Waldman bets on divided government for the foreseeable future:
[W]hat you could have is a party stubbornly alienated from the national electorate, but stubbornly able to keep control of the House of Representatives.
Which would mean that we just go on in this current vein. The GOP’s descent into madness helps Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Martin O’Malley become president, and stalemate politics in Congress continues. The image of the Republican party doesn’t recover, convincing most Americans that they’re too irresponsible to be trusted with governing, making it all but impossible for them to win the presidency or take control of the Senate. Yet they keep holding the House indefinitely, or at a minimum until a post-2020 redistricting reduces their stranglehold on the House.
Barro sees Christie as the GOP’s only hope. He points out that, in New Jersey re-election polls, Christie is “drawing about a third of the black vote, an unheard of level for a Republican candidate”:
Republicans are worried about how to appeal to voters in a country that is decreasingly white. Christie has shown how much credibility Republicans can gain with black voters simply by showing respect to the president, even while disagreeing with him on a broad swath of policy issues. This shouldn’t be hard, but for most Republican politicians, it is. Much of the party’s energy today is based on animus toward the man who happens to be the first black president. Christie is one of the few Republican politicians who understands how damaging that has been to the party’s brand.
The Dish 