Any effort to reform the Republican nomination process is going to have to go through the Republican National Committee, and, by extension, the state parties whose members comprise it.
This is a big problem.
The RNC is just not well-designed to reflect the interests of the whole party. Each state and territory gets three members, regardless of population or propensity of its voters to vote the Republican ticket. This is the same design as the Congress under the Articles of Confederation, and we all know how well that turned out.
But recent comments from many RNC members and state party officials have been especially disturbing, because they fly in the face of what everybody else, it seems, has realized: that the Trump nomination is a disaster, as the New York Times reported this week.
“Several of the Republican Party’s most generous donors called on the Republican National Committee on Thursday to disavow Donald J. Trump, saying that allegations by multiple women that Mr. Trump had groped or made inappropriate sexual advances toward them threatened to inflict lasting damage on the party’s image,” the paper wrote.
But the Times noted that Reince Priebus, the chairman of the RNC, has remained quiet. Why?
“Mr. Priebus is considering running in January for another term as chairman,” the story reads, and many RNC members are staunchly, even stubbornly, still behind Trump:
This is astonishingly narrow-minded. Trump is clearly going to lose, so cutting ties with him at this point is really about redirecting resources to down-ballot candidates. For members of the RNC to describe down-ballot triage as cowardly is, in a word, nuts.
Some members of the RNC have taken things further, defending Trump by attacking candidates in their own state.
Consider Robert Graham—the chairman of the Arizona Republican party. This is a state where John McCain is locked in a reelection battle against Ann Kirkpatrick. McCain was one of several Republicans to denounce Trump recently, which prompted a denunciation from Graham. In a statement, he did not mention McCain by name, but said, “It is hard to understand why some are willing to surrender the principles and values we espouse as conservatives well-knowing that Hillary Clinton, if President, will systematically condemn our freedoms.”
In an interview with a local Phoenix station, Graham came even closer to singling out McCain: “This guy (Trump) is not a 30-year career politician,” he said. (FYI: McCain has been in the Senate for 30 years.)
It gets worse. Diana Orrock is the RNC committeewoman for Nevada, and yesterday she tweeted a link to TraitorsToTrump.com. She wrote, “Here’s a list of the GOPe rats that have jumped ship & abandoned @realDonaldTrump. Vote them out!”
Included on that list is none other than Joe Heck, who is running to win a Senate seat in Nevada.
These are the people who will sanction any reform of the presidential nomination process. A large number seem to think the real problem with the GOP is those of us who see Trump as the problem.
That does not bode well for the prospects of reform.
