It may interest those who believe Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and doom are synonymous to know that supporters of Obama and Hillary believe similarly, for far different reasons.

Lee Drutman‘s opinion compelled me to borrow a Beck lyric for the headline:

There is a debate emerging on these pages (and elsewhere) as to whether the Democrats are in deep trouble.

Vox’s Matt Yglesias thinks they are. Not only, he notes, do Republicans now hold majorities in the US House and the Senate, but the GOP also now has unified control of 25 state legislatures, while Dems control only seven. More significantly, Republicans are using their power. They are going after unions, which have traditionally been a key organizing force for Democrats. And they are enacting stricter voting rules, which tend to disenfranchise those voters most likely to vote for Democrats.

Political scientist Phil Klinkner has disagreed, arguing that there is a natural, almost“thermostatic” ebb and flow to partisan fortunes in America. When one party controls the White House, public opinion naturally moves against that party. Put a Republican in the White House, he argues, and voters across the country will readjust to favor Democrats.

Who is right? It depends on whether you think American democracy operates primarily by balancing feedback loops (in which partisan electoral victories are always short-lived because they provoke an equal but opposite reaction) or primarily by reinforcing feedback loops (in which electoral victories translate into policy victories that can cement long-term advantages).

Almost certainly, it’s a little bit of both. But the timelines on which these loops operate vary. Reinforcing feedback loops are likely to prevail for the immediate future, possibly even for decades. Balancing feedback loops operate over much larger timescales.

Or, shorter version: Yglesias is probably right. Democrats likely are in deep trouble for the next few decades, barring any unexpected changes.

While party fortunes certainly do ebb and flow from election to election (and, yes, in some opposition to White House control, as per Klinkner and others), these ups and downs are secondary to a larger pattern in American politics. Traditionally, there has always been one dominant and one secondary party — a “sun” party and a “moon” party, as Samuel Lubell once famously labeled it.

Since the mid-1990s, things have been unusually up for grabs. The past two decades have been the most consistently competitive period in American history (which Frances Lee has convincingly argued is a key driver of our particularly nasty bout of partisanship).

But more and more evidence suggests that Republicans may come out as the long-term winners. As Thomas Schaller has convincingly argued, the GOP increasingly enjoys a structural advantage based on geography — suburban and rural areas, where Republicans do best, are overrepresented in Congress. Republican voters also turn out more reliably because of their stronger social networks.

Moreover, as Schaller notes, 39 of 50 US states hold gubernatorial elections in off-year or odd-numbered-year elections, when turnout is lower. John Judis has made somesimilar arguments about the long-term strength of Republicans.

But perhaps more significantly, Republicans are taking advantage of being in power to strengthen future electoral success.

Yglesias describes some of these strategies (weakening unions, raising hurdles to voting) in his piece. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have also provided someexcellent descriptions of the ways in which Republicans have used their electoral gains to strengthen their core constituencies (mostly the very well-off) while weakening Democrats’ core constituencies (those who are less well-off), increasing socioeconomic inequality in the process.

I am not sympathetic to complaints of income inequality for a variety of reasons, in part because the disease is the result of simple math, in part because said complaints violate one of the Ten Commandments (“thou shalt not covet”), and in part because the lefty cure (theft) is worse than the disease. It is interesting to note that said inequality has gotten worse under Obama (who has more high-wealth supporters, suh as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, than any Republican president has ever had), and that the Democrat paradise of California has the most wealth inequality in the entire country.

Arguably over the last 35 or so years the best thing for the Republican Party, to improve the GOP’s election prospects, is Democratic presidents. Jimmy Carter’s term as president went so well that not only was he not reelected, but the Senate went Republican for the first time in three decades. Bill Clinton not only never got a majority of the popular vote, but his first two years flipped both the House and Senate to Republican control. Obama has been politically successful only in getting himself reelected; during his seven years in office Democrats have lost both houses of Congress, several governorships (including Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Michigan) and nearly 1,000 state legislature seats (including enough Wisconsin legislative seats to swing control of both houses from the Democratic Party to the GOP).

One reason could be the Democrats’ arrogance on cultural issues. Molly Ball paid attention to last week’s election results:

In Tuesday’s elections, voters rejected recreational marijuana, transgender rights, and illegal-immigrant sanctuaries; they reacted equivocally to gun-control arguments; and they handed a surprise victory to a Republican gubernatorial candidate who emphasized his opposition to gay marriage.

Democrats have become increasingly assertive in taking liberal social positions in recent years, believing that they enjoy majority support and even seeking to turn abortion and gay rights into electoral wedges against Republicans. But Tuesday’s results—and the broader trend of recent elections that have been generally disastrous for Democrats not named Barack Obama—call that view into question. Indeed, they suggest that the left has misread the electorate’s enthusiasm for social change, inviting a backlash from mainstream voters invested in the status quo.

