Alternatives to GOP: what are the options (with a view towards election success by 2024)?

Obviously in an ideal world, the "base" would assert control over the Republican Party and flush out the swamp creatures who seem to form the majority of its executive and prominent elected representatives.

But assuming that movement never takes off or gains any traction, what third party options exist and what are their chances for electoral success by 2024?

(a) Declare the existence of an alternative GOP, calling it something very similar to the Republican Party (with the word Republican in the name, such as Conservative-Republican, Constitutional-Republican, Free Republican? hmm) ... organize and go forward with a view to capturing 80% of the vote of the GOP and perhaps 20% of the vote of the Democrats with Libertarians attracted also.

(b) Declare the existence of an alternative less obviously alternative to the GOP, with a more neutral name such as American Eagle Coalition, Freedom Party of America, etc. Then go forward with the same set of aims as in (a) above, hoping to assemble a voting coalition of at least 50%.

(c) Flock to some already existing alternative that has limited organizational skills, take it over and make it the alternative. This could even include the Libertarian Party which has sufficient resources to attract 3 to 5 per cent of the vote and is a perennial participant in federal and state elections.

(a) The hollowing out of the GOP approach under a new but similar name. To the best of my knowledge, this has not been tried in any major western parliamentary democracy before, all similar efforts would fall under option (b) that I listed above. ...

Basically (a) is the same idea as taking over the GOP, it just eliminates the messy process of ousting the executive and leading entrenched political figures like McConnell and Romney, and assumes instead that with a more attractive set of policies and perhaps the backing and participation of Donald Trump, this alternative would quickly replace the GOP as the real contender on the right.

At the same time, it would have the freedom to explore policy initiatives that the GOP would never envisage nor endorse, such as term limits for Congress, stricter immigration policies, anti-corruption measures, vote counting reforms, and specific restraints on war-adventurist types of foreign policy.

With the public quickly getting the idea that the new party with its similar name to Republican Party was the new Republican Party, there should be a rapid evacuation of almost all members and worthwhile political candidate elements of the GOP, leaving the actual GOP dead on the vine and likely to disappear in the 2025-28 presidential term that (ideally) would be either Donald Trump having returned without their assistance or endorsement, or a similar figure (possibly Donald Trump Jr, or even Ted Cruz) as president with good chances for re-election in 2028.

(b) The alternative party concept has been tried with varying amounts of success in a number of countries with roughly similar political landscapes, and also by Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, you might argue.

Canada provides two recent examples and they are both instructive and cautionary. First, some ancient political history, this will take two paragraphs then we can get back to important things. Around the mid-1920s in Canadian politics, there were the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, and a populist group known as the United Farmers of Alberta. This was before the time of the socialist "CCF" (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) which later turned into the NDP (New Democratic Party). So with several close elections and power switching back and forth, the Conservatives of those times reached out to the UFA and formed a new party called the "Progressive Conservative Party of Canada" which ended the existence of the UFA and went on to become a somewhat better vote-getting proposition than the previous Conservatives had been. Even so, after one brief chance to govern in the early 1930s, this party was in opposition in all the years between 1935 and 1984 except for the John Diefenbaker government that lasted from 1958 to 1963. The Liberal Party of Canada, at that time a very centrist drifting left sort of entity, easily won most of the elections held, and then started to drift towards the left-liberal globalist camp under Pierre Trudeau 1968 to 1984 (he was briefly ousted by Joe Clark for a minority period 1979-80, Clark got outmanoeuvered and Trudeau returned to power).

While the PC party was relatively unsuccessful in federal politics, it stayed relevant because of the formation of the NDP which ate into the Liberal vote totals. Otherwise, the Liberal Party of Canada would very likely remain perpetually in power since it could be assumed 90% of the 20% NDP voter share would go to them.

It should be noted that the PC party had greater success in provincial politics, notably in Ontario, Alberta and sometimes the other English speaking provinces except for B.C. where politics takes on a different formation, the B.C. Liberal Party is actually a conservative-centrist coalition and any efforts by the B.C. Conservative Party to gain seats has been rejected by the voters (it tends to attract about 5-10 per cent of the voters). And in francophone Quebec, there are analogue parties under different names but these come and go on a regular basis, Quebec politics are dominated by their wing of the Liberals as a base for federalist Quebecois, and the Parti Quebecois (PQ) which is more or less the NDP for separatist francophones. Third parties regularly appear and sometimes even hold balance of power, these are all over the spectrum and not necessarily conservative in nature.

