During the run-up to this year’s election, we saw the usual nonsense about how the Republican Party may become extinct as a result of the inevitable Hillary landslide. The landslide, of course, didn’t happen, and neither party is going out of existence any time soon. But if that fate awaits either major party, it is the Democrats, not the Republicans.
As I wrote after the 2014 election, the GOP has become America’s party. At the state level, Republicans now dominate. You hear a lot about the Democrats’ “thin bench.” That is no coincidence: the Democrats are losing elections pretty consistently, up and down the ticket, and you have to win to get onto the bench.
In one of its 2016 election post mortems, the Washington Post takes a brief glance at reality:
[The Democratic] party has also been hollowed out in state capitals across the country. Where Democrats held 29 governorships when Obama was inaugurated, they can count only 15 in the wake of Tuesday’s election. In 2017, Republicans could tie the record for controlling governorships, which is 34, set in 1922 when Warren Harding was president. (One governor is an independent, and a recount is possible in North Carolina, where the Democrat has a narrow lead.)
A large majority of Americans live under Republican governors.
During the Obama presidency, more than 900 Democratic state legislators were defeated.
On Tuesday, Republicans picked up additional legislative chambers, and continued to make gains in state houses, with 24 states now having the “trifecta” control of both houses of the state legislature and the governor’s mansion.
So in almost half of the states, Democrats don’t control anything.
The victories for the GOP Tuesday included picking up the Kentucky House for the first time in almost a century and gaining control of the Iowa Senate.
I am not sure why the Post doesn’t mention that the GOP also picked up control of the Minnesota Senate. More than two-thirds of all state legislative bodies are now in Republican hands.
As of January, the GOP will control the presidency, the House, the Senate, and an overwhelming majority of state government institutions. Just about the only things the Democrats control will be the press and–far more important–the federal bureaucracy. The funny thing about the Democratic Press is that they are so self-absorbed that they don’t seem to have noticed that, across the country, their party is getting clobbered.
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