I tend to think though after this election, with so many people not liking either candidate, with the crap that went on between Hil and Obama, that we could finally see a true third party rise with a lot of support from the American people.

Republican Presidents, with their ever-increasing bent on expanding executive power, turn out to be pretty willing to allow the expansion of social spending as a tradeoff for getting expanded "defense" spending (maybe especially since more social spending = more executive power). So a divided government with a GOP President does relatively little to slow down the growth of government spending. Also, as we've found out the last 8 years, a unified GOP government turns out – counterintuitively – to be significantly worse than a unified Dem government.

There's an article in Reason this month (not online, though) that details all this, i.e., that government spending is by far most tolerable with a Dem President (and GOP House/Senate) over the last 40 or 50 years, pretty gawdawful with a GOP President (and Dem House/Senate), only slightly more gawdawful with a Dem monopoly, and completely intolerable under a GOP monopoly. Point being that there's relatively little difference, from a gridlock perspective, between an Obama victory and a McCain victory in the short term. Where the big difference comes in is the intermediate-to-long term, where there is at least a theoretical chance of getting a divided government with Obama as President (which is easily the least-bad scenario), and a theoretical chance of getting a unified government with McCain as President (which is easily the worst scenario).

As for your point about a new 'remnant' era, I'd say that's probably pretty consistent with my coalition-shifting theories. The Dems, for the foreseeable future, are probably going to maintain their anti-market rhetoric and disposition (though I note that their actions and rhetoric in the last 20-25 years have not been as anti-market as they were in the previous 40 years or so – but that's a low bar), since it's worked for them for so long. Meanwhile, the flight of the "libertarians" from the GOP, thanks to their civil and social liberties positions, is going to allow (and necessitate) a "new" GOP centered on "National Greatness" and "Sam's Club" conservatism.

Eventually, the "new" GOP will pull enough populists out of the Dem coalition to allow (and necessitate) the Dems to start adopting libertarian(ish) viewpoints on economic issues. The big question, I think, is how long it will take for this transformation of the political coalitions to complete. Until that time, I think you're probably correct – we're back to reliving the "remnant" days.

I don't know that I can predict how long the remnant days will last, but I'm starting to think that the closest parallel to this election in terms of its transformational effects is going to wind up being 1920 rather than 1932, with Bush playing the role of Woodrow Wilson, McCain that of James Cox, and Mike Huckabee that of FDR (yeah, I know, Huckabee's not a VP candidate, but his effect on the GOP due to his primary campaign is going to be similar to FDR's effect on the Dems). On the flip side, I don't think the personality comparisons are as apt, but the larger point is that 1920 was the year that the Republicans started to reject "Progressivism."