Republicans are dying off. They have not elected in a President by a majority vote since the first President Bush because of this in 1988. Gore won the popular vote in 2000 so Gore was actually elected President by the popular vote instead of Bush II. Then Bush was re-elected only because we were in two wars and Americans don't change Presidents in the middle of even one war. Republicans are angry because they cannot elect another Republican President because they no longer have the votes since 1988. This is the real reason they are angry. Out Two party system is over at least as far as ever electing another Republican President goes. Some new system has to be worked out over time I guess. Because our two party system is over.
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The
2016 Republican primary began as many Republican presidential campaigns
do, with a few unexpected names atop the polls. In recent cycles, the
names have included Herman Cain, Rick Santorum and Pat Buchanan. This
year, they’ve been Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.
What’s made 2016 different is that unexpected names have stayed atop the polls.
For
the last five months, Mr. Trump, Mr. Cruz and Mr. Carson have combined
for more than 50 percent of Republican voters’ preferences in national
polls. And just to review: Mr. Trump and Mr. Carson have never held
elective office, while Mr. Cruz is loathedbymany of his fellow Republican senators. All three regularly tell untruths on the campaign trail.
By
contrast, the poll leaders in the final weeks before voting in the last
three competitive Republican races — 2012, 2008 and 2000 — were mostly
traditional politicians: Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich in 2012; John
McCain and Mike Huckabee in 2008; George W. Bush in 2000.
One
way or another, 2016 will be different. Either the nominee will be more
stylistically radical than any recent predecessor, or an establishment
figure like Marco Rubio will stage a much bigger comeback than any recent Republican nominee has.
Photo
Unloved by the party establishment: Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.Credit
John Locher/Associated Press
Why
has this happened? No doubt, there’s more than one answer. The
surprising weakness of Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, once the
front-runners, is part of it. Mr. Trump’s celebrity and his performance
skills are also part of it, as is Mr. Cruz’s success in winning over some conservative donors.
Yet
the biggest cause, in my view, is the mind-set of the Republican
electorate. It is angrier and more disenchanted than it has been in
years. Pockets of such anger have long existed. Disenchanted
conservatives helped Mr. Santorum win the Iowa caucus four years ago,
for example, and Pat Buchanan win
New Hampshire in 1996. Ultimately, though, a different group of
conservative voters — comfortable with the Republican establishment —
won out.
Share of self-identified Republicans who report being angry at the government in Washington.
%
100
80
60
40
20
0
33%
2000
2005
2010
Mon 19
Bush presidency
Obama
Clinton
The
establishment may yet prevail this year. Mr. Rubio and Chris Christie
have been sparring so much lately because both are trying to emerge from
Iowa and New Hampshire as the establishment alternative. One of them
(or Mr. Bush, if he can somehow turn around his campaign) will still
probably have a chance to consolidate the parts of the party turned off
by Mr. Cruz and Mr. Trump. If that effort succeeds, 2016 will end up
looking less unusual than it now does.
Yet
the alternative — that the Republican establishment will suffer its
worst defeat in a presidential primary campaign since Barry Goldwater’s
1964 victory — is a real possibility. Few political analysts or
journalists saw this coming.
To understand what’s happened, I asked the analysts at the Pew Research Center
to dig into their long-running surveys on the country’s mood and break
out the numbers just for self-identified Republicans. The numbers
generally do not show sharp changes in the last few years. They do show
an electorate that has become steadily more radicalized over the last
decade.
The
disenchantment began during the end of George W. Bush’s presidency,
accelerated during the financial crisis and reached a new peak during
President Obama’s highly active first term. By some measures, the
unhappiness has remained at that peak; by other measures, it’s even
higher today.
Consider
this: When Pew asks people whether they trust the government in
Washington to do the right thing, it offers three possible answers: just
about always, most of the time, only some of the time. In the most
recent survey, 18 percent of Republicans skipped all of those answers
and volunteered “never.” That share was up from 8 percent who did so four years earlier.
Similarly,
33 percent of Republicans said they were angry at the federal
government (as opposed to frustrated or basically content), up from 27
percent four years earlier. Only 12 percent of Republicans report being
satisfied with the country’s direction — roughly unchanged since 2012
and compared with the 18 percent who gave that answer in October 2008,
at the depths of the financial crisis. These patterns suggest that a
candidate like Mr. Trump or Mr. Cruz could have emerged in the 2012
cycle, but probably not earlier.
The roots of the anger have two broad causes: one economic, one cultural. The economic cause is the great 21st-century wage slowdown.
The typical family makes only marginally more money than it did in the
year 2000, because of the financial crisis and disappointing wage growth
on either side of the crisis. Historically, nothing breeds political frustration as reliably as economic stagnation.
For many Republican voters, this economic malaise is aggravated by cultural change. Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land. The share of Americans identifying as Christian is dropping. Only about half of babies born last year were non-Hispanic whites — while about nine in 10 of Republicans are non-Hispanic whites. A liberal African-American has been elected president, twice.
To be clear, many Republicans are frustrated without being racially prejudiced. But there is abundant evidence — from polls and analysis of web behavior, for example — that racial attitudes play a significant role in today’s politics.
One
especially telling explanation of the 2016 campaign comes from a Pew
question about Republicans’ attitudes toward their own party. In more
than two decades of Pew polling on the question, Republicans’
unhappiness with their party during the Obama presidency has exceeded
any previous level of self-party dissatisfaction, among either Democrats
or Republicans.
Share of self-identified Republicans saying they are dissatisfied with the country’s direction.
%
100
80
60
40
20
0
85%
1995
2000
2005
2010
Thu 17
Clinton presidency
Bush
Obama
About
half of Republicans have disapproved of their party’s congressional
leaders in most polls since 2013. By comparison, only about 20 percent
tended to disapprove during the Bush presidency.
No
wonder, then, that candidates who sound so angry are doing so well this
year. The actual start of voting — now just two weeks away — still has
the potential to return a sense of historical normalcy to the campaign.
But the Republican electorate is substantially different from the way it
used to be, which means the result could be, too.
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