The Lincoln Project coins the perfect collective noun for the hapless Senate Republicans

[Warpy]

78. Quite honestly, I'd prefer them to the K Street milksops that appear every 4 years

to be campaign handlers, trying to make sure no candidate ever says anything that could possibly ever offend anyone, which means they're pretty much gagged. You could especially see it with Gore and Kerry.

As for what happened with the Federalists and Whigs, there are a lot of decent articles online. The Whigs are the more interesting, pitched battles with Abolitionists had them fail to renominate their incumbent candidate, Millard Fillmore, in 1852. Their demise was rather more spectacular than the Federalist party, which collapsed under its own corruption. In addition, the status quo crowd flooded into the Democratic Party, creating the conditions for them to be the pro slavery and then Jim Crow party for many decades.

I think we are going to end up with these guys, at least in the short term, because there is no way the Republicans are going to encourage their most passionate and reliable voting blocs, the fundagelicals and Nixon's bigots, to leave any time soon.

Back in the early 00s, I had hoped Roy Moore would start a bible party, but he disappointed me election after election. He's getting a little long in the tooth for that now, maybe someone else will step into the breach.

ETA: There was no element of fraud in former Whigs re registering as Democrats, any more than there is now when people get disgusted with something or other and change parties. Nobody in the 1850s was talking about a big tent and the status quo Whigs didn't take the party over, they just added numbers that made it near impossible to shift to the right side of history. The last flood of Republicans into our party came in the 70s during and just after Nixon. It almost made up for all the southerners who had deserted us in favor of the Republicans after the Civil Rights legislation went through.