Reviewing a bit of history, I was surprised to find that there were, in fact, three Democratic candidates that ran against Lincoln the Republican in 1860. There was Stephen Douglas, John Breckinridge and a guy named John Bell. I’d heard of John Bell Hood, the reckless Confederate general, but hadn’t heard about John Bell. But here’s my point: the Republican party in 2016 bears a striking resemblence to the Democratic party in 1860, without the issue of slavery. How so? Let me ‘splain.

John C. Breckinridge was the vice president under James Buchanan, a one-termer whose ambivalence toward slavery gave him a slot in the ‘worst presidents ever’ list. A splintered Democratic convention resulted in Breckinridge and Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas both being nominees for president. Breckinridge was called the ‘southern Democrat’ and Douglas just plain ‘Democrat’. While popular history has it that Douglas was Lincoln’s principal adversary in the election, the actual results don’t support that. I’ll get to that in a minute.

John Bell’s nomination was the result of former Whig’s getting together with a couple of other splinter groups to form the “Constitutional Union” party, which obviously advocated to oppose secession. The clear result? Three Democratic candidates split the popular and subsequent electoral vote, allowing the Republican Lincoln to win the national election with northern and western votes. Bell took Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Breckinridge swept the south, and Douglas only won Illinois. Something very similar to that will happen in the 2016 election.

Let’s look at the current factions in the Republican party. While the three candidates don’t necessarily compare directly with the three southern Democrats, the split in ideology is analogous. Essentially, we have a ‘moderate’ (Rubio), a radical conservative (Cruz) and DtheT, who can only be described as a canny marketer whose candidacy is the result of too many years of stringing poor whites along with promises not kept. Rubio is too light-weight to win, as DtheT – and Chris Christie showed us in the debates. Ted Cruz is gratingly pedantic, turning off the electorate as well as his peers with his alienating style and substance. And DtheT is – well, you know what he is – everybody knows what he is. His popularity is as much a product of the distaste for the rest of the field as it is wishful thinking on the part of the electorate that they really can put a thumb in the eye of their elected Washington cadre.

So if the analogy holds – and current ‘establishment’ Republican rhetoric continues in the current vein – you could see multiple Republican candidates in the form of DtheT and

‘third-party’ entities emerging from the Cleveland convention in June. That would be semi-analogous to the election I thought this one would resemble: Nixon versus Humphrey and Wallace in 1968. But instead of DtheT, I had Jeb Bush in the role of Nixon (typecasting if there ever was) and him clearly winning. But I hadn’t dug deep enough. It seems DtheT and Nixon actual had a tie in common – Roy Cohn. Ironic, ain’t it? Roy and Nixon helped Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy become an ‘ism’, and Roy was DtheT’s attack dog attorney in the ’90’s. Oh my. What can be said about that? Wow.

So I suppose you could call 2016 a mash-up of 1860 and 1968, but with the opposite result: Hillary Clinton will be the 45th President of the United States, with 322 votes in the electoral college to Trump’s 218 and the third party candidate put up by the Republicans likely not even making it to the finish. When that happens, on Wednesday, November 9th, a new Republican leader will emerge that will be analogous to Bill Clinton’s emergence after Michael Dukakis’ defeat by George H.W. Bush in 1988. And who will that leader be? I predict it will be Governor Brian Sandoval of Nevada, the guy Obama thought could be his ‘trump card’ in appointing a Republican to the Supreme Court. He’s governor until 2019 when he’s term-limited out. Watch him rise as the next leader of the Republican party, and watch the ‘new’ party take over from a disappointing Clinton Presidency in 2020. And why will Hillary’s presidency be disappointing? Because anybody in that seat for the next four years is doomed to failure. Too many challenging issues; no unity in D.C. So there it is – watch it unfold and learn, grasshoppers.