From 1984 to 1993, Brian Mulroney formed strong PC governments in Canada. For the first time, he managed to attract up to 50% of the voters, which against three other options (by then) easily secures a large majority in parliament. His governmental style was similar to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher but he adapted that to Canadian contexts and governed from a centre-right position, keeping the Liberals bottled up between his political position and the purely socialist platform of the NDP. By the 1980s, another populist party called Social Credit was fading out of Canadian politics. It had governed British Columbia and Alberta in the past, but had morphed into a rural francophone dissent of all modern society movement, and when its charismatic leader died, that was the end of it altogether.

Mulroney lost favour with Canadian voters around 1992 after a divisive effort to reform the constitution and the introduction of a value added tax, the G.S.T. set at 7% (nowadays at 5%) on many but not all goods and services. It partially replaced a hidden manufacturers' sales tax of 12% on a more limited range of items. Even so, Canadians rebelled against Mulroney, led by the Liberal dominated media who cynically used the issue to get their party back into power. Despite the deputy leader of the Liberals' promise to repeal the G.S.T., incoming Prime Minister Jean Chretien knew it was a good idea and kept it around. Since then, there has been little opposition to it, as more and more Canadians have come to understand that the G.S.T. basically guarantees that people evading the income tax system will just be paying their fair share that way instead. Also it has stabilized our economy to a remarkable degree for such a small tax (provinces also have sales taxes that sometimes apply to the same items).

Well, in 1993 the PC party was not just defeated, it was crushed, reduced to two seats in the House of Commons and 30% of the vote. There had already been a breakaway right wing protest party formed, Reform -- Alberta based, it did not do any better in 1993, but by the 1997 election, it had outpaced the PCs and took about two thirds of the available right wing vote and elected a sizeable group (65 or so) able to form the official opposition. The PCs were only able to rebound to a low level of 12 MPs. The same result in 2000 allowed the Liberals to continue a majority government despite a rather shabby vote total of 39%, so a lot of people within the two parties (Reform and PC) determined they should perhaps rejoin but under a less divisive name (by now, Progressive had taken on far-left connotations that it probably didn't have in the successful years of the PC party). The Reform Party changed its name to the Canadian Alliance, partly to make it seem like the PCs wouldn't just be surrendering to Reform, but that was the essential nature of the merger when it happened in 2003-04. A leadership convention was held, and Stephen Harper, newly crowned CA leader, beat a field of other candidates with vague promises of compromise and continuation of the Reform-Alliance traditions (which were essentially Trumpist politics without a Donald Trump figure involved -- the Canadian media treated Stephen Harper in much the same way that your media have treated both GWB and Donald Trump in recent memory, but his leadership style while power-centered was not charismatic and certainly nowhere near a one-man show). The new party was simply named the Conservative Party of Canada, dropping the progressive label. Ontario, Manitoba, New Brunswick and Alberta are currently ruled by Progressive Conservative governments, and those provincial parties are essentially wings of the federal Conservative Party now after a period where they tried to stay on the sidelines of a federal bun fight between rival factions. The B.C. Liberal Party also can be thought of as a wing of the Conservative Party, with many of the same people active in riding associations (a riding being our name for electoral district).

Harper ate away at the Paul Martin Liberal government's majority, turning them into a brief minority 2004-05, then coming to power himself in a minority parliament 2006-08, and a majority secured thereafter for terms that lasted until 2015 when he finally ran out of gas and was (to the surprise of some) ousted by Justin Trudeau, with a return to the centre-left government of the Liberals. That has since been reduced to a minority where they need the support of the NDP to rule without the parliament coming to an end (in our system, a vote of non-confidence on an economic or constitutional matter automatically terminates a parliament and invokes an election, otherwise we now have fixed term elections every four years, the year before yours as it stands now).

