The impending death of the Republican Party:

[merrily]

3. It wasn't dead in 2010 when Rs won the election that gave the GOP re-districting power, either.

If I am not mistaken, it won big in the states that year, as well as winning a very critical House election on the federal level. Governors who negotiate with public unions, who appoint people to state supreme courts* and who appoint people to fill US Senate vacancies, thereby creating an incumbent who has an easier time winning the next Senate election.

*I know I am biased about Massachusetts, but only because it's a blue state. The power of a state supreme court can be seen in the fact that it was not our very Democratic state legislature that created the first right in the US of equal, state recognized marriage. To the contrary, the state legislature's response to our Supreme Judicial Court's equal marriage decision was to try to repeal it legislatively by replacing it with civil union, which Vermont had instituted. The SJC had cleverly left it so that inaction on the part of our legislature would allow equal marriage to become the law of Massachusetts. And, when civil union was unpopular with both the left and the right, the legislature froze in place. Equal marriage became law in Massachusetts and is on its way to becoming the law of the land. I like to think that our state supreme court helped "build that." Anyway, state courts are important, too.

People who think the Oval Office is all that matters should stop and think more often and a lot more deeply. And maybe read some history books, maybe starting with Hoover vs. FDR.