Will the GOP Ever Recover From 2008?

I'm going to step out on a limb and predict Obama will win by 7%, which is 1% more than his current lead. (I'm 3% more optimistic than Chris Bowers because McCain has discredited himself and Obama has an awesome ground game.) And I'll predict Democrats end up with 58 Senate seats (a gain of 7) and 258 House seats (a gain of 22).

When the new Congress begins, the Republican Party will be powerless. Yes they will be able to form alliances with conservative Democrats to limit President Obama's reach, but they will not be able to stop Obama from enacting his core agenda. And within a year, the 2010 mid-term campaign will begin.

Republicans hope 2010 will be a repeat of 1994. Republicans started 1993 as a permanent (40 year) minority in the House with a popular Democratic President, but Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay seized on Clinton's health care debacle to take over the House in a rightwing Republican revolution.

In 2009, Democrats won't repeat the mistakes of 1993. A controversial health care bill won't be the first big item on the agenda, but rather an energy/jobs plan that will be immensely popular in the middle of a recession. And as they work their way through other issues, Democrats won't fracture, but will remain united to deliver on as many promises as they can.

As a result, Republicans will have few issues to run on in 2010. But the bigger question is: will they have any decent challengers?

2008 was not a great advertisement for the Republican first string: McCain only won the nomination because he was less awful than Mannikin Mitt, Rudy Mussolini, Mike Wannabee, Fred Gumption, and the rest of an awful field. The second string VP choices were worse; then-unknown Sarah Palin outshone Romney, Lieberman, and Pawlenty.

For the 2010 election, the GOP will have to look beyond its dismal second string and empty out its bench. And the fundamental problem for the GOP is ... they have no bench!

We can see this all too clearly in this year's Senate and House races. There isn't a single Republican challenger with a chance of beating an incumbent Democrat. Republicans will be lucky to hold their open seats. At least 5 Republican incumbents will lose, including once-popular Liddy Dole. The survivors will be red-state rightwing men with no national appeal - old guys like Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, and Saxby Chambliss - if they're lucky. The old lions like Orrin Hatch and Thad Cochran are fading away, while their middle-aged successors are a totally unappealing lot.

And that's the distinguished body known as the Senate; the Republican House is far worse. The older generation of John Boehner and Roy Blunt are minimally respectable, but the next generation of leaders isn't ready for prime time - people like Eric Cantor make TV audiences want to puke. The few moderates were defeated in primaries by the far-right Club for Growth, leaving behind insane ideologues like Michele Bachmann, Mean Jean Schmidt and Marilyn Musgrove. The handful of new Republicans who manage to hold Republican open seats will be utterly mediocre or worse.

The future of the Republican Party is its bench, and its bench is nothing but rightwing ideologues who learned substance-free, brass-knuckle politics from Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove. It's hard to see how they will ever become a credible party again.

Update 1: Here's one example of the self-destructing GOP bench from blood-red AL02:

The fallout from a brutal Republican Congressional primary race continued Monday when Republican state senator Harri Anne Smith endorsed Democratic Congressional candidate Bobby Bright.

Smith batted current Republican Congressional candidate Jay Love in the 2nd Congressional District Republican Primary race earlier this year, and said Love lied about her during the campaign.

"Jay Love lied about my record just to further his own agenda and now he's lying about Bobby Bright," Smith said.

Following the example of Kansas, we may start seeing moderate Republicans in red states and districts switch to the Democratic Party to get away from their insane and vicious party colleagues.

Update 1: A note of caution from DemocracyCorps about young voters who will vote for Obama but skip down-ballot races:

Nationally, 15 percent of voters fail to complete their ballot. They show up, vote for President, and go home. Among younger voters, this number jumps to at least 20 percent and only 62 percent here say they will fill out the entire ballot. Among younger people of color, the number grows higher still.

I don't see this is a "cult of personality" issue around Obama; rather, less-informed voters simply don't recognize the down-ballot names and therefore skip those races. In earlier generations, parties taught their supporters to vote the entire party line, but that kind of education is absent from contemporary candidate-centered (as opposed to party-centered) politics. The Obama campaign sent out brief emails this week encouraging their supporters to vote for the local Democratic House candidate, but they missed an important opportunity to encourage party-line voting.