Post-2020 Vision: The Alternative Universes of Future U.S. Election Campaigns

The Republican Party’s ambitions to become the dominant party in the USA form the backdrop to the rise of Donald Trump, a leader that the party initially did not want, as a candidate, president, and ex-president eager to maintain his huge political influence. The GOP’s determination to realign U.S. party politics in its own favour together with the emergence of powerful new media channels that Trump mastered helped create the opportunity for a new rhetoric in politics. In this space, America’s two major parties have developed quite different conceptions of the party-political future, and their supporters maintain almost wholly separated channels of political communication to the extent that the post-2020 visions of the U.S. Democratic administration and its GOP opponents seem more like alternate universes. In response to this climate, the present article contends that despite the controversies of the Trump presidency, the Biden victory in 2020, and the lasting Democratic success in nationwide presidential voting this century, it is the Republicans who may have the best political opportunities in the foreseeable future. It proceeds to also explain that despite the fact that the model of party-political realignment can leave the appearance of an underlying cyclical progression, and an unreal sense that an equilibrium is almost always re-established naturally, change can be explosive and destructive at certain times.