Yankee Republicans on last legs

[ag]

This was one of the biggest stories this election: accelerated disintegration of the New England (and, to some extent, also New York) Republican Party. Elsewhere it was just "through-the-bums-out" election, but in NE it was more than that (though the national trend accelerated the long-term local process).

Unlike in the South, where the Dems can always rely on the blacks and the univeristy types, NE simply doesn't have a natural Repubilcan constituency left.  Normally, one-party system is not stable in a democracy (and, unlik the Solid South of old, NE states are - "small d" - democracies). But the national Republican party has become too ideologically unpalatable in New England. Frankly, this might be the best moment in decades for the emergence of a regional party that would take the second major party role. While in the rest of the country the Dem/Rep system is under no threat, here things are different.   Either the local Republican party simply severes the ties to the national organization to become locally viable, or another  party might emerge as the local second force, probably, to the left of the Dems, w/Dems being pushed a bit to the right. There are simply not enough Repubilcans in many places to make the "third party" candidates and voters fear that they might unwittingly elect a Republican.

If something like this happens, US politics would become more "Canadian": essentially local two-party systems, but a national multy-party configuration.

[ag]

I don't think the old two-party system is under threat except in New England (possibly, also, in the Mormon triangle, but that's stretching). To put it simply, elsewhere each of the two main parties has enough strength so that the third party candidates might become "spoilers", taking votes from the dominant parties and therefore "electing" the locally weak party's candidates. This, of course, lowers there appeal to a lot of voters who might find them otherwise attractive, which makes it unlikely they'd succeed.

The strange situation in New England (and, again, to some extent in the Mormon triangle) is  that one of the two national parties is sufficiently locally decayed that in a three-way election it is  still unlikely to make it's candidates competitive. In such circumstances, it is ripe for being displaced as the second local party.

In the South there are always going to be blacks, and,  together with universtiy types there are enough of them to make a Democratic victory in a three-way race not unlikely. In contrast, I don't see a reliable Republican voting bloc in  New England anymore.  As Connecticut's Lieberman/Lamont race has shown, in a three-way race an (admittedly pathetic) Republican might be the distant third.  In contrast, even in Texas's four-way gubernatorial race, when the push came to shove, nearly a third of the voters voted for a mediocre Dem candidate. For the two-party system to be undermined in Texas, Dems reliable vote should drop to well below a third.