FAST FORWARD?

Less than a month to the 2016 election and it's all over but the vote counting. Of course it already was the day the Democrats wound up their convention in Phoenix The nomination of Hilary Clinton and Julian Castro cinched the election and the GOP seemed almost to accept the fact. Their once vaunted SuperPacs were now called SuckerPacs, and they had a devil of a time finding

any suckers. By mid-September all the polls agreed that the Clinton-Castro ticket had won and the Republican party was in debt for more than a million dollars. .

When the history of the 2016 election is written, the account of President Obama's speech nominating Hilary Clinton may well be the lead paragraph, and the video of President Bill Clinton's tears will be remembered by everyone who saw it. But those histories will quickly move from the Democrat's victory to analysis of the final days of the Republican party.

Political junkie Leland Nichols (who voted for Harry Truman in 1948!) has written that the death kneel of the Republican party was sounded when they adopted what was then called “the southern strategy.” He argues that had they taken a hard look at the nation's demographics they would have taken Horace Greely's advice and gone west, “A party that depended on southern white Evangelical men was bound to starve to death,” he's written. “As the number of Hispanics and non-believers exploded, the fate of the GOP was sealed.”

What Nichols and other junkies now fear is that the currently unified Democratic party will again split as it did in the George McGovern era. As fears of terrorism subside and the economy maintains its up swing, the zealots on the far left will rise up again and split the party. However it seem clear that that will not happen during the Clinton-Castro years. Nichols ended his blog post by saying he was glad he wouldn't be around for the 2024 election.