We’ll have to wait another couple of months to learn the results of the 2016 elections, but Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review Online is already looking ahead to the Republican Party’s long-term future.
Most people who work in Republican politics want Donald Trump to win but think he will lose. They hope that afterward the party will unify in opposition to President Hillary Clinton. They are, however, underestimating the divisions in their party that Trump’s campaign has revealed.
From the standpoint of Republican unity, the worst possible outcome of the November election would be a narrow defeat for Trump. The nominee’s Republican supporters would be enraged at those Republicans who balked at Trump, and the party would be consumed by recriminations.
A larger defeat would be harder to pin on “Never Trump” Republicans. If Trump underperforms among independents as well as Republicans; if he runs behind most Republican Senate candidates, in a reversal of the pattern of the last two presidential elections; if he gets a lower percentage of the vote than Romney, even though Romney was running against an incumbent and a politician better liked than Hillary Clinton: The more such results, the more those Republicans who warned that Trump would be a disastrous candidate will be proven right, and be seen to be proven right. …
… But even a decisive result would not clarify other live debates within the party. The bulk of Republican politicians, activists, and commentators are not Trump loyalists, but they are themselves split between “establishment” and “tea party” factions. Republicans aligned with the first group generally blame the second for Trump’s rise: The tea partiers kept delegitimizing Republican officeholders as sell-outs and thereby, the argument goes, made Republican voters more open to a demagogic outsider. The anti-Trump tea partiers make a mirror-image argument: The establishment set up Trump by repeatedly selling out and thereby disgusting Republican voters to the point that they turned to a demagogic outsider.
Neither theory is a close fit to the available facts. Exit polls suggest that primary voters who felt betrayed by Republican politicians did not back Trump at greater rates than other voters did. Voters who consider themselves “very conservative” — the voters one would expect to be most disappointed in Republicans for not repealing Obamacare — were less likely than other voters to support Trump. That’s not surprising when you consider that Trump sounded more favorable toward government involvement in health care than did any of the other candidates, but it runs counter to both the establishment and the tea-party theories.
