As you watch the professions of shock and horror greeting Donald Trump’s entirely predictable win in New Hampshire — he held a double-digit lead going into Tuesday’s vote and has led there longer than former front-runner Scott Walker was even a presidential candidate — don’t forget how many of those now protesting made his meteoric rise possible.
Don’t like Trump? The Republican establishment deserves its share of the blame for his polling dominance. Here are five reasons.
Republicans are angry. Nearly 50 percent feel betrayed by their own party. Four in ten expressed anger to exit pollsters. Trump’s entire appeal is based on the contention that our leaders are incompetent and don’t know what they are doing. They are either complicit in screwing the country or are incapable of protecting it.
Republicans particularly feel that way about party leadership. Trump isn’t the only candidate who has capitalized on or benefited from this mood. Some think it’s a positive when Ted Cruz calls a leading Republican senator a liar. The whole Tea Party phenomenon was an outgrowth of this disappointment and dismay.
It is not uncommon to encounter Republicans who feel like their party’s governing class says, “Thanks for the votes, donations and volunteer work. We’ll talk to you in two to six years, depending on when our terms are up.” It may not always be a fair assessment, but if it’s widely enough held, influential Republicans must be doing something wrong.
Both moderates and conservatives are disenchanted. The populist conservative uprising against the party establishment has been a prevailing storyline since at least the 2010 elections. But we’re also witnessing the revolt of the middle.
Trump not only beat Cruz by 21 points among self-described conservatives in New Hampshire. He edged out John Kasich among moderates, winning 32 percent of their votes. The latter trend is a repeat from Iowa, where Trump beat Marco Rubio to win a plurality of moderate caucus-goers.
The establishment is divided. Usually, conservatives split their votes in the Republican primaries. Last time, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and a host of other candidates were competing for their votes. In 2008, it was Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson.
There was no shortage of conservative candidates this year, but it is the establishment who have been competing for the same financial support and voters, often quite acrimoniously. In New Hampshire, there was a four-car pile-up between Kasich, Jeb Bush, Rubio and Chris Christie from which only the Ohio governor emerged relatively unscathed. Something similar could happen in South Carolina.
Rubio is the establishment candidate who can claim the most conservative support and would appear to have the most plausible path to the nomination. But by bankrolling Bush’s super PAC and similar entities, establishment donors have countenanced unrelenting attacks on Rubio. And it was Christie, to no obvious benefit to himself, who drew first blood against Rubio in the last Republican debate before the New Hampshire primary.
It remains to be seen whether Rubio can recover or whether Christie has pulled the freshman senator from Florida into Dan Quayle territory. The establishment’s circular firing squad has road-tested a number of criticisms that could easily be repurposed by the Democrats in the general election should any of them become the nominee.
GOP leaders condensed the primary schedule. Eager to avoid a protracted nomination fight in which the eventual winner was goaded into taking positions more suited to a conservative primary electorate than the general election, the Republican National Committee voted for both fewer early states and an earlier convention, speeding up the point at which candidates must compete in multiple media markets simultaneously.
This was supposed to make it easier for a Mitt Romney to crush someone like Rick Santorum, a fact that might bother conservatives in its own right. What it has instead done is made it easier for Trump to catch fire early while leaving less recovery time for a candidate to come back and defeat him. It’s not as if Trump is going to be at a financial disadvantage.
Lack of a stop Trump effort. A lot of money that could have been invested in criticizing Trump’s past record of liberal policy positions or publicizing alternatives to the unconventional front-runner remained on the sidelines (when it wasn’t plowed into things like Jeb’s aforementioned super PAC). Why?
One reason may be that establishment donors didn’t want to heavily fund an anti-Trump campaign if the primary beneficiary was going to be Cruz. To the extent that this is true, it shows more hostility to conservatives than an ideological hodgepodge like Trump — which itself fuels the conservative anger helping Trump.
Trump has proved to have greater political skills than most anticipated when he took that fateful ride down the escalator over the summer. But it took a village to build the rationale for his candidacy — a village run by the establishment.
