The left-wing plan to rescue the Democratic Party

The party gains nothing by drifting to the center of the ideological spectrum

Saving the party
(Image credit: Illustration by Jackie Friedman)

With fruitcakes in first and second place in the GOP presidential primary (Donald Trump and Ben Carson, respectively), and the party's seeming inability to find a single warm body to serve as speaker of the House, it's easy to argue, as Kevin Drum does, that the Republican Party is on the verge of collapse.

However, it is also the case, as Matt Yglesias writes, that Republicans are basically the governing party across most of the country. They fully control 25 state governments, compared to the Democrats' seven. They are certainly not guaranteed to lose in 2016. Yglesias thus concludes that the Democrats are a party in crisis without a serious plan to take back power at the state and local level.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.