Republicans aren’t waiting until the convention to duke it out. They are starting to fight now.
When the Washington Examiner asked well-placed Republicans in December why there wasn’t a rush of donors funding opposition to Donald Trump, there were two answers. “Everybody seems to be banking on him fizzling out on his own,” one operative said. Another concurred, “I have not seen much of an appetite from donors for taking out Trump,” saying the consensus was that he was a problem that would take care of itself in due course.
Others complained that before Iowa, anti-Trump activism could benefit only Sen. Ted Cruz, who much of the establishment found at least as unpalatable. Back then there was still hope that Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush would rise, at which point the party’s governing class would engage.
Fast forward to five months later. We now have evidence that sustained attacks on Trump’s business record, past liberal positions, temperament and overall suitability for the presidency can drive up his negatives. He may finally be “fizzling out on his own” after a series of well-publicized gaffes.
But instead of the collapse coming as the early states were beginning to vote, Trump is at least temporarily showing signs of unraveling after the billionaire cleared 700 delegates and became the only candidate with a mathematically plausible path to the nomination before the July convention. All of the establishment favorites are gone, except for John Kasich, who has won only his home state of Ohio. Anti-Trump activism now so clearly benefits Cruz that even 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney says that a vote for any other candidate, including Kasich, is a vote for Trump.
Trump hasn’t led Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton in a general election poll since February. He now usually loses to her by double digits and his share of the national vote is stuck between 36 percent and 41 percent, a low end that’s below Barry Goldwater’s 1964 showing and a high end that matches Walter Mondale’s in the 49-state blowout of 1984.
The GOP front-runner has become deeply unpopular with women and younger voters. The Democrats are already hoping to replicate the high minority and millennial turnout they enjoyed in 2008 by replacing enthusiasm for Barack Obama with fear of Trump.
While Cruz hasn’t been mathematically eliminated from winning the 1,237 delegates required to secure the nomination through the remaining primaries and caucuses, Trump probably can be stopped only through a contested convention that inevitably will make a significant slice of the Republican primary electorate upset. All three surviving candidates have walked back their pledge to support the nominee.
The recriminations — precriminations? — have already begun. “In the first term, Republicans and conservatives fought Barack Obama,” argued the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger. “In the second term, they decided it made more sense to fight each other.”
Some Tea Party conservatives blamed other factions of the GOP for Trump’s rise. “Since the 2010 election, leaders of the status quo camp have controlled the Republican Party and have sought to define the art of the possible for conservative policy victories,” wrote Heritage Action CEO Michael Needham. “As such, the party has spent virtually no time addressing the themes animating Trump’s candidacy.”
Needham blamed conservative elites such as the Wall Street Journal page who “placed its trust in Republican congressional leaders and dutifully reproduced their arguments.”
New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat accused Republican leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, of “taking a ‘first, change nothing; second, do nothing’ approach to the challenge of Trumpism, and essentially lying still and hoping the danger would pass over.”
With Trump, nothing passes over.
