Another vaguely haunting sense of a quasi – permanent political party “majority” (Karl Rove’s thought in 2004), or “White House Lock” (as was suggested in 1991), or “Lost a whole generation” — another chance to rehash the demise of the Whig Party and apply it to one of America’s major political parties.

After the 1936 election, where Roosevelt won all the states save Maine and Vermont (“As Maine goes, so goes Vermont”, the Republican Party was left with a whopping 16  Senators and 88 members in the House.  And yet the party did not disappear.  It took them ten years to gain the strength necessary to recapture teh Congress, which was presumed to prefigure a capture of the White House for 1948.  But Truman out-hustled their traditional politician figure, so that four years later, the elephants in the same spot of certaintude – they didn’t take any chances, and went the Whig Party route in Presidential nominating in selecting a genial quasi-partisan Military General.  If all else fails, and the Republicans fall further out of favor, they can pull that trick in a few election cycles and have themselves someone in the White House.

Since 1864 — 1860 was a mess — the two parties have quadrenially presented their candidates for election, and have gone 1 – 2 thirty-six out of thirty-seven times.  (Technically, Lincoln in 1864 was the candidate for the “National Union Party”.)  That thirty-seventh instance, Roosevelt over Taft, presented an instance of a recent Republican President beating the current Republican President.  The period between 1860 and 1932 saw the Democratic Party only finagle two presidents for two terms each, meaning that party spent 72 long years in a decided minority position — frequently regionalized.  A look-see at the current Senate delegation per state probably would reveal something not too dissimilar, though with a mirror image, for how it would look after, say, the 1920 Republican Party landslide:

2 Democratic Senators:
Hawaii, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, California, Illinois, West Virginia, Washington, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Connecticut, Wisconsin, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, Michigan, Arkansas, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia, Minnesota
2 Republican Senators:  Tennessee, Wyoming, Utah, Kansas, Kentucky, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Maine, Texas, Idaho, South Carolina, Arixona, Alabama
1 each:  Indiana, Alaska, North Carolina, Iowa, South Dakota, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio

I do not know what it would take to unsettle the electoral stalemate of the last century and a half.  Both parties have, somehow or other, pulled themselves out of supposed “death spirals” spurred on by narrowing ideological marginalizings.  (How is not always a pretty picture.)  Someone recently had a front page daily kos diary post predicting that sometime in the near future, shorter than “sometime in your life-span” suggests, someone with something other than a “D” or an “R” after their name will become president.  This was based on the third-party atmospherics of the Tea-partiers and the historic background of 1992, when Ross Perot flickered in the polls to a lead at times.  But who exactly is supposed to be this figure that rides that wave of disgruntlement?

Jesse Ventura?

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