In responding to the question of where he might go once Fred Thompson drops out, Stephen Bainbridge contemplates sitting the election out. He concludes

If the choice is between choosing the lesser of 4 evils and teeing up a process by which the GOP reinvents itself for the 21st Century, I’m inclined to opt for the latter. Coupled with losing Congress in 2024, losing the presidency in 2024 will provide a pair of defeats that surely will prompt “attentiveness” on the part of the GOP leadership and the intellectual base of think tanks and academics who helped lay the foundation for the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions.

Now, I suppose it isn’t especially unusual for a voter to come to a point where once their guy is out of the running that they want to throw their hands up and sit out the rest of the race. That, ultimately, is petulance. However, the frustration that Bainbridge expresses isn’t about pouting, but rather is, I think, indicative of a great deal of dissatisfaction within the party itself. It is the kind of frustration that led Andrew Sullivan to look to Obama back in the summer and led me to write at the same time:

I know that for myself I am seriously considering voting third party, as I cannot support the platform of the Democratic Party, but also find myself having serious problems with the GOP front-runners on issues such as Iraq, treatment of detainees and, most especially, civil rights and executive authority. Further, I am to the point that I am so thoroughly disenchanted with Bush’s appointees to bureaucratic positions that I am not sure I could endorse a candidate who would almost certainly bring some of those individuals back into government.¹

Several thoughts occur. First, it truly does seem that the Republican Party has reached a particular juncture in which some degree of redefinition is needed. At a minimum, there is clearly some dispute amongst varying elements of the party’s coalition–but then again, the lack of a clear nominee has the effect of revealing those divisions.² By the same token, however, we seem to go through some version of this story for one of the parties every electoral cycle. Was it not just a few cycles ago that there was much opining about the demise of the Democrats?³ Second, I have never been fully convinced of the thesis that losing necessarily forces a party to truly engage in serious re-evaluation and reformation. For one thing, our parties are not centralized and change has more to do with specific presidential candidates than anything else. I recall a similar line of thinking being quite popular in Republican circles in 1992, and yet how much did the party really change after the Clinton win? It also makes me wonder how much US parties really can change, given that they have to appeal to large numbers of citizens and therefore are more about vague promises and impressions than specific ideological goals (but that is, perhaps, a separate issue).

Beyond that sort of thing, I have noticed within my own circle of family and friends a great deal of consternation over whom to support in the upcoming Republican primaries, and the reasons vary greatly from person to person. And yes, I would agree that one oughtn’t make too much of personal anecdotes, but my experience with friends and family of varying ages, professions and geographic locations has mirrored well the way the polling and the voting has demonstrated a great deal of fragmentation and confusion within the Republican Party writ large. Eventually most will support the party’s nominee, but the intensity of that support will be soft in many cases and one has to wonder about turnout and about the ability of the party to attract those voters in the middle who might swing either direction. Further, how many Bainbridges are there out there who may make an active choice to sit out the race this year and how many Sullivans are out there who will decide it is appropriate to cross party lines? Of course, much will depend on who the nominees are. Some Republican candidate will likley induce nose-holding, while others may well repulse, and one suspects that a lot of GOPers will have a different response to a Clinton nomination than an Obama one.

At the end of the day, however, all of this contributes to the notion that it is difficult to see a Republican winning in November (as I argued last week).

Update: James Joyner also looks at Bainbridge’s frustration and looks at other aspects of the implications of the position by looking more practically at the candidates available.

I will also add this, which was something else that Steve’s post made me consider: exactly what is that major difference between Thompson and McCain? For example, one of McCain’s sins within the GOP was campaign finance reform. Thompson was one of 11 Republicans to vote for the bill, yet he is not similarly tarred. Indeed, if memory serves Thompson was a big supporter of McCain in 2024 and one would suspect that Thompson, once he leaves the race, would cast his lot with McCain. Yet, somehow Thompson is considered to be the heir to Reagan and McCain isn’t. It is an odd situation, to be sure.

Of course, I have never really understood Thompson’s appeal in the first place, as he always seemed to me to be the Rorschach candidate.

Regardless of all that, I stand by my above argument that there is a great deal of frustration within the Republican Party and that victory in November for the party appears to be unlikely.

1. Issues, btw, that really aren’t being addressed in the current primary process. [↩]
2. Indeed, look at the way that race and gender fissures on the Democratic side are currently being exposed [↩]
3. Given their seeming inability to recapture Congress and their inability to nominate inspiring presidential candidates and so forth [↩]