(03-06-2025, 02:24 PM)Jag149 Wrote:

(03-06-2025, 01:50 PM)mikesez Wrote: Minor parties come and go.
Once a party is entrenched as a major party, meaning a party that fields one of the top two candidates for President, it stays in power.  The Whigs are the one and only example of a major party that died. They died in 1856 when a new party, the Republican party, suddenly became the 2nd place party in the Presidential election and shoved the Whigs to third place.  
Two things should be noted about this.  
One, the Republican party was made up of people who defected from either of the two previous major parties - mostly from the Whig party. Abe Lincoln had been a Whig.  So in a sense the Whig party destroyed itself, it wasn't defeated by its opponent, the Democrats.  
Two, these forces that caused enough people to defect from the Whig Party and join the Republican Party so that the Whig party became minor and the Republican party became major, were the same forces that started the Civil War just 4 years later.
So the lessons are, the Republican party can't destroy the Democratic party,  and even if other factors can cause the Democratic party to destroy itself, we should very much not wish for that, because a lot of social turmoil would go along with that.  
The same lesson applies to Democrats who dream of destroying the Republican party. 
The fact is, the Democrats under Obama watched the Republican party destroy itself as it became a party that had no unifying beliefs of its own other than opposition to Obama.  That party had low turnout and low enthusiasm and was then vulnerable to takeover by Trump, a takeover that reversed many of its core values and made it much stronger than it had been.

ok, so your post that said "In America parties never die but they do switch sides." was incorrect?  That is an absolute statement. 

I know you have an opinion on the whig party's evolution, that is nice. However it does not exist today and is defunct as members left it. Just like all these others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:D...ted_States

The bold statement sounds pretty relevant today, just not the Republicans.

The bolded statement is relevant for both parties.  More relevant for Democrats than Republicans, but still relevant for both.  The Reagan Republicans lost their connection with their voters and the party basically got a soft reset under Trump.  It didn't die the same way the Whig party died, but it did get whacked hard.  It lost the popular vote for President 4 times in a row and 7 out of 8 times going back to 1992. Though they won the electoral college 3 times, they only got more popular votes than the Democrats once from 1992 to 2020. Today's Democrats aren't that bad off yet, but it might not be long.

I still think the DeWayne "The Rock" Johnson is going to swoop in and take the Democrats over.  You're welcome!

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