Doug Sosnik was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and co-wrote a New York Times best-seller on the future of politics in the United States.

Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik was a close adviser to President Bill Clinton, and he’s famed in Washington circles for his closely held, big-think memos on the state of American politics. In his latest, posted here with his permission, he says that Republicans' efforts to win the midterm elections will make it hard for them to take the White House in 2016.

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“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” —Groucho Marx

In just a few words, Groucho Marx summed up the current state of the Republican Party heading into the 2016 presidential elections. Since the start of George W. Bush’s second term nine years ago, the party has been in political free fall. The GOP is in a state of transition, moving away from the Washington D.C. establishment-based, neoconservative party that has dominated Republican politics for a generation toward one increasingly controlled by conservative and populist interests outside the Beltway.

As part of this transformation, Republicans running for office are increasingly adopting far-right positions on economic and social issues that may play well in the midterms, but are well outside the mainstream for presidential-year voters.

At the national level, Republicans continue to be viewed as the congressional opposition party whose intransigence led to the government shutdown last October. These same interests actively worked to scuttle immigration reform this year. In this environment, it’s the likes of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and California Rep. Darrell Issa who define the Republican brand.

The struggle for the party’s future is playing out in real time as we approach the crucial period leading up to the 2016 elections. Ironically, Republicans’ short-term tactics to pick up additional seats in the 2014 midterms—as well as the rightward pressures of the presidential primary process—will only reinforce the public’s perception of the Republican Party as unwelcoming and out of step with the majority of Americans.

We are now entering the most critical phase of the upcoming presidential campaign. And, if history is any guide, by the time the first votes are cast in the Iowa caucuses in January 2016, the dynamics that will determine which party will win the White House will have already been set. These underlying forces are already taking shape, and they will begin to solidify next year as the Republican Party continues its rightward march.

The early zeitgeist

Ahead of each of the last nine presidential elections, voters’ sense of the times – their attitudes about the direction of the country, their own personal well-being, the incumbent president’s job performance and the two major political parties—began to solidify. Once set, that mood rarely changed, and formed the prism through which voters evaluated their presidential choices. Candidates were seldom able to alter the course of the general election, except at the margins.

Over the last 32 years, eight out of last nine presidential elections fell into one of three categories: 1) time-for-a-change elections, 2) stay-the-course elections, and 3) a version of the stay-the-course elections when a superior general election campaign mattered. The exception was the 2000 election.

In three of the elections (1980, 1992 and 2008), the incumbent president and his party were so unpopular that the outcome was largely preordained, despite the usual campaign drama. Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush all had job-approval numbers at 40 percent or lower during the general election campaign phase, dragging down their re-election prospects, or, in George W. Bush’s case, that of their party’s nominee. In each example the country was experiencing a significant economic downturn, making voters even more unwilling to give the party in power another four years in the White House.

In three others (1984, 1996 and 2012), the incumbent president and his party were popular enough that the parameters for their re-elections were set before the general election began. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama each had positive momentum heading into the general, with job-approval ratings approaching or topping 50 percent.

