Yes, the Republican Party is in the midst of a messy, bitter and confused internal reshaping that has substantially tarnished their brand among many Americans. 

The fact that they remain competitive and could still enjoy a “red wave” election year reveals a less-discussed truth about modern partisan politics: The Democratic Party isn’t exactly knocking it out of the park nowadays either. 

Without any doubt, the GOP is currently suffering a malignant and factious bout of tribalism within the party — and the result, as U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell recently pointed out, has been less-than-stellar candidates in a number of key races nationwide. 

While Republican politics have long been marred by internal battles over policy and principles, the boorish culture of today’s politics has done damage to the party’s brand that goes well beyond the pejorative of “RINO” being bandied about on social media. A handful of prominent Nevada Republicans have even gone so far as to outright denounce the conspiracist tendencies of the populist wing of the GOP and openly support members of the other party in a few key races. 

Regardless of the politics at play, their actions are a powerful indication that there are “irreconcilable” differences budding between certain factions of the party — the tale of Liz Cheney being ousted in deep-red Wyoming being yet another. As it turns out, there’s a sizable contingent of GOP activists who are more interested in “owning the libs,” concocting conspiracies, and fighting electoral losses with litigious temper-tantrums than there are in expanding the party to a broader swath of American voters.   

And so, the civil war within the GOP rages for all to see. It’s a messy affair that would, in normal times, put the party at great risk of becoming hopelessly irrelevant in the upcoming election. 

Of course, we don’t live in normal times. 

Despite increasing factionalism within the GOP ranks and a shrinking of their political tent, the prospects of a “red wave” remain real heading into November. And that should be considered a fairly damning indictment of the current Democratic Party, given the chaos taking place on the right. 

In an era of Trump-driven GOP primaries, Republican electoral conspiracists turning on their own party and names like “Cheney” no longer earning applause in cowboy country, something must have gone terribly wrong for Democrats to, nonetheless, look unappealing by comparison. 

While the only numbers that actually matter will be the vote tallies on election night, shifts in Nevada voter registration reveal just how little Democrats have been able to benefit from the GOP’s unforced errors in the last several years. Despite Nevada’s own share of GOP ridiculousness, the party continues to gain on Democrats in terms of voter registration, and large chunks of what were once considered solid Democratic constituencies have given up on Team Blue. 

While some of this voter migration is undoubtedly spurred by economic concerns such as inflation — not to mention the midterm election effect of an unpopular incumbent president — the Democrats, nonetheless, have their own share of self-inflicted wounds. 

If the GOP is in the midst of a ruinous internal civil war, the Democratic Party is at the very least in a state of internal civil unrest. The hostility between socialist idealists, moderate blue-collar Democrats and old-school liberals has been intensifying as the party’s most ardent activists shift further left. 

In other words, the kind of populist migration away from center we’re seeing in the Republican Party isn’t too dissimilar to what has already begun in the Democratic Party. Indeed, such internal chaos seems to be universal at the moment with  even Libertarians experiencing fractures within their national party. 

Taken together, what the parties are experiencing is something more than mere policy disagreements within each camp — it’s a realignment of the way political apparatuses function in our modern era. We’re simply living through a moment of cultural and technological disruption to our political ecosystem for which no one was really prepared. 

Social media bubbles, the way “news” has transformed into reality-TV entertainment, and the populist impulses of voters who have grown more contemptuous of each other have all had a profound effect on the way political parties conduct their operations. The “big-tent” mantra of the ‘90s and early 2000s has little partisan value in a world dominated by political outrage and funded by increasingly narrow cliques of American voters — and the consequences of these new party politics is impacting the caliber of people who end up winning primaries in both major parties. 

As Johnathan Haidt observed in The Atlantic, our Twitter-driven world encourages extremists to forgo targeting their enemies in exchange for attacking  “dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team.” The result has been a hastening down an already established path where elections are less about earning the trust and admiration of voters, and more about pandering to the most radical and vociferous members of one’s own base. Unfortunately for much of the electorate, this has only accelerated the depressing trend of being forced to choose between objectively unrepresentative and disliked options at the ballot box. 

Come November, voters will decide which candidates meet the depressingly low standard of being slightly less reviled than their opponent. Some of those races may currently be easy to predict, but many will leave Democrats biting their nails down to the quick on election night. 

At some point, that should reveal there’s a much deeper level of dissatisfaction with both major political parties than many of their partisan supporters would currently like to admit — even when compared to the tarnished and toxic brand of their opponents.