It is clearly evident that in the past 10-18 years, the parties have changed and what is worse, is that both parties have changed for the worse.
It’s been a hard year for the Democrats. Well before concerns over President Joe Biden’s age rocked the presidential campaign, the party was forced to confront a grim political reality: voters did not decisively prefer them to the Republicans. Despite Donald Trump’s criminal conviction, open bigotry, history of sexual assault, semi-incoherent ramblings, and general unfitness for office; despite January 6, the end of national abortion rights, and the stumbles of the Republican House majority; despite a notable drop in violent crime and an economy that is performing statistically as well as it has in years—the best Democrats could hope for in November was a slim victory. Whatever effect swapping Biden for Harris might have, it won’t alter the underlying reality: the Democrats are roughly as popular as Trump’s Republicans, and the general election could be decided by a coin flip.
The party faces a crisis of confidence that has many symptoms—repudiation in the most sophisticated parts of the country, widespread distrust of the Republican leadership, an inability to speak coherently on issues. All of them grow out of the same root cause: a vain search to rediscover the formula that made that unformulaic president Ronald Reagan so broadly appealing—even beloved. Congressional Republicans triumphed decisively in 1994 on such Reaganite issues as free trade, welfare reform, and shrinking the government. But, thanks to a deficit-dissolving economy and a dwindling memory of the Cold War, those issues were of declining importance even then and have since given way to a bipartisan consensus. Consensus, of course, is only another way of describing the issues that have been taken off the table. What remains for the party to talk about? On first thought, not much. The Republican strategist Ed Gillespie says, “We’re like the dog that caught the bus.”
They are infuriating voters by blaming them at every turn for the party’s failure to win their hearts. In other words, the Republicans are looking more and more like the Democrats of the 1970s and 1980s and less and less like the party that overthrew them.
In addition, one thing that has also changed are the extremes that each party has gone to (regarding abortion and sexual orientation) with the left defending those vehemently and the right opposing those vehemently!
Such a division between the parties cannot end well (under any circumstances), given that disunity among "Americans" is the result and the last time such disunity occurred, it brought the Civil war and all the negative circumstances attached to it. We are not likely to have a Civil war as what was seen in the 19th century, but what could make the consequences of this disunity worse is that we are now at risk of this disunity being taken advantage of by world powers (such as China, Russia, Europe or even our neighbors (Canada and Mexico), and it could mean our entire nation might suffer a defeat we would not be able to recover from.
Americans need to get away from party affiliations (I am an Independent) and vote for qualified people that have the best interests in the people and not in the party platforms. By voting for the individual (not for the party), we open the door for something good to ultimately happen.
We need to get away from Trump, Hegseth, RFK, Miller, Schumer, Ocasio, Casar, Omar and others like them. These people are not willing to compromise with the other party.
the majority of the board figured this out MONTHS ago.
