It looks like we might be seeing the cracks starting to widen, with people lining up on each side.
Lindsey Graham says he won’t vote for Trump (nor Clinton - big surprise)
Paul Ryan is not supporting Trump.
Romney, McCain, Bush - not outright saying it, but they’re not attending the convention, and have not gone on record supporting Trump.
Other Senators like Ben Sasse are outspoken in not supporting Trump.
On the other hand:
Chris Christie - on the Trump bandwagon
Mitch McConnell has outright said he will support Trump
Other Republicans are certainly on board.
Some folks predicted a big groundswell of people moving to support Trump, as is usually the case with Republican leaders (circle the wagons, support your leader no matter what). This does not seem to have happened - at least not yet.
So… Are we seeing the beginning of a big split? Or will time heal all wounds, and in the next few weeks we’ll see the Republican leaders compromise, and come together to support their presumptive nominee with open arms and wallets?
The schism is between the voters and the party. The GOP has been a coalition party for a long time, but mainly paying lip service to every group except the Conservatives. The Conservatives have been running a protection racket, any Republicans who wander off the reservation into Liberal concepts like increasing minimum wage would be rapidly attacked in the media and money would be directed to primary opponents. The message was loud and clear to the politicians and party hierarchy. The voters who supported them received nothing in return. Donald Trump has won the Republican Nomination for president this year while ignoring the Conservative Attacks. The Stop Trump movement was spearheaded by Conservative media, and largely ignored by the voters. Trump has taken at least 2 opposing viewpoints on every issue, one of them usually considered Liberal by the Conservatives, and they have attacked him for it, and he has ignored them and won anyway. It is that group which is now distancing themselves from the Republican Party. They don’t want to play the game if they don’t get their way, and Trump has just cut the heart out of the threat they’ve maintained to keep getting their way.
What happens next depends on the House and Senate elections. If the Republicans lose significantly there then it will be easy to blame Trump and get right back in bed with the Conservative faction. If the Republicans hold on in congress, and definitely if Trump wins, they will not regain the power within the Republican party they have enjoyed in the past 35 years for a very long time, if ever.
I"m more interested in what is going to happen PRIOR to the elections. In the past, the party has rallied around the nominee, with or without great enthusiasm, but they HAVE rallied around, more or less unanimously.
This year, I think we may not see that happen.
And I don’t think the voters are as uniform a bloc as you are painting either. You certainly do have 40% of the Republican primary voters who think that it’s great to have a leader who openly embraces their opinion that inferior Mexicans are stealing our jobs, that the National Enquirer publishes interesting factual articles and that all we need is a Strong Leader who will just tell those corporations to hire more Americans… or else. However that leaves 60% of the Republican primary voters who are thinking “what the hell just happened?”. I think there is an impending schism among the Republican VOTERS as well.
With two dominant parties, schism means loss of power. That’s strong motivation for keeping the party together despite fundamental differences. Wouldn’t we better off if we had half dozen or so strong parties, with each one capturing Congressional seats? Presidential candidates would then have to appeal to a coalition of parties to win an election. Now we seem to be balanced on a knife point. When the wind blows left, we get one kind of country, and when it blows right, a completely different one. No matter what, we end up with large blocs of people feeling disaffected and ignored. Why is the equilibrium for the U.S. always two parties? That’s not true everywhere.
I have to agree. Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine 4 parties, each with a full slate of candidates for senate, house and presidency. One is headed by Cruz. One is headed by Kasich. The third by Clinton and the fourth by Sanders. Imagine what the country would be like…
Winner take all, first past the post voting. If we had instant runoff, proportional representation, or almost any other voting system, we’d get several viable parties just like democracies in Europe.
I don’t think we disagree. I mentioned that the party is a coalition, religious conservatives, the Big C Conservatives, traditionalists, 2nd amendment folks, and racists among others. Across that group, and plenty of left leaning voters also, is the dissatisfaction with the traditional political process, and they’re aiming their discontent at the parties right now. Unless there’s a huge GOP sweep in November I think the internecine battle within the party starts there.
Although some moderate Republicans will reject both of these persons, many many more will vote for Hillary, both to keep Trump out and because they will accept that her basic positions are the same as their own.
Plus the more elderly will have not unfond memories of the Clinton Boom — together with welfare slashing and putting ‘feral thugs’ in prison, along with the War on Crack. Bruce Bartlett, Reagan appointee is voting for Trump in order to destroy the Party to save it from it’s conservative tendencies = “I think that Trump is a symptom of a disease of rampant stupidity, pandering to morons and bigots and racists and all the sort of stuff that defines today’s Republican coalition. And I just think it’s awful.”
But he agrees Hillary will appear to other Republicans as president. " …it may be that Hillary can make inroads among Republicans. I don’t know. There may be a goodly number of Republicans who moved from being solidly Republican to being Republican-leaning independents who have been continuing to vote Republican even as their loyalty to the party has diminished. This might be enough to push them over and say “I give the fuck up, these people are hopeless, I’m just going to become a Democrat, I’m going to vote for Hillary.”"
It’s their discontent that is key. Do Trump voters have reasonable expectations? Boehner saw the writing on the wall and decided they did not. There are simply not enough conservative hardliners to win AND not concede on something. The GOP dug their own grave when they decided conceding on anything was treasonous. When they don’t get what they want the public that believed they could do it felt betrayed and so a new leader without Washington connections seems like the only answer. And he won’t get it either, even if he is elected. The gerrymandering, voter ID laws and jingosim won’t make a damn bit of difference.
It’s all our country so it sucks for everyone, but I just feel sorry for them.
When Obama was elected, a certain segment of the Republicans went bat-shit crazy. Their hyperbole about Obama was off the charts. Birtherism. Predictions of dire economic consequences. Cats sleeping with dogs.
Obama was not simply wrong-headed. Obama did not simply have bad policies.
Obama was EVIL PERSONIFIED. He was literally… The Antichrist.
And what do you do with that? Do you compromise? Do you sit down with the Antichrist to see if you can hammer out a deal. No you do not. You cannot compromise with pure evil.
This is where we’ve come to. The final, ultimate partisanship, where the other side is evil and can NEVER be worked with.
Then the presidency would be decided by HR from the three candidates with the highest electoral vote totals, with each state having one vote. So the presidency would be decided by the flyover states and it is virtually certain they would pick Cruz. I cannot imagine a worse electoral system.
There is good that comes out of this very situation.
At least you can say: “We Did This To Ourselves. No-one else is to blame: the whole thing is the Will of the People. And we will own it.”
No foreign master forced this on you: no USSR imposed Trump as American Soviet Vassal; no nazis urged Hillary as American Reichsgauleiter. Gaddafi’s Ghost has not taken his revenge. You are free and you can abide by your mistakes, with or without a President Trump or Clinton.
it is no a “great GOP schism.” more than Goldwater’s loss leading to Nixon’s decisive electoral college victory 4 years later. Its that way in part because of the way money and politics work in this country. A Corporate GOP and a Populist GOP could not survive on their own.
The headline may be a tad on the hyperbole side, but they get to the point in the article. I don’t think we’ve seen the like of this before from either party, at least in the past 100 years…