Republicans Really Could End Up Nominating a Right-Wing Loon Like Ben Carson or Ted Cruz

In a year we pick a president.  If it seems far off to you, you’re either very young or follow politics too closely, in which case the last year probably felt like five. We have known for a while that it’s the most vital election we’ll ever be privileged to vote in; our climate is more extreme, our democracy more broken, our middle class more desperate, our opposition more deranged than ever before. If things were any worse, they’d be past fixing. As the election nears, the race comes into focus. The first thing we notice is its fast winnowing field of candidates.

In our virtual democracy, more and more candidates lose elections before they’re even held. In 2004 just one Democratic presidential candidate dropped out before a vote was cast; eight made it to Iowa. This year three have already dropped out and a fourth has demurred, leaving just three standing. At 17 strong, the 2016 GOP field was the biggest ever in either party. By the time Iowa rolls around it may be the smallest of any GOP field in more than a generation save only for those years in which a Bush sought reelection. Only two candidates have bowed out thus far but four more are polling 0 percent and another five are below 4 percent.

We thought that with so many billionaires throwing so much money around their candidates could hang around forever. But as Rick Perry and Scott Walker found out, campaigns need money more than super PACs do and limits on donations to campaigns are among the few we still impose on money in politics. All may learn that putting a top adviser where you can’t talk to him without committing a felony is problematic, or that spending all your time fundraising distracts from other tasks, like figuring out if you have anything to say. And as Donald Trump often tells his foes, the very act of procuring makes you look like a procurer, or at least a puppet.

Of the three candidates whose rise shocked the world and the 15 whose fall may surprise no one, not one rose or fell due to money. (Scott Walker still has $40 million in a super PAC; Rick Perry has $17 million.) Nothing hinged on a TV ad or direct mail letter. The clear lesson: Money isn’t everything, not even in politics. When we finally learn it, progressives may no longer abide their own betrayal and even Democrats may see that Bernie Sanders’ small donor model works better than the “pay to play” politics of Hillary Clinton and the party establishment.

Democrats are alarmed by last week’s state and local elections. It isn’t just the big races lost in Kentucky and Virginia or the gay rights and marijuana referenda that went down in Houston and Ohio. It’s the turnout. Iowans will soon cast the first ballots of 2016. On Tuesday, turnout in Mason City was 7.2 percent. Houston hit a 12-year high, but it took just 20 percent of eligible voters to do it. For seven years turnout has fallen across America. If the trend continues unabated it will mean disaster for Democrats.

While historic, Barack Obama’s 2008 election was no watershed. Some 131.4 million voters went to the polls. At 57 percent, turnout was the highest in 40 years, but it’s been downhill ever since. In 2012 there were 6 million more eligible voters but 2 million fewer showed up. Turnout was 54 percent. In 2014, 81.6 million votes were cast, a stunning 50 million vote drop from 2008 in the lowest turnout since World War II. Since 2008 Republicans have picked up 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats and 12 governorships, one of the three biggest partisan growth spurts in American history.

A big factor is the work Republicans put into state and local organizing. They invest heavily in candidate recruitment, public outreach and, of course, voter suppression. The last stratagem is so vile most Republicans are in denial about it and the rest are rarely caught on tape. When Howard Dean chaired the DNC he stressed long-term party building like no chairperson before or since, providing trained staff and technical assistance to all 50 states. In 2006, the sulfurous Rahm Emanuel wanted all money shifted to a handful of House races and went after Dean in his usual way, which is to say, with a baseball bat. Dean got ousted, the program got scrapped and now only Republicans play the long game.

When it comes to suppressing turnout nothing beats good old fashioned alienation. The good news: It still presents in most voters as anger rather than hard-to-reach glacial despondency. Some say voters moved right but in fact many have moved left. Their anger is over economic decay and political corruption, and is empirical, not ideological. Democrats can’t accept that voters’ anger at government is fact-based. To win them back we must show them we know how to fix what’s broken, and that this time we really mean to do it.

Sanders’ turnout model has two elements: a clear agenda that speaks to the needs of the middle class and marginalized and a grass-roots movement to support it. He knows if you don’t make the case you can’t build the movement. Most Democrats don’t know it, which is why they still invest more in “message” than in policy and still try to get out their vote with top-down, corporate-style campaigns better suited to pacifying than to mobilizing their base.

Democrats seek solace in two notions. One is that Republicans will bail them out by nominating an insane person for president. The other is that demography will bail them out. The demography theory is a little weightier so let’s take it first. It holds that Democratic friendly groups such as Hispanics, African-Americans and the young are growing fast, that conservative ideology is odious to them, and that as a result Republican victories will soon be a near mathematical impossibility.

Veteran pollster Stanley Greenberg put the case well in a recent Guardian piece headlined “I’ve seen America’s future- and it’s not Republican”:

The U.S. is now beyond the electoral tipping point, driven by a new progressive majority… racial minorities (black and Hispanic) plus single women, millennials… and secular voters…formed 51% of the electorate in 2012 and will reach a politically critical 63% next year.

It’s all true, but the statistical majority conjured up is far from a working coalition. By Greenberg’s math it hit about 57 percent in 2014. So where was it then? Do we know what’s on its collective mind now? Republicans are always looking for ways into allegedly entrepreneurial, socially conservative Hispanic hearts. Millennials who came of voting age post 2008 trend a bit more Republican. Lots of seculars are libertarians. Who knows where they’ll all end up?