Donald Trump is not a conservative. He is only recently a Republican. He is losing in the polls to Hillary Clinton. He is mean and abrasive, and he manifestly lacks the temperament to be president of the United States.
So why is the Republican party letting him skate by? Indeed, there are reports that some in the “establishment” are sidling up to the real estate mogul.
This question has been on the mind of sensible, public-spirited conservatives, as Trump continues to float above the fray—largely untouched by other candidates and enjoying a huge bonanza of free publicity from the press.
What gives?
The answer gets to the nature, and limits of the modern political party.
We’re inclined to think of parties as organizations like corporations or governments. Parties have some qualities in common with these institutions, but they are really quite different.
The structure and operation of parties have evolved over the centuries. The first political parties of the 1790s were mostly just collections of legislators who agreed on principles of governance. In time, these politicians built political operations to educate and mobilize voters on Election Day. Toward the end of the 19th century, their operations grew into massive machines, top-down state hierarchies ruled by bosses like Thomas Platt of New York and Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania.
Such leaders would never have abided a demagogic wild-card like Trump, but the parties evolved over the course of the 20th century. As political scientist Joseph Schlesinger argued in the 1980s, the “new American political party” is decisively centered around candidates for office. This includes pretty much every elective office where parties nominate candidates—from president of the United States down to local dog catcher.
Around the candidates revolve a series of actors, all of whom are more or less in service to the needs and interests of the candidates: campaign donors, strategists and consultants, and the national and state party organizations.
Most of the time, these ancillary groups do not act independently of candidates. They work on their behalf, and are often under their direct employ. Citizens United and the rise of the SuperPACs, may change this dynamic in due course—changes in campaign-finance laws often produce changes in party operations—but for now it is interesting to note that many SuperPACs are actually tied to candidates, as a way to get around the restrictive contribution limits imposed by McCain-Feingold.
In sum, the best way to think of the modern party is a series of candidate-centered nodes that generally coordinate with one another.
There is a strong incentive for such coordination ahead of the general election. A Republican candidate for state senate has good reason to work with the Republican candidates for state house, U.S. House, and so on. Because most people vote a straight ticket, a party’s candidates for such offices tend to rise or fall together. Similarly, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in one state has a motivation to coordinate with a Senate candidate in another state, for history shows their fates are linked. This is where state and national party organizations can provide useful services—by facilitating the shared campaign effort.
During primaries, there are incentives for such coordination, but they are not as intense. After all, primaries are intramural battles, where the opposition party is not a threat. So, the need for common effort is not nearly as acute. Still, candidates (including current officeholders not up for reelection in the current cycle) often work together because of ideological similitude, personal or professional friendship, or calculations of self-interest.
Substantial coordination typically does occur during presidential nomination campaigns. The bulk of a party’s major, non-presidential officeholders usually favor one candidate over the others, and the ancillary groups in service to these officeholders assist the preferred candidate. Historically, this has been sufficient to generate victory for the party’s first choice. This is the thesis of the very smart book, The Party Decides, by Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller.
However, there is no formal mandate for officeholders and their surrogates to cohere in this way. They do it because it is in their own interests to do so.
Right now, there is no such interest to unite against Donald Trump.
Currently, the main officeholders of the party have spread their support for presidential candidates very broadly. FiveThirtyEight has done yeoman’s work in keeping track of endorsements within the party, and has found the balance going to Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Chris Christie.
In addition to these formal endorsements, there are probably a lot of implicit endorsements, alliances, or just well-wishes. For instance, Chris Christie was chairman of the Republican Governors Association for the 2013-14 cycle, so he probably has a lot of friends in statehouses, even if they have not explicitly endorsed him. Something like this probably characterizes the relationship between Christie and Iowa Governor Terry Branstad.
Most of the major presidential candidates have a sharp strategic interest in avoiding Trump at the moment. Their manifest fear is that an all-out assault on the real estate tycoon will bolster Ted Cruz in Iowa, which would give the latter momentum coming into New Hampshire—where the remaining candidates have staked significant political capital. Thus, the officeholders who have endorsed these candidates are under implicit obligation to hold back, to mimic the strategy that their candidate has adopted.
Right now, the only candidate with an incentive to attack Trump is Cruz, but he has very few endorsements—17 House members, per FiveThirtyEight, many of whom are backbenchers from the House Freedom Caucus.
In other words, insofar as the race in Iowa boils down to a two-man contest between Cruz and Trump, the vast majority of the party is probably rooting for Trump. Not to win outright, but rather to serve as a stalking horse for their own candidate. The thinking is: Trump humbles Cruz ahead of New Hampshire, thereby boosting the prospects of the others.
There is another point to keep in mind. Cruz is intensely disliked among the most prominent Republican officeholders, a view that is likely shared by the ancillary actors loyal to them. Very few leaders in the Republican party wish to see a Cruz nomination, and would instead prefer one of the other candidates traipsing around New Hampshire, even if they have not endorsed or quietly supported anybody. This creates an additional incentive to keep mum—at least for now.
The crucial moment for Trump and the GOP will come after the field consolidates, especially after New Hampshire. There are a large number of candidates who have placed their biggest bet on New Hampshire: not just Bush, Christie, Kasich, and Rubio, but also Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina. No more than two of those candidates should survive the New Hampshire primary, and the South Carolina primary should winnow the survivors down to just one (although the chance that more candidates successfully run this gauntlet is not negligible).
If the Republican party is going to make a move against Trump, look for it to happen toward the conclusion of this consolidation. As presidential candidates fold their campaigns, their endorsers, allies, strategists, donors, and well-wishers will be free to reposition themselves. It is an easy bet that the vast majority of them will prefer the winner of the Bush-Christie-Kasich-Rubio fight to either Cruz or Trump. This will especially be the case if Rubio wins; as a conservative who has worked constructively within the Senate, his appeal among regular Republicans is probably the broadest.
It is then that we should see the balance of the Republican party make a vigorous case against Trump.
A final point: reasonable Republicans of all ideological stripes should be dissatisfied by the gross inefficiencies of this process—it is needlessly expensive, too focused on trivialities, and forces candidates from the same party to hurl all manner of insults at one another, which only helps the Democrats. There is no rational reason for the way the current rules operate. It is the result of short-sighted decisions and full-blown historical accidents. Our Founding Fathers understood that good rules are necessary for good policy—that is why they drafted the Constitution with such diligence. The same logic holds for how parties select their nominees: if you want good candidates, you need good rules.
Republicans would do well to learn some hard lessons of this process—during which a two-bit, liberal demagogue has dominated the field for seven months—and invest serious efforts in root-and-branch reform of the rules of the Republican nomination process.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and the author of A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption.
