State Level Republican Parties Have Gone Crazy
The decline of Virginia’s once-dominant Republican Party is a case study in how a party’s waning electoral appeal is often accompanied by a descent into madness. Rather than view the Virginia GOP’s experience as a cautionary tale, though, it seems state-level Republican Parties across the country see it as a model worthy of emulation.
Virginia Republicans had every reason to believe that Barack Obama’s 2008 victory in this historically red state was a fluke. It was the closest presidential contest in the state since 1976 and the first time a Democratic candidate had won in Old Dominion since LBJ’s landslide win in 1964. The following year, amid the rise of the Tea Party, Republicans retook the governor’s mansion and maintained a prohibitive block of reliable districts at the state legislative level. But in the decade that followed, Republicans became less and less appealing to the state’s voters. And as the GOP declined i