, but wins Nebraska at large, which splits, Obama getting NE-01 and NE-02, barely). Palin effectively delivers Alaska, but nothing else, to Romney.
Huckabee does something remarkable: he picks up all of the core South except Mississippi and takes North Carolina (barely), Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia. He comes close to picking off Texas and Oklahoma, but even winning those two states would not be enough to win the election for him.
In Florida, Obama wins enough of the Jewish, Latino, and black vote to barely edge out Huckabee and Romney (the latter doing better in Florida than in any other state in the South that he lost). Mississippi? Romney and Huckabee campaigned heavily in the South, split the white vote, and Obama wins the black vote.
Results in this scenario:
Obama 370
Huckabee 97
Romney 71(note that I have not adjusted for re-apportionment of Congressional seats).
The Republican candidate for President has finished a distant third in a Clintonesque landslide for Barack Obama.