TIME-FOR-A-CHANGE-ELECTIONS 1980: The horse-race numbers showed Carter leading for most of the 1980 presidential campaign up until the end of October. Despite the appearance of a close race, the reality was that the country had been increasingly souring on Carter’s presidency throughout the year. At the beginning of 1980, Carter’s job approval numbers went into political free fall, dropping from 58 percent in January to 31 percent in June in five months. Dissatisfaction with Carter was so strong that he was forced into a protracted primary against Ted Kennedy, which lasted all the way until the Democratic Convention in New York. By the end of June, seven out of 10 people disapproved of Carter’s job performance. The disapproval persisted and his job approval hovered at or below 37 percent for the rest of his presidency. Even though voters were unsure about who they would vote for, they seemed pretty locked into who they weren’t going to vote for in November. The electorate wanted to support Ronald Reagan, but many voters were deterred by his age and some of his policy positions. For much of 1980 many alienated Carter voters parked their vote with independent John Anderson (who was polling as high as 24 percent in June) while they deliberated on Reagan. After the campaign’s only debate on Oct. 28, Reagan finally cleared the bar of acceptability and Carter’s candidacy virtually collapsed overnight. On Election Day, Reagan carried more than 50 percent of the vote in the three-person race and won 489 electoral votes in 44 states. 1992: President George H.W. Bush was no Ronald Reagan. Broad disapproval of his stewardship of the economy doomed his candidacy before the start of the three-person general election race with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. Bush’s job approval cratered from 66 percent in October 1991 to 39 percent by February 1992. His weakened condition forced him into a primary challenge from the right by Pat Buchanan. Bush’s downward spiral continued until Aug. 2, when his support bottomed out at 29 percent. His Oct. 15 job-approval rating of 34 percent came close to his final vote of 37 percent. With the exception of a brief a post-convention bounce, for most of the period between early April and Election Day, six in 10 voters indicated that they did not plan to vote for Bush. In the three-person race, Bill Clinton glided to victory, winning 31 states (plus the District of Columbia) with 370 electoral votes. 2008: It has been said that John McCain was the only candidate to lose twice to George W. Bush. In 2000, he lost the nomination to Bush. And in 2008, McCain’s presidential campaign was doomed from the start due to Bush’s unpopularity. Despite McCain’s efforts to distance himself from Bush, the country was simply in no mood for four more years of a Republican in the White House. Bush started 2008 with a 32 percent job-approval rating, which by Election Day had dropped to 25 percent. Although much was made about what appeared to be a tightening race during the fall period, the electorate’s overwhelming unhappiness with Republicans put Obama on an easy path to victory. In the final pre-election Wall Street Journal/NBC poll on Oct. 20, the Republican Party had a 48 percent negative rating and only a 32 percent positive one. In the end, Obama carried 28 states (plus D.C. and one congressional district in Nebraska) for a total of 365 electoral votes.

In 1988 and 2004, the incumbent party enjoyed a relatively strong base of support, but there were no guarantees of another term. In both of these elections, the Republicans entered the general election with a sitting president with approval ratings at or above 50 percent. However, in 1988 the popular president, Reagan, was not on the ballot; George H.W. Bush was. And in 2004, only a narrow majority of voters supported his son George W. Bush, who faced a strong and motivated opposition. Both Bushes faced very different election-year circumstances, but both needed to run a superior campaign to capitalize on their relative advantage over Democrats going into the general election.

And then there’s the 2000 election—the only true example of a presidential race that was decided during the general election phase and its aftermath.

The GOP’s structural disadvantage in 2016

The results of the 57 previous presidential elections have demonstrated the resilience and adaptability of the American political system. Over time, the process has given one major political party an edge over the other, but never a permanent advantage to either. But over the last 20 years, the changing face of the electorate has given Democrats an ever-widening structural advantage in presidential politics. Republicans’ short-term 2014 electoral strategy, as well as their 2016 presidential primary process, will only exacerbate this gap.

Following the 2012 elections, the Republican National Committee (RNC) issued its “Growth & Opportunity Project” report, a comprehensive post-mortem analysis of the election that included interviews with more than 2,600 party leaders and online surveys of 36,000 activists. The final report was a 112-page indictment on the party’s failures to adapt to the changing world—especially when it comes to broadening its base of support among women, minorities and young people.

“The minority groups that President Obama carried with 80% of the vote in 2012 are on track to become the majority of the nation’s population by 2050,” the report noted. “The nation’s demographic changes add to the urgency of recognizing how precarious our position has become. … unless Republicans are able to grow our appeal the way GOP governors have done, the changes tilt the playing field even more in the Democratic direction.”

If anything, the RNC understated the urgency. Since the 2004 election, Republicans have steadily lost ground among women voters, Hispanics, African Americans, Asians and youth. Despite the clear trend lines, Republicans have continued to adopt positions that are seen skeptically—to put things charitably—by women and the fast-growing demographic groups that are increasingly necessary to win presidential elections.

Women now constitute 53 percent of all voters. In the last two presidential elections, women supported President Obama over the Republican nominee by double digits.

Since the 2012 presidential election, the Republican Party’s policy positions on women’s health and choice have only worsened these tensions with female voters. Rather than reconsider those positions, Republicans have concluded that they simply have a communications problem. Recently, the party hosted a two-day Washington D.C. seminar on “how to talk to women.” The conference, which was attended by 60 House candidates and a dozen Senate candidates, was widely ridiculed in the media.

Republicans face similar challenges with the fast-growing non-white voting population, which has been trending more and more Democratic over the last several election cycles.

Over the past quarter century, as the non-white share of the population has expanded, the white share of the vote for president has steadily declined, falling from 87 percent in 1992 to 72 percent in 2012.

