The Republican party has devolved into a group of the lowest form of reality show contestants.
Compare it to “Survivor,” where the people who act the worst (e.g. Russell Hantz, Colton Cumbie) get the most attention and airtime because the show needs a villain to create tension and drama. But in the end, those villains never win. It’s always the quieter contestants who understand how to manage the social aspects of the game and get the members of the jury to vote for them in the end — not those who try to disrupt everything and play a mean, selfish game.
Now, substitute Ted Cruz or any other Tea Party extremist for Russell or Colton and you’ll see where they’re headed. They may be able to create havoc and manipulate the system for a little while, but in the end, they can never win.
My theory also explains why the candidates who made headlines in the GOP primaries were Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain. None of them had a chance of winning the general election, and yet the media fell over one another trying to pump them up as viable nominees. In the end, they got Mitt Romney instead.
That’s why no Republican has won a majority of the votes in a presidential election since 1988, and unless the party reverses itself radically in the next two years, it’s unlikely 2016 will be any different. Until then, the extremists in Congress will continue treating it as their own personal tribal council — and every day, their approval ratings will drop as more Americans want to snuff their torches.