The only issue is that the candidates haven’t materialized. Here’s the graph of seats (Republicans in red, independents in grey) contested by Republicans since legislative downsizing ahead of the 2002 elections:

This year, Republicans will contest 40 seats in the legislature. If they won all of them, they would barely break the Democratic supermajority in the Senate, and still fail to do so in the House. Keep in mind, 40 would be about twice as many districts as they have won, ever. There are only about 20 districts across the state that Republicans have ever won. Winning 20 districts would actually make this the most successful year the Republicans have ever had since the General Assembly reached its current size in 2002.*

Simply put, the Republican candidates necessary to make their party a functioning opposition haven’t materialized. And it’s noticeable to me that Republican recruitment issues have grown worse since 2010, when a Republican wave election empowered Republicans nationwide and gave them majorities in both chambers of the U.S. Congress.

The grey line is candidates running as Independents, and the point to notice here is that they have increased the number of seats contested over time. And Independents in Rhode Island often caucus with the Republican Party in the State House (e.g., Blake Filippi) or are already Republicans (e.g., perennial Providence candidate Luis Vargas who volunteered for the RI Republican Party). Not all, mind you, but many would’ve been Republicans.

Notably, these developments (the increasing difficulty of the Republicans to recruit candidates, and the increasing number of Independents) have happened pretty much independently of the master lever’s existence.

But these are just seats. What about the number of candidates? If Republicans have only ever been competitive in about 20 districts, then this could undercount candidates in safe Republican seats.

As you can see, Republicans did fairly well in distributing their candidates for seats; as did the Independents (more remarkable because no one is organizing them). Meanwhile, the Democrats have more than enough candidates to contest all 113 General Assembly seats, but didn’t contest five of them: House Districts 30 (Incumbent: Giarusso – R), 36 (Incumbent: Filippi – I), and 48 (Incumbent: Newberry – R) and Senate Districts 35 (Incumbent: Gee – R) and 38 (Incumbent: Algiere – R).

Democrats’ recruitment advantage continues unabated. In fact, just on the numbers, Democrats could split into three parties that could each match Republican recruitment abilities.

The problem was never going to be the master lever for Republicans. The problem remains (as it has been since 2006) their party’s toxicity to a state that overwhelmingly supports Democratic policies. And even one of the most liberal state Republican Parties can’t overcome that obstacle – especially with Donald Trump on the top of the ticket. At this point, I think Republican hopes for growing their caucus (or even keep it the same size) this election is that the commentary on RI Future here is true: Clinton really is so unpopular that liberals will stay home and they can pick up low-turnout seats. The problem is that the people who dislike Clinton tend to be Republicans, and the people who dislike her as much as Trump aren’t really that big, certain in their choice, or even likely to be Democratic partisans.

Now, am I going to say RI Republicans will be massacred this year? No. I do not have a great track record there. But looking at past presidential elections and RI GA results, I’m going to guess the Democrats should win 100 seats and Republicans should win 12 seats. In each off-year election, Democrats have picked up 96 or 95 seats, and in each presidential year election they’ve picked up 99-102 seats.

The big question for me is what effect Trump will have. RI Republican office-holders have fairly closely embraced their presidential nominee, and nominees can have an effect down the ballot even to state legislatures. Trump seems more of an anathema to the average RI voter than a generic Republican, so theoretically, he could do serious damage to what remains of the RI Republican Party since the Bush years caused the liberal Republican to go extinct.

* An earlier version of this post inadvertently implied that Republicans have never been successful in GA races, that’s obviously not the case.

On Election Day 2012, there were 786 candidates for all offices across Rhode Island, from U.S. Senator to Town Sergeant. According to a list provided by the Secretary of State’s office, the make-up was such:

• 301 Democrats
• 209 Republicans
• 116 Independents
• 4 Moderates
• 1 Libertarian (Independent)
• 1 Vigilant Fox (Independent)
• 154 candidates for nonpartisan offices

In evaluating partisan strength, we need to put aside the 154 nonpartisan candidates and the offices they ran for, merely because nonpartisan offices don’t identify party affiliation. Including the federal offices contested (not including the U.S. Presidency), there were 373 partisan officials elected in 2012 (not all offices are contested in a given election year, the total number of offices in this state is at least 505 and the 1992 Census of Governments by the US Census Bureau put the total number of elected offices at 1186).

How did the parties do? Well, of the 301 candidates put up by the Democrats, 244 of them were elected; a win rate of 81.06% per candidate. The Republicans? Of their 209 candidates, just 96 of them made it to elective office, a win rate of 45.93%. Political independents placed 33 candidates, winning 28.45% of the time. The Moderates (and everyone else) had a win rate of 0%.

Basically, with no organization behind them, political independents did about half as well as the Republicans, despite that party’s over-hyped “Strike Force”, their poorly-constructed/conceived “Rhode Island sucks” website, and chairman Mark Zaccaria’s “less-is-more” strategy (which I criticized back in June). Deep organizational/strategic thinking or cheap gimmicks?

The answer is clear from the results: Republicans in Rhode Island were crushed in 2012. With only 11 members in the General Assembly, it is no longer tenable to think of Rhode Island as having two major parties with minor parties like the Moderates and Greens. Instead, we need to think of Rhode Island has having a primary party, the Democratic Party; a secondary party, the Republican Party; and tertiary parties like the Moderates.

Despite the insight to the RI GOP’s issues provided here by Patrick Laverty (running inexperienced candidates for statewide office), he misses the deeper structural problem for Republicans: they’ve largely ceded much of the state to Democrats and independents (a problem exacerbated under Mr. Zaccaria’s time as chair). If you lived in all but one of Pawtucket’s six city council wards or House District 46, after you completed the federal office section of your ballot there wasn’t a single Republican anywhere down ticket.

Republicans may feel strong in towns like East Greenwich, West Greenwich, and Scituate (towns where the majority of voters voted straight Republican for President, U.S. Senator, and U.S. Representative), but even in these towns, Democrats contested town-wide offices and majorities of voters voted for the occasional Democratic Assembly candidate (in East Greenwich, they picked Mark Schwager; West Greenwich went with Leo Raptakis and Lisa Tomasso; and Scituate returned Michael Marcello).

A strategic problem for the Republicans is that they don’t appear to have a plan to actually fix Rhode Island’s problems, and the only ideas they’ve expressed are an anathema to the majority of Rhode Island’s voters. Without an appealing plan or vision, Democrats will continue to accrue the state’s new talent and fresh blood in politics, while the Republicans will remain a party adrift and rudderless. The only question is whether the party will finally drown under a tide of blue, or find a way to reform and provide a serious challenge. It’s a project that will take decades.

CORRECTIONS: An earlier version of this article missed that there were four expressly partisan Moderate Party candidate. It also failed to give a justification for not counting nonpartisan offices. Thank you, Ted Nesi.

An earlier version also incorrectly referred to Rep. Michael Marcello as “Phil Marcello”.