The kids are all Democrats

How Republicans are repulsing the young

The 2017 Women's March.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Wayne Taylor/Getty Images)

Will the former reality TV star currently working part-time in the White House do incalculable long-term damage to the Republican brand? It sure seems like it! After all, President Trump's horror-show of a first year in office has already diminished the number of Americans who self-identify as Republican, endangered GOP congressional majorities, and led prominent conservative intellectuals to abandon the party. Despite the recent uptick in the president's approval numbers, it is fair to wonder whether the Trump administration is indeed losing the future.

Still, Michigan State political scientist Matt Grossman recently tried to throw some cold water on the "Republicans are doomed" theory. Grossman argued that, contrary to Democratic hopes, President Trump is unlikely to do permanent damage to the Republican cause all by himself. He says that the president's ugly, never-ending political carnival merely "accelerated the normal partisan pendulum and the nation's polarizing trends without fundamentally transforming or undermining the Republican Party." Pointing to past Republican nadirs like the post-Watergate era and the end of George W. Bush's tenure, he reminds us that the GOP has recovered from worse fiascos before and that it will likely do so again.

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David Faris

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.