Can the unstable GOP ever finesse the contradictions in their coalition?

By Dan Balz September 27 at 2:32 PM

The Republican Party has become an unstable and potentially unsustainable coalition. The danger has been apparent from the day President Trump began his quest for the White House. Roy Moore’s victory in the Alabama Republican primary provided the exclamation point.

Moore’s victory was telling for what it showed: that the Trump message has more power at the grass-roots than the president himself. Trump was persuaded to embrace Sen. Luther Strange in the GOP runoff against Moore. But it was the anti-Washington, anti-establishment message of the twice-removed state Supreme Court justice that prevailed Tuesday.

That this is a period of turmoil and flux in American politics states the obvious. Tribal voting has become the norm, with the country divided into red and blue camps. Come December in Alabama, when the general election between Moore and Democrat Doug Jones is contested, those firmly established patterns again could determine the outcome. In deeply red Alabama, Republicans will expect to win, even with an establishment-rattling, ultraconservative candidate like Moore.

Yet the red-blue alliances and the left-right differences are no longer sufficient to explain the tensions and divisions that mark the politics of the Trump era. They still shape political debates and policy differences; they still help predict general-election voting patterns. But alone, they do not provide the fuller framework for such an unusual time. Neither party is offering answers.

For establishment Republicans in Washington, Tuesday was perhaps the worst day among many bad days. It was a trifecta of disappointment and rejection. The failure of the party that controls so many levers of power to govern effectively and the consequences of that inaction rarely have been on such public display.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/can-the-gop-ever-finesse-the-contradictions-in-their-coalition/2017/09/27/8e54ee44-a3a3-11e7-b573-8ec86cdfe1ed_story.html