Mr. Trump could not have asked for much more. If you were ranking Republicans in terms of their chances to defeat Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz, you would probably list Mr. Rubio, Mr. Bush and Mr. Kasich. Yet they appear likeliest to finish tonight in exactly the opposite order — maximizing the likelihood that all three stay in the race.
The presence of so many viable, mainstream Republican candidates poses a huge challenge to the party’s establishment. Most obviously, the three have split mainstream voters and donors, and will continue to do so. But it is even worse: They have used their donors’ money to viciously attack one another, instead of Mr. Trump.
.. A continued split among the mainstream candidates would not only increase the possibility that Trump wins the nomination, but also the prospect that no candidate will amass a majority of delegates before the convention.
What About Ted Cruz?
One of the most conservative members of the Senate, Cruz would test the argument made by leaders of the hard right that Republicans have lost four of the last six presidential elections because their candidates — George H. W. Bush of 1992, Robert Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney — were insufficiently conservative.
.. Cruz’s nomination would turn the general election in November into an almost perfect test of the viability of a pure conservative.
.. He subscribes to the belief that life begins at fertilization. This position would not only criminalize abortions in the case of rape and incest but would prohibit the use of contraceptive methods that are understood to prevent the uterine implantation of a fertilized egg like the intrauterine device and the morning-after pill.
.. What is really stunning to a longtime observer of Washington is the number of reputable people who have brutally criticized Cruz on the record. The New Republic recently published an extraordinary collection of anti-Cruz quotes that runs from the left through the center to the right. His colleagues are on record as hating him — hate may be too mild a description. First and foremost, he has angered virtually everyone he works with, especially his fellow Republican senators.
.. John Feehery, president of Quinn Gillespie Communications, and a former top Republican staffer on Capitol Hill, was more outspoken:
Cruz is an army of one, alienating anybody who is in his path. He advocates losing strategies purely to further his own career at the expense of the party.
.. Cruz, more than any of the other Republican presidential candidates, including Trump, is ideally suited to mobilize every Democratic constituency, including single women, minorities, young voters and socially liberal professionals
.. Married white Christians have steadily dropped from 80 percent of voters in the late 1950s to fewer than 40 percent now. In 1940, 82 percent of adults were members of the white working class; now that number is well below 30 percent.
.. if Cruz were nominated, party leaders would “sit down and try to help Cruz run a better campaign, but he may not listen.” In contrast, “You can coach Donald,” Black said.
The Republican Mess
But it must be acknowledged that if you were scripting a path to the nomination for a populist candidate who only has a third of the party in his corner, this is almost exactly the script that you would write — with a strong but still-limited hard-right candidate like Cruz, and then a logjam of weak and deluded mainstream politicians competing deep into the primary season for the rest of the vote.
.. Or does the idea that it’s safer to let Trump “rent” the party than to cede it to Cruz actually have purchase outside of a few donors and consultants?
.. What we should be rooting for — what I’ve tried to hope for — is a candidate who can channel, à la Richard Nixon with George Wallace, the legitimate grievances of the Trumpistas while stiff-arming his rank, un-republican fascismo.
.. Or should we begin to root for Donald Trump — not as a candidate actually to champion, now or in the fall, but as an agent of divine retribution for a corrupt and stumbling party, a pillaging-and-torching Babylonian invasion of which it must be said: The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
Democracy Won in New Hampshire
In her concession speech, Hillary Clinton boasted of her small donors. More than 70 percent had given less than $100, she claimed: “I know that doesn’t fit with the narrative.” As Ken Vogel of Politico immediately tweeted, the claim also distorts the facts. Clinton may have a lot of donors, but the bulk of the value of her donations—85 percent—has come from the biggest givers. And her family’s personal wealth, and its foundation’s assets, can also be seen as built on the largesse of banks, corporations, and foreign governments. .. along with the coy secretiveness that produced an evasive promise to “look into” the release of speech transcripts contractually owned by Hillary Clinton herself, and that led her to store sensitive public email on a privately owned server... Republican presidential contests have operated as a policy cartel. Concerns that animate actual Republican voters—declining middle-class wages, immigration, retirement security—have been tacitly ruled out of bounds. Concerns that excite Republican donors—tax cuts, entitlement reforms—have been more-or-less unanimously accepted by all plausible candidates. Candidates competed on their life stories, on their networks of friends, and on their degree of religious commitment—but none who aspired to run a national campaign deviated much from the economic platform of the Wall Street Journal and the Club for Growth.