In 2012, 88 percent of Mitt Romney’s support came from white voters.

Of greatest concern to Republicans should be the Hispanic vote – an ascendant voting bloc that is expected to double in size over the next generation. The Pew Hispanic Center projects that by 2030, 40 million Hispanics will be eligible to vote—up from 27 million today. Since George W. Bush’s 2004 election, Hispanic voters have abandoned the Republican Party in droves. Republicans’ ongoing attempts to thwart immigration reform this year in Congress are likely to drive the party’s support among Hispanic voters even lower.

Compounding Republicans’ problems with minority voters is the party’s growing challenge with younger voters. Democrats have carried the youth vote in every presidential election since 1992, creating an entire generation of Democratic-leaning voters.

In 2012, Obama won the youth vote by 23 points—60 percent to 37 percent. Many of these young voters were drawn to the Democratic Party by Obama’s historic candidacy in 2008, as well as by their opposition to the Bush/Cheney administration’s positions on the wars and on social issues.

The GOP’s deficit with young voters is likely to grow. A recent Pew Research Center report, Millennials and Adulthood, found that Millennials are more progressive than any previous generation—particularly on social issues. Republicans’ positions on issues like gay marriage, women’s health, global warming and the legalization of marijuana are anathema to young people, as the RNC’s own autopsy report acknowledges: “in every session with young voters, social issues were at the forefront of the discussion…. [M]any see them as the civil rights issue of our time.”

The same Pew report found that only 17 percent of Millennials currently identify themselves as Republicans. Absent a change in their policy positions, it’s hard to see how Republicans will close the gap with these Millennials—particularly since their generation is expected to become a growing share of the electorate. Right now, young voters constitute 25.5 percent of the eligible electorate, a figure that will rise to 36.5 percent by 2020.

The math looks even more daunting for Republicans when you’re looking at the Electoral College. How things change: As early as 1964, Republicans began to solidify their hold throughout the South following the passage of the Civil Rights Act. By the beginning of the ‘80s Republicans were thought to have a “lock” on the Electoral College. Immigration was already undermining that, to the extent that despite Dukakis’ weak candidacy in 1988, he still managed to secure 111 electoral votes against George H.W. Bush.

STAY-THE-COURSE-ELECTIONS 1984: Reagan’s re-election was effectively secured before it ever began. He started the year with a 55 percent job approval, which never dropped below 50 percent the entire year. In Gallup’s last pre-election poll, Reagan’s 58 percent job-approval rating mirrored his final 58 percent vote against Democratic challenger Walter Mondale, and he carried 49 states with 525 electoral votes. 1996: Two factors ensured that Bill Clinton’s re-election was never really in question: 1) his strong job performance as president by the end of his third year in office, and 2) the Republican-led shutdown of the federal government at the end of 1995. Following Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union address, his job-approval rating held steady at 50 percent or above for the entire year. On Election Day, Clinton won re-election over Bob Dole with 49 percent of the vote, carrying 31 states (plus D.C.) with 379 electoral votes. 2012: In early August 2011, many pundits started writing Obama off as a one-term president when his support dropped to 40 percent. Several factors, however, positioned Obama to eventually cruise to a relatively easy re-election. First, he remained personally popular and his job performance steadily increased to around 50 percent and higher throughout 2012. And, second, the Obama team ran a once-in-a-generation campaign, while Romney emerged from the weak field as a damaged general-election candidate. By the time Romney had secured the nomination, the contours of the election had already been set in Obama’s favor. Obama went on to beat Romney by nearly four percentage points, picking up 332 electoral votes.

Democrats went on to expand their political base beyond New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the West Coast while they solidified their hold on the industrial Midwest. Population growth and shifts in the fast-growing states in the inter-mountain West—including New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado—as well as in states bordering the deep South—including Florida, North Carolina and Virginia—allowed Democratic-leaning states to become base states and some Republican-leaning states to become toss-ups, greatly expanding Democrats’ targets of opportunity. Due to these changing demographics, even historically bright red states such as Arizona and Georgia, and eventually Texas, will increasingly become more competitive for Democrats.

In each of the past six presidential elections, Democrats have carried 18 states—which currently total 242 electoral votes—as base states, leaving them only 28 votes short of the 270 necessary to win the White House. Three of these base states—California, New York and Illinois—alone total 104 electoral votes. Even when Republicans have won, their ceiling of electoral votes has been relatively low, leaving them a very small margin for error. Since 1988, no Republican candidate has managed to secure 300 electoral votes in a single election.

