Yoni Appelbaum: Impeach Donald Trump

Even if you accept the Leninist accelerationism inherent in this argument, Lockhart’s claim that Trump will destroy his party if given the chance is highly dubious. Call it Graham’s rule: Predictions of the collapse or permanent irrelevance of political parties are frequent and also invariably wrong. Not since the 1850s has a major American party gone extinct, and yet prophecies abound year after year.

In 1969, Kevin Phillips published The Emerging Republican Majority. Following the 2000 election, Karl Rove began floating the possibility that George W. Bush could go a step further, cementing a “permanent Republican majority.” When Republicans defied history and gained seats in the 2002 election, this idea gained credence.

But John Judis and Ruy Teixeira fired back, declaring first in The New Republic and then in a book that we were actually witnessing the emerging Democratic majority. Then came the 2006 midterms, in which Democrats took back both houses of Congress, and which Bush accurately termed a “thumpin’,” followed by Barack Obama’s 2008 victory. Some Democrats concluded that the permanent Democratic majority had arrived, with a new coalition of voters, especially young and minority ones, guaranteeing progressive control of government for the foreseeable future.

This rush to judgment was only slowed down slightly by the crushing Republican victory in the 2010 midterms. This was just a fluke of turnout, the Democratic optimists said; midterm years saw older, whiter electorates, but they couldn’t lose in a presidential year. Indeed, they didn’t, in 2012. But in 2016, the Democratic coalition bled white working-class voters and saw turnout dip among other segments—and lost the White House.

Meanwhile, the Republicans, having decisively captured the House in 2010, had their own vision of the future. After the party made new pickups in the 2014 midterms, Representative Greg Walden, the head of GOP congressional efforts, said, “We’re back to a majority as big as any of us have seen in our lifetimes. It may be a hundred-year majority.” Other Republicans were more dour; they said that if the party didn’t take up immigration reform, it might as well close up shop.

Neither of these predictions turned out to be accurate. Instead of embracing immigration, the GOP nominated the most anti-immigrant presidential candidate in memory and won the White House. Meanwhile, the “hundred-year majority” in the House lasted precisely four years past Walden’s prediction, until Democrats’ big gains in the 2018 midterms.

Those recent Democratic victories were driven in part by picking up traditionally Republican voters and seats in suburban areas. But assuming that those changes will be permanent, or won’t be offset by further realignments elsewhere, requires ignoring historical judgment. The 2018 losses don’t prove that Trump is destroying the Republican Party from within; they mainly demonstrate that the president’s strategy of focusing on a minority of the electorate is a bad approach to midterm elections.