Some people feel the Republican Party is in chaos, with no obvious front-runner for president, no one apparently willing to be Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the party in danger of losing control of the U.S. Senate in an election year that seems to favor Democrats.

But if you think the GOP has it bad, James Taranto reports on a lefty writer who thinks the opposite is the case:

Matt Yglesias delivers this cheery news to readers of the liberal young-adult website Vox.com: “The Democratic Party is in much greater peril than its leaders or supporters recognize, and it has no plan to save itself.” He has a pretty good argument. Look past President Obama’s “victory lap” and the current disarray in the House and the GOP presidential contest, and Republicans dominate elected politics in most of the country.

The GOP holds majorities in both houses of Congress. Thirty-one governors are Republicans, as are majorities of state attorneys general and secretaries of state. Republicans hold majorities in 69 of 99 state legislative chambers (including Nebraska’s unicameral Senate, which is formally nonpartisan) and have “unified control”—governor and legislative majorities—of 24 state governments (Yglesias erroneously says 25).

The most surprising fact in Yglesias’s piece: Apart from California, the most populous state with unified Democratic control is Oregon, which ranks 27th in population. That surprised Yglesias, too. At the end of his piece is this correction: “Earlier versions of this article said that Minnesota or Washington was the biggest non-California Democratic-controlled state, but in fact the Republicans control one legislative house in both of those states.”

Yglesias argues that even the House Republican leadership crisis is a sign of Democratic weakness: It “reflects, in some ways, the health of the GOP coalition. Republicans are confident they won’t lose power in the House and are hungry for a vigorous argument about how best to use the power they have.”

That confidence, in his view, is well-founded. Republicans have a natural geographic advantage in district-based lawmaking bodies—state legislatures and the U.S. House—because their voters are dispersed, whereas Democrats’ tend to be concentrated in big cities. Majorities are self-perpetuating, both because incumbents tend to win and because control of state government usually entails the power to draw district lines with the goal of enhancing the majority party’s advantage.

And “ ‘wave’ elections in which tons of incumbents lose are typically driven by a backlash against the incumbent president. Since the incumbent president is a Democrat, Democrats have no way to set up a wave.” Recent history bears out that point. The House majority last switched in a sitting president’s favor in 1948; since then, the president’s party has lost its majority five times, three of them since the 1990s.

Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore offers a rebuttal, the strongest point of which is that “even if you regard the presidency as a thin, fragile thread by which the Democratic Party holds onto a share of power, it’s a pretty damn important thread.”

To which we would add that Yglesias doesn’t dwell much on the Senate, where a Democratic majority after 2016 is well within reach. Republicans will be defending seven seats in states Obama carried in 2012, and a four-seat pickup would be sufficient for a majority assuming the Democrats win the presidency. A Democratic president and Senate could populate both the administrative agencies and the courts with liberal ideologues. With Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy both turning 80 next year, a reliably liberal Supreme Court majority is a serious possibility.

In 1981-86, the situation was reversed: Democrats dominated the down-ballot offices, but Republicans held the White House and Senate majority. In terms of enacting their agenda, Republicans were much better off then than they are now. (Here a caveat: Because the parties were less ideologically polarized in the ’80s, a House from the opposite party was not as great an obstacle to the president’s legislative agenda as it is today.)

Not that Yglesias would disagree with any of this. He leaves no doubt about the urgency, in his view, of electing a Democratic president:

Winning a presidential election would give Republicans the overwhelming preponderance of political power in the United States—a level of dominance not achieved since the Democrats during the Great Depression, but with a much more ideologically coherent coalition. Nothing lasts forever in American politics, but a hyper-empowered conservative movement would have a significant ability to entrench its position by passing a national right-to-work law and further altering campaign finance rules beyond the Citizens United status quo.

A subtext of Yglesias’s argument is a warning to those Democrats who are (and have excellent reasons to be) wary of Mrs. Clinton that if she loses, they would find the consequences dire.

That complements another recent Yglesias piece, in which he argued that Mrs. Clinton’s contempt for “procedural niceties”—i.e., laws, rules and customs—would make her an “effective president,” one willing to do whatever it takes to get things done. (As we argued, Yglesias may be engaged in wishful thinking if he expects Mrs. Clinton to employ her amoral tactics in the service of a cause other than herself. Recall that Bill Clinton’s boldest assertion of executive power was Clinton v. Jones, the 1997 case in which the Supreme Court unanimously rejected his assertion that his office immunized him against a private lawsuit for sexual harassment.)

Yglesias’s piece is weaker on the question of just what the Democrats should do about their down-ballot predicament. He accuses them of “complacency and overconfidence” and observes that “the party is marching steadily to the left on its issue positions . . . even though existing issue positions seem incompatible with a House majority or any meaningful degree of success in state politics.” He cites the example of Wendy Davis, the pro-abortion extremist who thrilled national Democrats but was an obvious mismatch for her state. She got trounced in last year’s Texas governor race.

But his only real advice is this: “The first step for Democrats is admitting they have a problem.” Gee, thanks.

He is weaker still on the question of how the party ended up in this situation. Indeed, he doesn’t address it at all. But when Obama took office in 2009, his party had large majorities in both House and Senate and was considerably better off by every other measure Yglesias cites. It is probably already accurate to say that no president since Herbert Hoover has overseen such a calamitous down-ballot performance by his party. And Hoover was in office at the time of a financial crisis. Obama was supposed to play the role of FDR.

One word that never appears in the Yglesias essay is “ObamaCare.” (Nor does he refer to it by its euphemistic formal title, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or by a generic term like “health-care reform.”) Putting aside the question of its merit as policy, can anyone deny that the politics of ObamaCare were and have remained disastrous? Obama’s “signature achievement” was an ideological act of recklessness that put the diminished and discredited GOP back on the right side of public opinion. More than any other factor, it enabled the overwhelming Republican victories in 2010 and, after its effects began becoming clear, in 2014.

The Democrats’ best hope for 2016 is that voters will conclude the Republican nominee is manifestly unqualified. The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds Donald Trump still leading the Republican field, with 25%. Ben Carson is second, with 22%. If the Obama years have made Democrats overconfident, they’ve made many Republicans desperate enough to turn to men who’ve never even run for public office. Recklessness can as easily be born of anger as of complacency.

This schizoid view is represented in Wisconsin as well. Republicans control both houses of the Legislature, all but one partisan statewide office, and five of eight Congressional seats. On the other hand, a majority of Wisconsin voters haven’t voted for a Republican for president since Ronald Reagan in 1984, and while there is one U.S. senator of each party, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R–Wisconsin) is not favored for reelection next year.