The GOP’s state of disarray

Today, the Republicans’ favorability rating is at record-low levels.

A March ABC/Washington Post poll found that 68 percent of respondents believe that the Republican Party is out of touch with the concerns of most people today (only 28 percent say that it is in touch).

The party’s current disarray was on full display during its “official” responses to this year’s State of the Union address—all four of them. Following a Republican House Conference retreat earlier last month, the New York Times aptly summed up the party’s status in one line: “House Republicans ended a three-day retreat here united in their division.”

The outside-the-Beltway, Tea Party-inspired takeover of the party is almost complete. These conservative interests have already taken control of the U.S. Republican House Caucus. Despite Speaker Boehner’s early attempts to work with Democrats in the House, hard-right leaders of the movement have gained virtual veto power over the Republicans’ major policy positions, as evidenced by last fall’s government shutdown. (The political damage from those efforts was so severe that Boehner was able to push through a budget deal over Tea Party objections, but his failure on immigration reform is a reminder of who’s really calling the shots.)

In the Senate, there’s little doubt that the right wing will take working control of the Republican Senate Caucus after the 2014 elections. For the past year Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been in a state of paralysis while he deals with a Tea Party challenger back home in Kentucky. The challenge has forced McConnell to avoid taking any positions that might come anywhere close to the political middle in order to avoid inflaming Rand Paul voters.

Conservative and Tea Party interests have also overwhelmingly dominated the Republican independent political organizations that emerged following the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. As pointed out by the RNC’s Growth and Opportunity report, “The handful of friends and allied groups dominating our side’s efforts… [are not] healthy…. A lot of centralized authority in the hands of a few people at these outside organizations is dangerous to our party.”

In recent years, the right has been more focused on burying the establishment wing of the party instead of developing a coherent organizing strategy to win elections. Starting with the 2012 elections, conservatives have plowed large amounts of ideological money into primaries to take out more establishment and mainstream candidates. A Feb. 1st Washington Post story noted that GOP super PACs and nonprofits spent almost $36 million in 2012 in Republican primary races across the country.

The GOP’s technology deficit

In the last five years Republicans have fallen a generation behind Democrats in harnessing the power of technology in elections to engage, persuade and mobilize voters. Obama’s presidential campaigns ushered in a new era in American politics—replacing the television age that had dominated campaigns for more than 50 years. In the 1960 presidential campaign, broadcast television fundamentally changed the art of political campaigning. In the years that followed, campaigns’ use of the medium intensified as electoral strategists mastered its full use. But as television saturated almost every home in the country, its effectiveness began to taper off as more and more viewers grew to view the ads as simply another marketing campaign designed to sell a product—in this case, a candidate.

Fast forward to the last decade, when the country experienced an unprecedented rate of technological change and Barack Obama—the first post-Baby Boomer candidate—launched his campaign for the presidency.

After rudimentary use of new technologies in 2008, the Obama campaign built the equivalent of a $1 billion political start up during the 2012 election. In doing so, Obama redefined political campaigns and established a new baseline against which all future campaigns will be measured. Years from now his campaign will be remembered as the beginning of the post-modern/digital age of American politics.

Obama’s distinct edge on technology put Democrats way ahead of Republicans on this front. It’s unlikely that the GOP can meaningfully close this significant fissure prior to the 2016 presidential contest – particularly since many of the technological innovations taking place on the right have been limited to third party, independent issue-based organizations that have often been unwilling to share their learnings or new technological capacity with the national Republican Party.

The GOP’s right turn

As has long been the case, the composition of the midterm electorate is significantly different than that of presidential contests, and this gap has continued to widen. If this November’s electorate is like previous midterms, voter turnout will be substantially lower than in presidential years and a higher percentage of the electorate will be white, conservative and older.

In 2010, the lower turnout rates among younger, non-white and more secular voters helped propel Republicans to victory, allowing them to net an additional 63 seats in the House of Representatives, as well as more than 675 legislative seats across the country.