Consider these results:

• Ohio voters rejected a ballot initiative to legalize recreational marijuana by a 30-point margin.
• Voters in Houston—a strongly Democratic city—rejected by a 20-point margin a nondiscrimination ordinance that opponents said would lead to “men in women’s bathrooms.”
• The San Francisco sheriff who had defended the city’s sanctuary policy after a sensational murder by an illegal immigrant was voted out.
• Two Republican state senate candidates in Virginia were targeted by Everytown for Gun Safety, former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s gun-control group. One won and one lost, leaving the chamber in GOP hands.
• Matt Bevin, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Kentucky, pulled out a resounding victory that defied the polls after emphasizing social issues and championing Kim Davis, the county clerk who went to jail rather than issue same-sex marriage licenses. Bevin told the Washington Post on the eve of the vote that he’d initially planned to stress economic issues, but found that “this is what moves people.”

There were particular factors in all of these races: The San Francisco sheriff was scandal-ridden, for example, and the Ohio initiative’s unique provisions divided pro-pot activists. But taken together these results ought to inspire caution among liberals who believe their cultural views are widely shared and a recipe for electoral victory.

Democrats have increasingly seized the offensive on social issues in recent years, using opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage to paint Republican candidates as extreme and backward. In some cases, this has been successful: Red-state GOP Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock lost after making incendiary comments about abortion and rape in 2012, a year when Obama successfully leaned into cultural issues to galvanize the Democratic base. “The Republican Party from 1968 up to 2008 lived by the wedge, and now they are politically dying by the wedge,” Democratic consultant Chris Lehane told theNew York Times last year, a view echoed by worried Republicans urging their party to get with the times.

But the Democrats’ culture-war strategy has been less successful when Obama is not on the ballot. Two campaigns that made abortion rights their centerpiece in 2014, Wendy Davis’s Texas gubernatorial bid and Mark Udall’s Senate reelection campaign in Colorado, fell far short. In most of the country, particularly between the coasts, it’s far from clear that regular voters are willing to come to the polls for social change. Gay marriage won four carefully selected blue-state ballot campaigns in 2012 before the Supreme Court took the issue to the finish line this year. Recreational marijuana has likewise been approved only in three blue states plus Alaska. Gun-control campaigners have repeatedly failed to outflank the N.R.A. in down-ballot elections that turned on the issue. Republicans in state offices have liberalized gun laws and restricted abortion, generating little apparent voter backlash. …

To be sure, Tuesday was an off-off-year election with dismally low voter turnout, waged in just a handful of locales. But liberals who cite this as an explanation often fail to take the next step and ask why the most consistent voters are consistently hostile to their views, or why liberal social positions don’t mobilize infrequent voters. Low turnout alone can’t explain the extent of Democratic failures in non-presidential elections in the Obama era, which have decimated the party in state legislatures, governorships, and the House and Senate. Had the 2012 electorate shown up in 2014, Democrats still would have lost most races, according to Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist, who told me the turnout effect “was worth slightly more than 1 percentage point to Republican candidates in 2014”—enough to make a difference in a few close races, but not much across the board.

Liberals love to point out the fractiousness of the GOP, whose dramatic fissures have racked the House of Representatives and tormented party leaders. But as Matt Yglesias recently pointed out, Republican divisions are actually signs of an ideologically flexible big-tent party, while Democrats are in lockstep around an agenda whose popularity they too often fail to question. Democrats want to believe Americans are on board with their vision of social change—but they might win more elections if they meet voters where they really are.

One obvious fact is that the number one purpose of a political party is to elect and reelect members of that party. The parties do not exist to promote social issues except to the extent that voters driven by social issues vote for that party. That is why anti-abortion voters are invariably disappointed by the GOP’s failure to outlaw and eliminate abortion.

Ask liberals (if you can stand the experience), and they will claim Republicans have nefariously used gerrymandering to control state legislatures, as if Democrats haven’t used gerrymandering to benefit themselves. (The number one beneficiary of gerrymandering isn’t Republicans or Democrats; it’s incumbents, and the only way you can get rid of incumbents short of voting them out of office is by term limits, which, in our increasingly polarized society, usually mean replacing a Democrat with another Democrat and a Republican with another Republican.) Did Scott Walker get elected governor three times because of gerrymandering?

One year out, the most likely Democrat-friendly events to happen are, in order, Hillary Clinton getting elected president, (somewhat less likely) Democrats taking back the U.S. Senate (probably for two years) and (considerably less likely than that) Democrats taking over the state Senate. There is zero chance Democrats will take over the House of Representatives or the state Assembly, and I wouldn’t bet money on the state Senate going socialist either. Perhaps gridlock is the permanent state of American politics.