Which I might remind you happened the instant he clinched the nomination.
That doesn’t address the issue of motive. Trump wants to see himself elected. But the Republican party wants to see a Republican president elected. If they feel a different candidate has a better chance of winning than Trump does, they would rather have that other candidate.
The motive is that they do not admit failure or loss: they double down.
Assessing things as “maybe this isn’t the best idea” also implies that they have a firm grasp on reality and know how to interpret statistics but evidence in support of either of those things in the past decade-plus is scant.
Yes, in 2016 and 2020. Trump’s record of winning general elections after getting nominated in 50%.
Let’s say some other candidate has a 70% chance of winning if he is the Republican nominee. The Republicans would rather see that candidate as their nominee.
The Republicans have been “reforming” general elections for at least a couple of decades now. Any reason to think they can’t do the same with primary elections? The fact that Republicans are willing to manipulate elections is the topic of this thread after all.
How would they accomplish that? If they wanted to have superdelegates like the DNC has, they missed their chance last year, when they didn’t pass any reforms at the convention and they adopted a single-page platform consisting of “We believe in whatever Dear Leader tells us to believe.”
There’s a difference between being immoral and being stupid. The leaders of the Republican party aren’t idiots. They are aware they lost the 2020 presidential election. They will not be looking to repeat that mistake.
I’ll point to the OP:
A lot of people here accept the idea that the Republicans are capable to rigging an election to help Donald Trump win. So why is it so hard to believe the Republicans can use those same means to rig an election to help somebody other than Donald Trump win? Historically, it’s easier to rig a primary election than a general election.
And who’s going to be the consensus candidate that isn’t Loser Donald? That’s the same thing that flummoxed the QOP in 2016: the wonks didn’t want Donald to be the nominee, but none of the other candidates had the ability to consolidate the anti-Donald faction around them.
It’s not 2016. The Republican party leaders have now seen that Trump as President was a liability that cost them an election they could have won (the last three presidents before Trump all got re-elected to a second term). There is no other Republican who will drive millions of people to the polls to vote against him the way Trump will.
Which one would the Republicans like best? I don’t know. I’m just saying which one they like the least.
Then Donald will win, because there is no other Republican who will drive millions of people to vote for him the way he will.
Sure, but enough don’t that he’d still be able to crash the election for the party, and that’s exactly the sort of tantrum Trump would throw.
Trump’s one real skill is a nearly supernatural ability to get idiots to believe his stupid bullshit.
Unfortunately, that’s also the one skill that really helps you win elections.
I disagree with your analysis that some other Republican could have a 70% chance of winning. The reason Republicans are sticking with Trump is because they know his style of running for office is their only chance of victory, short of blowing up the party platform and reemerging as a new party. Trump, as noted above, motivated tens of millions of people who previously were non-voters to come out to the polls. When Trump is gone, those voters will go back to their couches. They aren’t going to come out to vote for Mitt Romney, Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, or Ron Desantis. And they definitely aren’t going to come out and vote for Senator R or Represntative R - old school style Republican who now pretends Trump never existed.
There is no other Republican who will drive millions of people to the polls to vote R the way Trump did. Republicans can manipulate the first part of the equation (people voting against Trump) by their various voter suppression methods that they are currently engaging in. The only way they can manipulate the second half of the equation is by running Trump. That is their only option.
I don’t think it’s clear at all that this is the case. Yes, Trump needs Republicans. But most Republicans are behaving as if they desperately need Trump.
Quite frankly I think most politicians in the Republican party would be happy for Trump to drop off the map. But nobody’s going to do it because the first one to knife Trump in the back will find 200 knives in their own back. I suspect many are just hoping that his unhealthy habits catch up with him before the 2024 primaries.
I think that’s a safe bet 
.
Ugh. Typo fixed.
But you know, some people have a theory that Trump can never die. After watching him survive COVID in spite of some very large risk factors, I’m inclined to believe it.
Or if he does run, and the Democrats still engage in their own internecine bloodbath.
In order to disenfranchise Trump primary voters, they’d have to disenfranchise Republican general election voters.
The latter would definitely be worse. IMHO the best case scenario, assuming things are still going poorly in 2024, would be for Biden and Harris to both decide to not run, and the primary being mostly positive campaigns, hopefully featuring Governor Stacey Abrams.
I don’t want to seem like I’m being argumentative, @Little_Nemo, but when you say that if the “Republican Party decides” or the “Republican Leadership decides” that they’re better off without Trump, who are you speaking about? Republican voters overwhelmingly back Trump, so you’re already posting a move that would be in opposition to the desires of most members of the Party. The local and state party officials who actually organize and conduct primary elections are elected by these voters and reflect their preferences. The RNC is stacked with Trump loyalists. You seem to be assuming the existence of a powerful, behind-the-scenes faction in the Party that wants to depose Trump and has means to carry it out. No such faction exists.
The difference between rigging the general election for Republicans and rigging the primary election to defeat Trump is that the former is something that Republican voters strongly favor and they’re doing it right out there in the open. Secretly “rigging” a primary to defeat Trump would be impossible to pull off and the attempt would enrage primary voters.