STAY-THE-COURSE-ELECTIONS THAT REQUIRED SUPERIOR GENERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGNS 1988: Thanks in large part to Ronald Reagan’s strong appeal, the 1988 presidential election was the first since the end of the Roosevelt era where one party won the White House three elections in a row. Even though the horse-race numbers showed Dukakis leading the race by 17 points in July, Bush benefited greatly from Reagan’s strong job-approval ratings, which never dropped below 50 percent after July 4 of that year. On Election Day, Bush won 40 states with 426 states. Voters never saw Bush as another Reagan, but a combination of Dukakis’s weak campaign and the Bush team’s effective efforts to disqualify him made Bush an easy heir, particularly in a campaign where Dukakis was the only alternative. Bush ended up winning 53 percent of the vote and carrying 40 states with 426 electoral votes. 2004: When the Democratic primaries began in 2004, George W. Bush had a 53 percent job approval rating, which stayed consistently in the 50 percent range for most of the year. Bush also benefited from two other factors: his clean shot to the nomination (at the same time that Democrats suffered through a long and protracted primary) and a superior general-election campaign. Bush went on to win a narrow victory over Democratic challenger John Kerry, picking up 286 electoral votes. On Election Day, his final vote closely matched his job-approval rating in the weeks leading up to Election Day.

Republicans’ strategies to take over the U.S. Senate this fall—while maintaining control of the House—have pushed them to adopt a series of conservative policy positions and tactics that have moved the party even more rightward. Control of the Senate will come down to a handful of races in red states that Romney carried in 2012. In these states voters tend to skew even older, whiter and more conservative than the rest of the country. Republicans’ efforts to appeal to these voters may help them in the short term, but their actions will make it more difficult to win back the White House in 2016.

The very positions and values that they have espoused at the national level to appeal to these voters in conservative and non-presidential target states are precisely the ones that will alienate the rising electorate of younger, non-white and less conservative voters who comprise a disproportionate share of the voters in the battleground states that will determine the 2016 presidential election. This positioning has only reinforced the image of a Republican Party that is out of touch with most Americans.

The GOP openly acknowledges its tough position in its post-election autopsy analysis: “The federal wing is increasingly marginalizing itself and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another Presidential election in the near future. … [P]ublic perception of the Party is at record lows.”

A second factor working in Republicans’ favor in off years, but increasing the party’s challenges in presidential years, has been their success in gerrymandering congressional districts for maximum gain. By packing a majority of congressional districts with older, more conservative white voters, Republicans were able to solidify their hold on the House in 2012, maintaining a 33-seat advantage despite receiving 1.4 million fewer votes in House elections that year.

But the demographic makeup of those Republican congressional districts doesn’t come close to resembling the country as a whole.

And as Republicans double down to hold on to these seats, they will move further out of step with the overall electorate as we approach a majority-minority country in the coming decades.

Another negative consequence of packing the districts with a conservative voter base is that many Republicans are now more worried about losing a primary to a Tea Party candidate than they are about losing the general election to a Democrat, which pushes the party further rightward.

Earlier this month, the Republican Party primaries in Texas demonstrated the extent of the Tea Party’s influence on the Republican ballot. In the vast majority of cases, the Republican candidates adopted the views of the Tea Party, even when they didn’t formally align themselves with it.

While this Tea Party-inspired takeover of the Republican Party is unmistakable, it’s inconsistent with where most Americans want our country to go. In the March 9 Wall Street Journal (WSJ)/NBC poll, only 24 percent of voters identified themselves as Tea Party supporters (66 percent did not). The same poll also found that the Tea Party had a 41 percent unfavorable rating (23 percent favorable).

The RNC’s Growth and Opportunity Report put it best: “The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself. We have become experts in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue…. The perception, revealed in polling, that the GOP does not care about people is doing great harm to the party and its candidates on the federal level, especially in presidential years.”

The primary process leading up to the Republican nomination for president will likely be the last fight before the Tea Party takeover is complete. As demonstrated by the 2012 presidential primary, activists in the early states drove all the candidates to the right, making them less and less palatable for the electorate in the general. The moderate business wing of the party has proven itself to be risk-averse, plodding and ineffectual in serving as a counter balance to the party’s ascendant wing.

Additionally, in early states like Iowa and South Carolina, social conservatives will put pressure on the candidates to take positions that will further alienate women and young voters. With the nomination process likely to go into the spring of 2016, Republicans will face a very public fight about the party’s future direction for two more years.

The road to 2016

The public has been dissatisfied with the direction of the country for more than a decade—regardless of which party has occupied the White House.

Voters’ views about their own well-being and that of the country’s, as well as their expectations for the future, have remained consistently downbeat.

The anemic economic recovery has certainly driven a lot of this pessimism about the direction of the country. In the March 9 WSJ/NBC poll, 57 percent of respondents said that the country is still in a recession; 73 percent said that over the next 12 months the economy will stay the same or get worse.

There is also a broad sense of alienation toward all institutions. The public’s frustration is most evident when it comes to the record-low approval ratings of Congress over the last decade—regardless of the party in control.

Voters’ negative attitudes are fueling a rising populist surge from the left as well as the right. (See 11/25/2013 memo)

While voters’ discontent has certainly taken a hit on Obama’s popularity, he has maintined a fairly consistent level of support among women, young people, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and Democratic voters. These supporters have allowed Obama to sustain a steady floor of support that has never dropped below 40 percent.

At the other end of the spectrum, Obama continues to face a low ceiling with stiff and unyielding hostility from white, older, conservative and Republican voters. This sharp opposition has put a cap on Obama’s positive job performance. Obama’s ratings stand in sharp contrast to his predecessors’, all of whom had much wider range in their job approval ratings throughout their time in office.

It’s likely, absent any major unforeseen events, that Obama’s job performance numbers will remain somewhere within this band during his final two and a half years of his presidency. Obama is currently at the low end of this range— with a 41 percent job-performance rating in the March 9 WSJ/NBC poll. If he maintains his current support level, Obama would leave office with a higher rating than Carter, Bush #41 and Bush #43, but a lower one than Reagan and Clinton.

The Democratic Party remains in a far stronger position than Republicans, but only relatively speaking.

Since Obama became president, the party has not fared particularly well. The WSJ/NBC polling trends indicate that Democrats’ favorability ratings have dropped 21 points during Obama’s time in office, going from a rating of 49 percent positive/31 percent negative during his first term to being underwater now with a 35 percent positive /38 percent negative rating. (See May 9, 2013 memo)

THE 2000 OUTLIER ELECTION 2000: Despite receiving 540,520 fewer votes than Al Gore, George W. Bush secured a presidential victory with a big assist from the State of Florida (which was governed at the time by his brother) and the U.S. Supreme Court (in which a majority of the justices were appointed by Republicans). The results clearly showed the decisive role that Bush and his campaign played in the outcome. Despite Bill Clinton’s personal failings, he maintained his high job-performance ratings throughout the final year of his presidency, thanks to the strong economy. Clinton started 2000 with a 63 percent job performance rating that never fell under 55 percent the entire year. In the final poll in the run up to the election, it was 57 percent. The final October Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found that 48 percent of Americans believed the country was headed in the right direction, while only 32 percent thought it was headed down the wrong track. By historical standards, all that should have been enough for Gore to earn the mantle for four more years. But the Bush/Cheney campaign put itself within striking range of victory—and the State of Florida and the U.S. Supreme Court put the campaign over the top.

All of these indicators would seem to suggest that 2016 should be a “time for a change” election, creating a window of opportunity for Republicans. However, the party’s current state of disorder leaves Republicans poorly positioned to take advantage of the opening. Since 1992, there have been three instances when the White House changed control—1992, 2000 and 2008. In all three cases, the incoming party’s favorability was at 54 percent or higher—double the Republican Party’s current favorability rating. This is not a new problem for the party, as demonstrated by polling trends that show the depth and intensity of the electorate’s dislike for the GOP.

Right now, the GOP’s biggest problem is that the country isn’t looking for the kind of change that their party is offering. The Tea Party-inspired, insurgent wing of the GOP is so consumed with completing its political takeover it’s either unable or unwilling to do what it takes to appeal to the group of voters Republicans need to capture to take back the White House.

You simply cannot deny that global warming exists and alienate women on economic and health care issues, Hispanics and Asians on issues like immigration reform and young people on social issues and expect to win American elections in the 21st century.

The political pressures that have driven the GOP’s policy decisions to the right are going to prove toxic to their efforts to regain majority status. The day following the midterm elections, the fight for the Republican nomination will begin. This 18-month process will only pull the party even further to the right and away from the majority of presidential-year voters.

During the crucial period of time between now and the 2016 general election, the public’s negative views of Republicans as being out of touch with the concerns of most Americans, intolerant of views that differ from their own and unwelcoming to Americans who do not share their own background will likely harden. This will be a very heavy load for Republicans’ eventual nominee to lug around in the fall campaign. By the time the general comes around, the GOP nominee will have precious little time to undo all the damage that will have settled into the psyches of most American voters.