Quote:
Originally Posted by flere-imsaho
IMO, only if he wins the general, too, and then it's a different kind of toast.
If Trump wins the nomination and there aren't shenanigans (like a bitter contested convention and a subsequent high-profile GOP split), and then loses the general election, the party's basically back where it was. Which is a party with a strong hold on offices from municipalities to state legislatures to the U.S. Congress with a pretty strong bench. Yes, it still has the issue of another potential clown car in 2020, but theoretically it can solve a lot of that by overhauling its nomination process.
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I think you just skipped over the 3.5-month circus of the campaign.
Let me flesh out my comment there. Pretty much every...single....Republican who holds national office will be badgered by the press to go on the record as for or against Trump. Some have already gone on the record as being against, and unquestionably a significant number will. And if Trump loses, on the morning of November 9th, the narrative from the Trump supporters will be that the only reason he lost is because for the first time in history, the party sabotaged its own nominee, over the will of the people.
Let's also not forget that Trump isn't just the most popular candidate among Republicans. He's also the most disliked candidate among Republicans. Sure, some percentage of those who dislike him would vote "Anyone But Hillary," but some percentage will not. Yes, Trump supporters are angry, but the anger is also starting to rise in anti-Trump Republicans--a group that also
*hates* HRC. If Trump is the nominee and loses to HRC, there's going to be hell to pay for every Republican who said "we need to rally around our nominee." As much as Trump supporters would blame a Trump loss on the establishment not rallying around him, the anti-Trump crowd would blame the Trump supporters and the politicians who did rally around him for not forcing him out of the nomination in the first place.
In either case, we're talking about at minimum a de facto party split, if not an actual one. It seems to me that the perfect storm is brewing here for the party, and the only way to head it off is to go to the convention with someone else having more delegates than Trump.