Republican disarray

Last week Brendan Nyhan argued that Democrats shouldn’t expect the chaos in the Republican House of Representatives to hurt the Republicans in the 2016 elections. He is on very solid ground in terms of next year’s congressional elections. Congressmen simply are not punished at the ballot box for Congressional dysfunction and, as Thomas Edsall recently explained well, several national trends bode well for GOP efforts to protect their Congressional majority next year. However, I don’t think Nyhan's analysis is as persuasive in terms of the GOP’s presidential aspirations in 2016.