If the Republicans win the presidency, the Democratic party’s immediate future will be “catastrophic,” according to the national political reporter at The New York Observer. (The weekly newspaper’s publisher is Donald Trump’s son-in-law, but its politics are generally liberal and progressive.) It would become a “shell party.”

Even if the Democrats retake the Senate, writes Ross Barkan, “that would only mask the dismal truth that Democrats have repeatedly failed to win the kinds of down-ballot races that can safeguard progressive priorities like an expanded social safety net and protections for organized labor and the environment. … Public employees, pro-choice activists, organized labor, the gun control movement and environmentalists should be terrified.” Among the prizes the party would lose is the majority of the Supreme Court, which the next president may be able to shape for the next decade or two by nominating new justices as the elderly ones retire.

Among the reasons for Democrats to be worried:

Seventy percent of state legislatures, more than 60 percent of governorships, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state are all under Republican control. Working in concert with a Republican White House, they would have the collective ability to usher in an era of conservative dominance unrivaled in recent times. Single-party Republican rule now exists in 25 states. Democrats control seven.

Barkan quotes an historian from American University who predicts: “A Republican victory would fundamentally reorder the domestic and international priorities of the country.” He also quotes from an analysis by Vox‘s Matthew Yglesias. “The truly striking thing,” Yglesias wrote last October, “is how close to bottom the party is already and how blind it seems to be to that fact.” It has no plan to counter the Republican advantage. Worse, the party’s “national progressive donor networks are inherently populated by relatively affluent people who tend to be emotionally driven by progressive commitments on social or environmental issues,” he noted, which means a Wendy Davis can get a lot of attention for her pro-choice stunts and still lose a state-wide election.

The party establishment, Barkan explains, is expecting that demographics — especially the rising number of minority voters — will help them and also hoping that the Republicans will doom themselves by nominating someone who won’t appeal to enough voters to win election. This article, for example, from the website of the liberal magazine The New Republic, dismisses the Republican base as “old, cantankerous, nativist, and caucasian.”

For more, see The Democrats Will Have a Shell Party if They Don’t Win the White House from The New York Observer.