Several high-profile conservative voices in the press are calling on the GOP to change its primary rules to prevent future party outsiders from achieving Donald Trump’s kind of success.
In a column published Tuesday night, the Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker offered several alternatives to the GOP’s current primary system, which is largely operated by states counting popular votes.
“After Trump, the GOP may need a better voting system,” she wrote. “Longtime voters might find such suggestions jarring, but a Trump nomination could be a rule-changer … Had an approval system been in place, it’s conceivable that John Kasich could be accepting the nomination in July.”
George Will, also of the Post, called for a similar rule-change, and said the goal should be blocking access to any “freebooting candidates.”
“Open primaries are not unconstitutional, but they are discordant with a First Amendment value — the freedom of the individual to associate with like-minded persons in political parties to advance a particular political doctrine,” wrote Will in April.
“[A]ny future reform must be evaluated in terms of how it would facilitate or impede future Trumps. Measures to prevent candidacies like his could be his contribution — inadvertent, of course — to the public good.”
Trump’s unexpected rise to becoming the presumptive GOP nominee — he has changed his party affiliation five times since the late 1980s — has left many of the party’s veterans in both politics and the media feeling outcast. He has often bucked traditional conservative orthodoxy and publicly insulted several high-profile conservative writers, like Will and Charles Krauthammer.
Their alienation has left many in the conservative media calling on GOP voters to abandon their presumptive nominee or for the Republican National Committee to somehow deny Trump the nomination.
“[T]here is no point in even having a party apparatus, no point in all those chairmen and state conventions and delegate rosters, if they cannot be mobilized to prevent 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate from imposing a Trump nomination on the party,” wrote New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in March.
“But the party’s convention rules, in all their anachronistic, undemocratic and highly negotiable intricacy, are also a line of defense, also a hurdle, also a place where a man unfit for office can be turned aside,” he said. “So in Cleveland this summer, the men and women of the Republican Party may face a straightforward choice: betray the large minority of Republicans who cast their votes for Trump, or betray their obligations to their country.”
