1. 2010 and the midterm elections
When Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in 2008, his political party obtained a filibuster-proof supermajority in Congress.
According to experts, they kept on spending almost all the political capital they had on passing Obamacare in a long-winded process that included plenty of bizarre compromises with their own party members, such as “Cornhusker Kickback,” and contentious legislative tricks, like the popular “deemed as passed” maneuver.
Moreover, everything happened while the Affordable Care Act didn’t manage to get the support of the majority in the polls. As you can imagine, this set the stage for a major Republican asset going into the 2010 midterm elections.
If we analyze things on paper, the Republicans managed to have a forceful victory, having 63 seats in the House of Representatives and 6 seats in the Senate. But the GOP did something that ruined their chance of getting the Senate back when they elected weak candidates in plenty of winnable races.
For instance, their biggest mistake was having Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, and she lost her position after she stated that she had an episode in which she experimented with witchcraft. Long story short, all this made Republicans lose their possibility of having control in the Senate.
2. 2012 and Mitt Romney for president
If you thought that the failure to grab the Senate was the only thing the Republicans did wrong, wait until you read more! The GOP was still going strong with their anti-Obamacare sentiment, but they also had some voter frustration due to the slow recovery from the Great Recession.
According to experts, a lot of this was encouraged by the Tea Party movement, which brought a unique and significant element to the GOP. In 2012, the Republican Party thought that Mitt Romney was an impressive candidate for the presidency.
Speaking of that, if you really give it a second thought, he was actually a very good choice for the political party’s nomination. This man was the establishment GOP in almost anything that he’s done.
When the majority of American citizens were blaming Wall Street for the country’s economic catastrophe, Romney had experience as a hedge fund manager at Bain Capital.
Besides that, the Republican Party wanted a candidate who invigorated their anti-Obamacare and progressively anti-establishment base, but not a lot of people agree with their decision.
3. 2013 and the denial of a crisis
As you already know, the first flood of unattended children at America’s southern border started in 2013. It ended in 2014, and the Obama administration faced the issue by detaining many of those kids in fenced-in places, which quite a lot of people in the Trump administration referred to as “cages”.
This sad episode involving the children set the stage for the great weapon that helped Mr. Trump overcome a crowded field of potential Republican presidential candidates in the 2016 primaries.
However, according to different sources, the thing that was most important in this entire situation was the fact that GOP leaders showed more interest in bowing to corporate pressure to keep the borders somehow open instead of taking a step further and dealing with those issues that too much migration actually meant on a human scale.
