The GOP machine welded together from working class and underclass conservatives, the evangelicals, and the top 10% of income earners seems (on the national level) to be in some difficulty. They seem to have gotten themselves into a box with Trump but the local and regional GOP strength on the ground should never be under-estimated even if their POTUS contenders are questionable.
Is the fracturing at the national level going to hold serious consequences for the party even at the regional and local level? If the GOP’s purported ideological and intellectual leaders are at odds with the majority of the base who and what defines the modern GOP?
My perception is that the power-money axis component of the GOP has been grooming and manipulating the GOP working class and evangelical base for a long time now as long as their agenda was being implemented. Both these constituencies have finally realized they have been played and are rebelling. The working class more overtly than the evangelicals.
Well, imagine you are a socially conservative white working-class voter in a rural area of a Red state. The GOP predominates by default in local and state government, and in the last couple of years the state legislature has done some things you approve, like cracking down on abortion, and others you might have endorsed in principle to start with but now can see all too clearly have not worked out well, like Brownback’s fiscal policies in Kansas. This year you might be shouting for Trump, thinking he’s going to change the whole system in some undefined but yuuuuge way – a hope doomed to disappointment even if Trump wins, which he won’t. In any case – how are you going to vote for Congress and state offices in the 2018 midterms, if D and R are the only choices? For the Democrats? That’s about as likely as significant numbers of blacks and Latinos voting Pub. Too much cultural baggage prevents it. You might be discontented with the GOP, but there are limits to what you’ll do about it.
How the election turns out makes a huge difference. More the congress than the executive. Any way it comes out a lot of GOP congressmen are going to face competition in primaries two years out.
The likely outcome is a bitter defeat for Trump and the GOP congress and the long knives will come out. The big C Conservatives will try to re-establish their dominance in the party and if that fails they could easily form a new party to weaken the GOP so they can take over again.