Weblog 2017-01-18

Jacob T. Levy: "The Party Declines"

Another Niskanen Center blog post examines how the weakness of party structures enabled the rise of Trump, even as strong partisanship in the electorate made it unlikely that Republican voters would cross party lines once he was nominated.

In other words, while we can easily imagine smarter, earlier, and braver action by party elites that would have changed the outcome, suggesting that the party might not have been organizationally impotent, the party elites managed things so haplessly in part because they were organizationally weak and didn’t have tools they were confident in.

In the medium-to-long term, restoring a robust democracy in America will crucially require rebuilding a functioning, rational Republican party.