Discontent within the ranks of the CPC has led to the creation of a populist alternative, the Peoples' Party of Canada. Despite the socialist sounding name, this is a far-right rump of voters who would be in the Trump coalition if they lived across the border. The policies of the PPC are more extreme forms of conservatism than the CPC will tolerate or endorse, although the CPC did well enough under Harper's style of appearing to lean towards those things then never actually doing much about them (such as with climate change, immigration issues, or standing up to the socialist media and defunding the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as examples). The PPC only managed to get 2-3 per cent of the vote in 2019, and failed to elect even their well-known leader who was running in his own home riding won as a Conservative in 2015. He was rather narrowly defeated by the official Conservatives, but other candidates were well back in the pack, behind the Green Party which does fairly well in some Canadian urban areas.

Although outside the scope of this topic, since we've delved that deeply into Canadian politics, and just for context, there is also a sizeable Quebec based party called the Bloc Quebecois which is essentially the federal presence of the PQ, and aimed to be a front line for separation negotiations should any referendum ever empower them (so far, two in 1980 and again 1995 failed by very narrow margins, gotta love those Montreal Greeks who were the margin of difference apparently). This BQ party tends to bounce up and down in Quebec opinion polls between 20 and 40 per cent support. The NDP tried to mount a francophone presence, partly succeeded around 2008-11, then lost that ground to the BQ, who are essentially a socialist party waiting to re-merge with their PQ brethren after separation or "sovereignty-association" as some like to sell the concept (we're leaving but sticking around for the financial benefits being the essential nature of that proposition).

Another example that could be cited of the success or failure of alternative right wing parties would be in the United Kingdom where the Conservative Party never took on the name Progressive Conservatives, but made the same philosophical shift a bit later, perhaps after Churchill's last term when Anthony Eden, a more centrist figure, took over. In those days (1950s) it was a straight up choice between centre-right Conservatives and leftist Labour, and they tended to alternate terms in power to the 1970s. At that time, a third party emerged, the Liberals, unlike in Canada, a very small presence and largely idealistic centrists who wanted neither of the above. The Liberals never totally broke through, their usual election performance was something like 10-20 seats won (out of over 600 in the UK parliament) and perhaps 15% of the vote. That party has since been renamed the Social Democratic Party. In UK politics also, there are regional parties for Scotland and Northern Ireland holding many of the seats available there. These tend to align themselves with either side although the Ulster unionists almost always align with the Conservatives. While the Scottish nationalists are pro-independence, the Ulster unionists are largely the opposite, advocates of continued participation of NI in the UK.

Into that rather complex picture emerged the UKIP, a more right wing protest party that was the prime mover to get the Brexit movement started. The Conservative Party co-opted that movement when it sensed that opposition to it might lead the UKIP towards a larger voter share in national elections (the term federal does not get used in the UK since they have basically a unitary form of government, especially in England and Wales, counties have some governmental authority but basically all the politics is national and in Scotland or Northern Ireland, regional).

The UKIP have acted as a sort of deterrent to any tendency for the British Conservatives to become too centrist. Also a deterrent to that was Tony Blair's third way concept of moving Labour more into the centre from the far left. The Conservatives were being squeezed into a fairly narrow portion of the voting spectrum so they basically tried the GOP approach of giving election cycle lip service to policies that would appeal to soft dissident votes that might otherwise get parked with UKIP as a protest. Then between elections they attempt(ed) to ignore those vague promises, Stephen Harper style, and govern from the centre anyway.

Just a brief commentary on all of the above -- the relevance of this to U.S. politics would be that yes you can create alternatives under considerably different names and philosophies, but as with the Ross Perot experience, the danger is that the alternative reaches just that critical level of success that will split the available anti-Liberal (anti-Democrat) vote in half and make it easy for them to win without even good appeal to their side of the voting spectrum.

The success of the alternative depends on crushing the orthodox original party being replaced. If there is not a crushing by at least a 4:1 ratio, then the original party retains enough life and presence to be constantly in the process of renewing itself and eating back some of its lost support.

Another cautionary tale is that just because an alternative is successful (Canada's Reform Party by about 1999) is no guarantee that it can do any better against the leftist establishment than the defunct and corrupt original party was doing, nor is it any guarantee that the new leadership (as with Stephen Harper) will follow through on explicit promises to voters. In other words, you can even get to majority power status as with Donald Trump, and still fail to reach the objectives laid out (clearing the swamp in his case, certain other things in Canada -- much was made in 2011 of how Stephen Harper would finally defund the CBC which is essentially the voice of the Liberal Party of Canada paid for by taxpayers of all persuasions, yet he did nothing about that promise, and he also endorsed the precursors to the Paris climate accords, Kyoto and the Rio summit).

