There are Republican traditionalists rooting for Trump over Cruz, and the thinking of some goes like this:
.. He’ll embarrass the party and roil the country but maybe not cost Republicans key congressional races. Besides which, he scrambles all rules and all precedents so thoroughly that you never know. Victory isn’tunthinkable, and better a Republican who’s allergic to caution, oblivious to actual information and altogether dangerous than a Democrat who’ll dole out all the plum administration jobs to her own party.
.. “Cruz is a disaster for the party,” one of them told me. “Trump is a disaster for the country.”
.. “If Cruz is the nominee, we get wiped out,” he added, with a resigned voice. “And we rebuild.” The party needs that anyway.
.. In fact, a few Republican traditionalists have insisted to me that a Cruz nomination and subsequent defeat would have a long-term upside. It would put to rest the stubborn argument, promoted by Cruz and others on the party’s far right, that the G.O.P. has lost presidential elections over recent decades because nominees like Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney weren’t conservative enough.
Donald Trump, a Frightening Window Into the American Present
The default presumption about populism holds that its appeal peaks in times of economic crisis, and this is partly true, as suggested by the populist upsurge of the eighteen-nineties, when disgruntled farmers transformed their anger at banks seizing their land into the populist People’s Party, and the insurgent campaign of Ross Perot, a century later. But, in America, populism is driven not solely by distress at economic malaise but also by fears inspired by racial progress—and the belief that these two things are synonymous.
.. When the Democratic Party—motivated in part by Wallace’s left-flank candidacy and partly by the Great Migration, which had delivered millions of Republican-leaning African-Americans to Democratic strongholds in the North—adopted a strong civil-rights plank at its convention, Southern segregationists bolted and formed the States’ Rights (Dixiecrat) Party.
.. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s frequent conflicts with the Southern wing of his party hinged not on the creation of a welfare state but on segregationist demands that only one race be the beneficiary of it.
.. Last summer, large numbers of Sanders supporters took offense at the serial disruption of his campaign events by Black Lives Matter protesters. In retrospect, they appear to have done Sanders a favor. To the extent that his brand of populism is viable, it is dependent on the kind of cross-racial appeal to common economic despair that Henry Wallace understood nearly seventy years ago. In forcing his campaign to court African-Americans earlier and more aggressively than it otherwise would have, Black Lives Matter facilitated Sanders’s upset of Clinton in Michigan—a state where he garnered nearly a third of black votes. The civil-rights movement in which Sanders was a proud participant was itself a response to the identity populism of Southern whites.
.. George Wallace .. blamed his own (relative) racial leniency for his loss in Alabama’s 1958 Democratic gubernatorial primary and reportedly told an aide that he would “never be outniggered again.”
.. Trump’s brand of populism is cemented in the ideal that he will not be out-Muslimed, out-Latinoed, or out-baited regarding any other signpost of American change. And it’s selling. They are all Dixiecrats now.
How to Steal a Nomination From Donald Trump
In many states, primaries and caucuses are just the most public face-off in a multi-step process to select the individual delegates who will choose the party’s nominee. Only a small share of the 2,472 total convention delegates are free to pick the candidate of their choice, regardless of the election’s outcome, on the first ballot, while about three-quarters of them are gradually freed to do so on subsequent votes. That means there is a small pool of so-called unbound delegates who are pure free agents, but a much larger number who can be recruited throughout the spring as double agents—delegates who arrive in Cleveland pledged to Trump, all the while working in cahoots with one of his opponents and confessing their true allegiances once it is safe to do so.
.. “Forty-four states give the delegation-selection authority to a state convention or state executive committee, with no requirement that the candidate have a say in choosing delegates,”
.. During the nominating season, this often means a governor can freely stack an at-large slate with cronies, expecting a rubber-stamp from a subservient party committee. In Iowa, where Governor Terry Branstad in 2014 helped to reclaim the state party after an unexpected takeover from supporters of Ron Paul, Republican officials actively discourage their rank-and-file from even understanding how the state’s 18 at-large delegates will be selected.
.. but Trump is powerless to fill that slate with his own people. To serve as a national delegate from South Carolina, one has to have been a delegate to the 2015 state convention—held more than a month before Trump announced his candidacy
.. Bush ultimately won the popular vote handily in Pennsylvania, even though candidates loyal to Reagan seized 50 of the state’s then-77 delegate slots ..
.. “If there is to be a contested or brokered or open convention—whatever you want to call it—Pennsylvania will be at the epicenter because of that huge share of unbound delegates,”
.. There is nothing in the RNC’s rules that prohibits delegates from cutting a deal for their votes, and lawyers say it is unlikely that federal anti-corruption laws would apply to convention horse-trading. (It is not clear that even explicitly selling one’s vote for cash would be illegal.)
.. Trump’s slate in Illinois contains “a food service manager from a juvenile detention center, a daycare worker from a Christian School, an unemployed paralegal, a grocery store warehouse manager, one brave advocate for urban chicken farming, a dog breeder, and a guy who runs a bait shop.” Could some of them be tempted to flip their votes if a generous campaign, super-PAC, or individual donor picked up the costs of their week in Cleveland?
.. Thus far, Priebus has been docile toward Trump, who early on made being treated equitably by the national party a precondition for promising not to run as an independent in the general election. But if Trump doesn’t finish with a clear majority of delegates, Priebus will face immense pressure from party officials and donors to undermine him.
.. Investigators deployed by an opponent’s campaign or super-PAC can seek out cases of “disorganization and confusion”—as Romney lawyers described it when they successfully challenged the results of a 2012 Maine convention taken over by Paul supporters—to knock out Trump slates nationwide.
.. Reports of caucus-site irregularities in Nevada—ballot shortages, unreliable check-in procedures, supposedly neutral election officials wearing Trump garb in violation of party rules—were quickly forgotten when Trump carried the state by a convincing margin of more than 20 points. But anti-Trump forces may now be eager to revisit them.
.. Before the official festivities start in Cleveland, the committee would have to rewrite Rule 40 for anyone other than Trump or Cruz to even be considered by delegates.
.. In 2012, chairman John Boehner decided to hold a voice vote instead of a roll call on pro-Romney rule changes; even though the pro-Paul supporters were clearly the loudest, Boehner reflexively ruled in Romney’s favor.
..Trump supporters within the arena who see the vise closing on his chances to be nominated could respond in rage. Trump himself will likely be egging on an insurrection, from within the hall and amplified by his running commentary on Twitter and in broadcast interviews.
Trump Is No Accident
You can see the continuing power of the orthodoxy in the way all of the surviving contenders for the Republican nomination, Mr. Trump included, have dutifully proposed huge tax cuts for the wealthy, even though a large majority of voters, including many Republicans, want to see taxes on the rich increased instead.
.. But demagogy and appeals to tribalism help more. Racial dog whistles and suggestions that Democrats are un-American if not active traitors aren’t things that happen now and then, they’re an integral part of Republican political strategy.
.. For the underlying assumption behind the establishment strategy was that voters could be fooled again and again: persuaded to vote Republican out of rage against Those People, then ignored after the election while the party pursued its true, plutocrat-friendly priorities. Now comes Mr. Trump, turning the dog whistles into fully audible shouting, and telling the base that it can have the bait without the switch. And the establishment is being destroyed by the monster it created.