Can Republicans rebound in 2018?: Ross K. Baker

President Warren Harding was probably not the first person to use the word "normalcy," but its aspirational implications were perfect for a country tired of war, consumed with fear of alien radicals, and even weary of the surge of progressivism unleashed by Teddy Roosevelt and carried forward by Woodrow Wilson. But the "normalcy" of the 1920s was not a return to the prim Victorianism of the earliest years of the century.

This was a country that had almost simultaneously given women the right to vote and denied Americans the right to consume alcohol. Hedonism and Fundamentalism did battle: speakeasies versus the bans on teaching evolution in the schools. A surge in immigration was followed by the most restrictive immigration laws in history. Warren Harding was uniquely incapable of understanding these tensions, let alone managing them.

But it's unlikely that Hillary Clinton, if elected, would be so passive. Deep divisions in the Democratic Party in the 1920s made them unequal to the task of blunting the strong rightward push of the Republicans until the Great Depression did the job for them. The post-Trump GOP seems equally ill-equipped to challenge Clinton.

Right now, the push for a mandate is the strategy of the Clinton campaign. That means not only rolling up large numbers in the popular vote and capturing the electoral votes of the big swing states, but thinning out the ranks of the GOP in Congress to the point where she would be able to go big on such items as immigration reform, moving against income inequality, advancing environmental regulations and somehow bettering the circumstances of America's poor, especially those who are African American.

Republicans need Trump's populism: Charlotte Allen

Clinton would have two years in which to get a start on these things before a likely reaction takes place in the mid-term election in 2018. Historically, the newly-elected president's party suffers badly in the first mid-term election, but there have been a few exceptions. The ability of the opposition to recoup losses incurred in the presidential election surge depends greatly on its vigor. What took place in the 1982 congressional election following the Reagan landslide two years before illustrates what can happen when an opposition party fails to rally from a disastrous defeat.

When Reagan beat Carter in 1980, his tidal wave also swept the Democrats out of control of the U.S. Senate, in which they had held the majority since 1954. Worse still, he decapitated the top leadership of the party in the Senate. Democratic stars Frank Church, George McGovern, and Birch Bayh went down to defeat. The Democrats retained a tenuous grasp on the House but were at the mercy of a defiant group of conservative Sun Belt Democrats known as the Boll Weevils, who lined up with Reagan on important budgetary issues.

So demoralized were the Democrats that even when a recession hit the country in 1982 and unemployment reached levels not seen since before World War II, they failed to capitalize on it and claw their way back. The Democrats did manage to capture 27 House seats, but control of the Senate would remain with the Republicans until 1986.

Democrats are now truly the Mommy Party: Ross Baker

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

That 27-seat gain — huge by today's standards — might easily have been 54 had the Democrats not still been reeling from the pasting they'd taken in 1980. As a staff member of the House Democratic Caucus at that time, I saw attractive Democratic challengers coming to Washington with hat in hand trying to get enough money from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to wage aggressive campaigns for seats that were winnable. Party leaders were frugal and conservative and bet only on sure things. I recall one challenger from Ohio who was blown off for serious money but was handed a bag of trinkets, the kind that clutter all Capitol Hill offices, with the suggestion that she hold an auction for them to raise money.

If she wins big, Clinton would understandably want to go big. There would likely be pushback, but would a demoralized and fractured GOP be able to capitalize on it or continue with the fratricide unleashed by Donald Trump? The prospects don't look good. In 1982, Democrats saw their Southern support slipping away and tried to pull the party closer to the center — something only accomplished a decade later by Bill Clinton. For the Republicans of 2016 and beyond, the road back also will be a long one and may be advanced more by Democratic missteps and scandals than by newfound cohesion.

Ross K. Baker is a distinguished professor of political science at Rutgers University and a member of the Board of Contributors of USA TODAY.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines.