If Hillary loses, Democrats face a long time in exile

[WestVirginiaRebel]

NY Post:

There’s been lots of speculation about the fate of the Republican Party if (as most of the prognosticators expect and hope) Donald Trump loses. There’s been less speculation, though recent polling suggests it may be in order, about the fate of the Democratic Party if Hillary Clinton loses.

 

Certainly there’s reason to think — or fear — the Republican Party will change. Republicans likely won’t supply the bulk of support for free-trade agreements as they increasingly have for 40 years. Prominent Republicans probably won’t press for mass legalization of illegal immigrants, as they did in 2006, 2007 and 2013.

 

If Trump loses, the Republican electorate will have become more downscale and elderly — a continuation of a process that’s been in train since the middle 1990s. The long-term migration of voters southward along Interstate 95 will have made the East Coast just about as solidly Democratic as the West Coast, leaving a Republican rump in the interior South and the Great Plains.

 

Anti-Trump Republicans hope the Trump effect will just go away, and will note that a defeated Trump will not leave behind much in the nature of an institutional apparatus, as the defeated Barry Goldwater arguably did in 1964. But the argument for going back to pre-Trump positions is weakened by the fact that Republicans have lost four of the six presidential elections between 1992 and 2012.

 

But what if Hillary Clinton loses? The political map in that case will look quite different, with Democratic states confined to the Northeast, West Coast and a few splotches in between. The presidential Democratic Party, like the congressional Democratic Party, will be concentrated in heavily Democratic central cities, some sympathetic suburbs and scattered university towns.

 

The shock for Democrats if Clinton loses will likely be more severe than for Republicans if Trump loses.

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Inevitable versus unthinkable.