No, the Republicans won’t be a unified party. When the leading candidate has a large and rock-solid minority of about 37 percent, which means 63 percent of the party is voting against him, it means a lot of people are going to leave very mad.
If Trump loses, he’ll walk, and lots of his voters will walk away with him, though whether he’ll run on a third party line is unclear. If he wins, there will be a third line on the ballot, partly to protect the down ticket candidates, and there may also be another Republican candidate. If Trump loses after multiple votes, his supporters will claim the moral high ground as he had more votes than anyone else going in, while his opponents will claim that many more people had voted against him, and it was right that their interests prevailed.
Trump’s backers are forecasting (which means they are threatening) riots if he isn’t the winner, which would certainly make for a bad week in Cleveland. But if he wins, the party we’ll have four months after that will turn out to be a lot worse. If you think he has trashed the Republican image already, wait until he spends four months as the official voice of the party, with even more genital references and riot-filled rallies, and digs an X-rated hole for it to climb into and from which it may never emerge.
In the normal course of events, a party unifies at its convention, but when the nominee is seen as an actual menace, a different dynamic sets in: The institutional party, which is informal, ad hoc, and cannot be directed, pulls itself back from him and his efforts, and leaves him to die on the vine.
In 1964 and 1972, as Teddy White tells us, when Barry Goldwater and George McGovern were judged by the country at large as too likely to either start a war or to lose one, strange things started to happen to both their campaigns. Few would appear on a dais with either. Undercard candidates and/or party leaders always seemed busy when they came to town. Traditional allies long taken for granted stayed silent, or joined with the enemy forces. Papers that had never before gone Democratic got behind Lyndon Johnson, as Life, the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Herald-Tribune, and all the Hearst papers turned on the party en masse.
In 1972 John Connally and others formed “Democrats for Nixon,” anti-Soviet stalwarts such as George Meany and Lane Kirkland made certain that the AFL-CIO remained neutral, and Jeane Kirkpatrick and Norman Podhoretz cast their first ever votes for a Republican, the gateway drug for their move towards Reagan eight years after that.
Had he not voted against the Civil Rights Bill, Goldwater might have carried only his home state, Arizona, while McGovern lost his (South Dakota), winning only Massachusetts and the city of Washington. McGovern and Goldwater were veteran senators and genial people liked by their colleagues. Trump is liked by almost no one in government, and it is he, not just his ideas, that people find frightening. He would have a zombie convention followed by a zombie campaign, which most politicians who still have a future would not really want to come near.
Is it better to have four days of rage, or a peaceful convention followed by four months of torture that ends in a drubbing of epic proportions? Some kinds of problems are worse than some others, and now and then peace costs too much.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
