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. . . the modern Republican Party is a rags-and-riches story. After 1988, it has struggled in presidential contests: The Republican candidate has won the popular vote just once, in 2004.
But this unimpressive presidential record has not signaled a party on the verge of collapse. On the contrary, Republicans have done quite well — holding the House, the Senate or both for much of the past three decades while increasing their tally of governorships and state legislatures. They have done so, moreover, without undertaking the kind of adjustment Democrats did after Walter Mondale’s landslide loss in 1984 (nurturing “new Democrats” like Bill Clinton).
Instead, on major issues, the party’s standard-bearers have moved steadily to the right, at least until Mr. Trump came on the scene. Solving this puzzle is key to understanding why grand electoral losses haven’t killed the G.O.P..
The White House is a major prize, but in our system of checks and balances, the president legislates with Congress. In the context of a divided electorate, highly polarized parties and nonstop combat in an unending string of elections to fill national and state offices, presidential contests are less likely to usher in dominance than to invite opposition.
That’s in part because presidential election years — with high and demographically diverse turnout and more or less equal weighting of votes across the country — look very different from the more frequent elections that fill these other institutions. As the political scientist Thomas F. Schaller argued in his book “The Stronghold,” the Republican Party has become centered in Congress, reflecting the geography of its changing base of support.
Over the last generation, Republicans have gained strength in rural areas. This creates a formidable advantage in the Senate, where less populous states get just as many seats as more populous ones.
This structural edge applies to the House. Many Democratic votes are “wasted” in majorities piled up in cities. Republicans can maintain a majority even while Democrats win more votes. In 2012, Republicans had a more than 30-seat edge in the House despite receiving a minority of votes cast in House races.
Our frequent elections offer another structural advantage for Republicans: Voter turnout has always steeply dropped from presidential elections to off-year elections. What is new is the big advantage Republicans now enjoy in the low-turnout environment of nonpresidential years, fed largely by the shift of older voters (who have the highest turnout rates) from the Democratic Party to the Republicans. The imbalance helps explain Republican success in elections for governor, more than four-fifths of which do not coincide with presidential elections.
The electorate is changing in ways that will weaken the Republican advantage in the future — in particular, it’s becoming much more diverse. But Republicans have managed to hold back this tide to some extent by making voting harder (with voter ID laws and the like) and by mobilizing their core voters even more aggressively. And they’ve mobilized them not in spite of their presidential disadvantage, but often by virtue of it.
It is not simply that the G.O.P. enjoys these structural advantages. More and more, it feeds on the failure of its presidential standard-bearers.