Another lesson is that some in the voter base will accept a half loaf or a glass half full, saying, "this is a lot better than letting the socialists rule." Stephen Harper still has many fans in Canadian conservative politics although he gained some enemies as well. His two successors so far have tried to emulate his style and philosophy, Max Bernier was going towards populism when narrowly defeated for the leadership, thus he bailed out and formed the PPC alternative.

Most of the Trump wing of the GOP would probably think of themselves as philosophical conservatives and some as libertarians. These terms have taken on somewhat tarnished meanings due to the decisions taken by their most prominent representatives. For example, if one thinks of "conservative" as being prep-school, Bush-Cheney, National Review, neo-con or any of those types of globalist adjuncts, then conservative can be a sort of code word for sellout nowadays. And libertarian could mean defender of civil liberties, a task that often falls to left-leaning lawyers who just happen to have broader tolerance for free speech than most of their colleagues. I know this quite well personally, having successfully defended myself in court against a slander lawsuit brought by a far-left blogger in Canada, where my arguments and those of my co-defendants, the Fourniers (managers of a website Free Dominion which is Canada's version of FR), were partially supported by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, who intervened as observers, and took a position something like this -- "like us, you might not like these people or what they're saying, but they have the perfect right to say it."

Of course, that attitude, the general anti-religious foundation of the Libertarian movement, and its pro-marijuana stance, are all irritants that keep many right wing voters away, unless they wish to park a protest vote having run out patience with their RINO or CINO alternatives. I would not join, support or vote for the U.S. Libertarian Party. The Canadian version is similar, and I have voted for it once, when there was no other alternative but the Harper cons or staying home. In Canada, the Libertarians do just about as well as in America, perhaps not quite as strong a voter share (1-2% seems to cap it). The effects of the Libertarian vote seem almost nonexistent if one assumes that without the party, half of the voters would stay home, the other half might divide equally between alternatives. So there seems little point in trying to take over the Libertarian Party and making it big-time and election-savvy, which the current version strikes one as being anything but ... they seem to wear as a badge of honor their nearly complete inability to devise actual methods of attaining power, it's a libertarian thing apparently to consider one's self so purely small government that no practical person could vote for your party (that is a really small government, one that can never even exist).

There are probably other parties out there with skeleton organizations, one or two dedicated leaders, almost no voter support or recognition, and a compatible ideology perhaps somewhat idiosyncratic to the founders' views of politics. In Canada there was something called the Freedom Party that struck some of us as being a vehicle, but that idea never gained traction and the Freedom Party faded out of existence. Or there are small religious conservative parties, in Canadian politics, there's a Christian Heritage Party, resolutely pro-life, anti-same-sex marriage, and reasonably well organized, but condemned to media planned ignoring and/or contempt combined with 0.5% voter support levels. Within the narrow context of its overall limited prospects for success anyway, it has been hampered by the appearance of being an adjunct of one particular Christian denomination at the expense of a wider base of support.

But in the context of our discussion, a religious based party would probably not work in American politics at all, given the separation of church and state foundations of the constitution. The McMullen rump candidacy in 2016 showed that even a perfectly crafted appeal to Mormon voters would attract fewer than 5% of them and almost nobody else.

The search for a tiny perfect political nucleus is really just the same process as (b) above, so in my opinion should be tossed out as an alternative in favor of (b).

On balance then, the most likely path to eventual success would appear to be (b), a new party with an independent name and foundation, sending the message to the Republican Party, we're here, deal with it, and becoming an inviting but not entirely compromised or dedicated target destination for Donald Trump himself or his most powerful support base. In other words, set it up as a Trump-friendly organization, give out the impression that you couldn't do better than Donald Trump as the first leader or presidential candidate, but even so, there is a party organization involved and so it would be a change in operational procedure from 2016-2020 Trump, in the following ways ...

Donald Trump had a love-hate relationship with the GOP, they tolerated him rather sparsely at first, then got perhaps more enamored with his successes mid-term, then the support began to fade under the relentless pressure of establishment opposition and their natural desire to roost close to the fountains of globalist largesse that might come their way after Democrats had finished their feeding frenzies.

