Former President Donald Trump’s mounting legal jeopardy is raising a stark political question: can anything break the sustained electoral stalemate that has left the country divided almost exactly in half between the Republican and Democratic coalitions?
The problem here is that the Republican party is shrinking, and has been for years. So I'm skeptical that it's really "deadlocked," no matter how much the media wants a horse race. Trump's support among Republicans is rock-solid, but his presence has caused a lot of people to leave the Republican party. The people left are the most extreme, the most hateful.
But that doesn't necessarily mean they have equity in numbers with Democrats.
Or to put it differently they’ve won the popular vote once in the past 30 years. The last Republican to be president without losing the popular vote in their first election was in 1988, he then proceeded to lose, and his son only won the popular vote in his second term in part thanks to a patriotic fervor following 9/11. Incidentally, there are voters born after that election.
People are leaving the Republican party in name, but 90% of them are still going to vote as conservatives (aka Republican), so really they're just letting the extremists control the primaries so the ones that "left" can pretend to be moderate while still voting for racists and indirectly supporting their hateful rhetoric.
Source: look at the fucking idiots like Joe Manchin, Lisa Murkowski, Liz Cheney, and Susan Collins. They can claim to be moderate all they want, but at the end of the day, they vote however the Republican leadership tells them to.