I'm not intelligent enough to determine whether or not the Democrats are in big trouble; I DO know that the chanting of the inevitable demise of the Republican Party is widely overstated. Despite what you hear on TV, the Republican Party is the MAJORITY PARTY in the USA. The Republicans control BOTH houses in THIRTY states. Another eight are split, leaving the Democrats controlling 11 (Nebraska's is unicameral and doesn't count).
And they control 31 governorships.
They control both houses of the US Congress.
Literally the ONLY thing they don't control is the White House.
But don't expect Rachel Madcow or any other leftist to cite those points, either. For a party on the brink of death, they sure seem to win a lot of elections to me. In fact, look at this quote:
"Until the GOP held both houses of Congress, and the presidency, and a majority of governosrhips and state legislatures, it could not lay claim to status as the majority party." (Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, "Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars," 462).
It also puts the lie to the notion that the GOP is 'the party of old white men' as if those alone sustain it. That's not to say the GOP does not have a REAL problem at the Presidential level - no Republican since Bush 41 in 1988 has won anything resembling a mandate from the voters and a lot of pundits would say that neither that nor Reagan's 1984 win constituted a mandate given that the GOP lost Senate seats both time and House seats in 1988.
I won't suggest that we have 'good party, bad party' here because it's becoming more difficult to tell the two apart except for a few extreme issues like abortion and gay rights and the death penalty.