The result of all that was that Donald Trump never had much oversight or dedicated intelligent support and advice, he simply ran his own show the way he runs his business operations, and might have lost the benefits available of better advice than he apparently did get from the sycophants he assembled (because unless Joe Biden does not take office, let's call a spade a spade, Donald Trump essentially failed in his self-declared mission to clean the swamp).

I'm sure people still want to support the man based on his obvious dedication and considerable other successes especially economic and security wise, but would it not be true to say many would like to see a sort of Improved Trump with more voter oversight, where the base is directing Trump more so than Trump directing the base? After all, he wants to serve this political base, he just seems to feel that his own counsel is sufficient and he "gets" what the base want without much formal interaction. I feel that some aspects of the election loss could have been avoided, and that is why I want to see a third party, so that those failures can be avoided in 2024.

First of all, if you know there's going to be fraud, then surely a better strategy than just letting it happen to prove a point might exist? Trump should have been lobbying all through 2019 and early 2020 for better voting oversights and he should have made a more detailed case for the potential of massive fraud in five or six key cities (PHL, CHI (ORD), MKE, ATL, LAS, probably others that don't matter to the results as much). With a more dedicated party on his side instead of trying to outlast him, the ideological opponents are less free to wheel out absurd criticisms that can resonate through a managed media -- the organized and dedicated party speaks for more than just Donald Trump and his family, and can join in the fray. This is why George W. Bush never reached quite the boxed-in position that Donald Trump quickly found he faced with regard to Congress and wider public opinion.

Ideally, there would be an outcome something like the creation of an American Eagle Freedom Party, or whatever you like, with an enthusiastic pro-Trump membership ready, willing and able to give 110% support instead of the compromised and ambivalent support of the GOP, the sort of reluctant "I guess we have to" model of endorsement that caps the voter appeal somewhere too close to the margin of error -- the appeal of a pro-business, pro-freedom, anti-war for no reason, low-tax, no-climate-b.s. well organized party should be around 65 to 70 per cent.

There was never any reason for example for black or Latino voters to be hostile to Trump. He has no really racist background, and was advocating policies that could make lives better in all segments. For women voters, a more savvy political advisor than Donald Trump ever seemed to find would have told him, look, we can't shed the image of your past, but if you can stomach doing this, just apologize and move on, say you're not perfect, nobody is, but at the same time you're not so completely imperfect that you fit into traditional uniparty politics like a swamp creature.

Donald Trump never got past about 80% capture of the Reagan coalition and that did him in (yes fraud, but that's been going on forever too).

It's not too late to reorganize and do the right thing for the country, flush the GOP and start over with a cleaner and leaner fighting machine.

The low-hanging fruit is the Congressional races in 2022, primary out every single incumbent, even those who appeared to support Trump, because they are all suspect, let God sort it out. And replace them with MAGA candidates, and do not split the vote. This is where Trump can be effective, if he puts a team together, goes through each Congressional District and endorses one candidate, and one candidate only with the official MAGA Seal of Approval.

For good or ill, a two party system is the norm in most modern democracies because it offers the greatest political efficiency. When one of the two major parties falters, it may seem to open up political space to a new party, but that is rarely the case due to the great difficulty in forming a new party and the ability of the incumbent parties to adapt their program and message to compete with any new party that threatens to become effective.

In sum, unless fully embraced and led by Trump, any effort at a new conservative political party would be a nonstarter. Even then, if Trump led the new party effort, it would still be a hard sell unlikely to prevail. The end result would almost certainly be a defeat for conservatives like the election of Wilson in 1912 due to the Republican party splitting between Taft and Roosevelt.

The thing about such a comeback is that it’s so rare, it would be another superlative to add to his record - a real feather in his cap.

I haven't heard anyone compare such an election to the 1912 three-way with Teddy Roosevelt attempting to return to the Presidency after the then-deep-stater Taft took over. Which probably means it's been written about numerous times in the last week or so :-)

It’s hard to imagine that a new party would get the kind of majority in that it wouldn’t ultimately have to form a coalition with one of the other parties.

Which essentially is what we already have within the GOP itself.

The idea is to make the Conservatives the dominant faction of the GOP.

Seventy million people voted for Trump and you think we need a new party?

I don’t think so.

What we need is new media that is not biased against us.

We must also accept that the foolish people will sometimes get their way. Reagan followed Carter’s disastrous economic policies. We must endure similar nonsense for the next four years. Things need to get bad enough that your average liberal gives up on trying to solve other people’s problems. His own problems must dominate his every waking hour and give him nightmares too.

“””Alternatives to GOP: what are the options?”””

You ask a question that has few options, if any.

The GOP only seems to gain power when the Democrats overstep the bounds of political normality.
a. Reagan wins when Jimmy Carter is shown to be an incompetent leader.
b. GOP wins the House in 1994 for the first time in 50 years when Clinton pushes socialized medicine.
c. GOP wins House and Senate in 2010 when Obamacare is passed.
d. GOP could well win in 2022 and 2024 as it is pretty obvious that the Democrats will push the political boundaries beginning on January 21, 2021.

When the GOP is in power they rarely push any new political boundaries. That is until Trump became President and he created the America First policy or the fake news policy.

So without a person like Trump to lead the future, how can we change the minds of 80 million GOP voters where far too many of them have been trained to not expect any radical changes by prior GOP regimes.

My two cents.

Sure, you could get a large number of voters, but what good does that do considering what happened on and after November 3rd, 2020???

Voters made absolutely no difference...

Even if you get voters, you still have to have candidates...By and large, the republican party has very few candidates worth voting for as shown this year...

I think you’re grasping at straws there. Here’s the simple dilemma the GOP faces:

1. Trump was very much an anomaly. He was almost certainly the only GOP contender who would have won in 2016.

2. Trump attracted the support of a large cohort of minorities, independents and even many Democrats. Very few of these people are going to come out and vote for Republicans in 2022 — or at any time in the next 50 years.

3. For all his bluster and his combative personality, Trump has gone out of his way to avoid contentious battles within the GOP in recent years. The last thing he ever wants to do is support a loser, so he’s never going to out on a limb to push MAGA challengers to run against RINO incumbents unless it’s a heavily Republican state or district (Lizard Cheney is an ideal target for him). He would rather support a RINO who wins than a “Deplorable” who loses.

I have often compared Trump to Churchill, in that like Trump, Churchill was really not well-liked by other politicians, even within his own party.

Let’s look at the 1945 election when Labour whupped the Tories and Clement Atlee took Churchills place, remember in Britain you don’t vote direct for the PM, it’s based on representation in Parliament.

Many ask, why did Churchill lose, after what he did during the war? Several reasons, First of all, Labour did a better job of getting out the message of their post-war vision for Britain, which was basically Socialism. But this was also at a time when the British economy was in such dire straits, that even the private businesses were literally begging to be taken over by the government. What was the Tories’ message? “We’ve Got Churchill!”.

Also Churchill shot himself in the foot, with a dissatrous radio broadcast right before the election, where he stated that Labour would use “Gestapo”-tactics to implement Socialism. Well you can only imagine how the press went to town on that, “Churchill Compares Labour to Gestapo”, especially so soon after the war, and with the knowledge of the Nazi’s atrocities. Even his own party was appalled, and if it wasn’t for his popularity with the people, the Consevatives would have sent him out to pasture, after the election.

But at the time, Churchill was all the Tories really had, so they were at least smart enough to keep him on as Leader of the Party.

Fast forward to 1951, Churchill was back at 10 Downing Street , where he served until 1955 when he retired at the age of 80.

But of course, it’s not a total happy ending, Labour basically got their socialist program installed, which is still there to this day.

[I haven’t heard anyone compare such an election to the 1912 three-way with Teddy Roosevelt attempting to return to the Presidency after the then-deep-stater Taft took over. Which probably means it’s been written about numerous times in the last week or so :-) ]

I’ve referred several times to Perot’s two gifts of the presidency to Slick Willy. But if someone of TR’s charisma couldn’t defeat Wilson in 1912, ushering in one of the worst presidencies in the history of the Republic, I’d be surprised if Trump could. And TR carried the 1904 popular vote by a 20% margin and defeated his opponent by 200 EV’s. Note the way the Bull Moose Party has disappeared without a trace, except in the history books.

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