Fewer than a third of Republican members of The POLITICO Caucus — a panel of activists, strategists and operatives in 11 key battleground states — believe Trump’s reshuffling will move the campaign in the right direction. Just as many, 31 percent, say the installation of Breitbart News executive Stephen Bannon as campaign CEO and pollster Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager, represent a turn for the worse.
.. “Changes in top staff this late in the game are always a sign that the campaign and candidate recognize that they are lost. In this case, they have gone from bad to worse. Campaigns do not need ‘CEOs,’ and pollsters are not qualified to manage presidential efforts. He is in a constant cycle of moving from one set of ‘yes men’ to another.”
.. A North Carolina Republican called Bannon “a bomb-thrower” but with “good aim.”
.. “Paul Manafort was trying to run a conventional campaign with an unconventional candidate,” said an Ohio Republican.
Why the GOP Will Never Accept President Hillary Clinton
One of the roots of this argument can be found in the famous list of words that the then-Rep. Newt Gingrich and pollster/communications strategist Frank Luntz offered Republican candidates in the run-up to the 1994 midterms. “These are powerful words,” they said, “words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party. … decay… failure (fail)… collapse(ing)… deeper… crisis…… corrupt…destructive… destroy… sick… pathetic… lie… … betray… traitors…”
.. They paint the opposition not simply as incompetent, but as malevolent. And it is an approach to politics that fits perfectly with the rise of right-wing talk radio
.. Conspiracy theories emerged suggesting that Obama, the Chicago community organizer, had managed to get his liberal, black friends at ACORN (the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to steal the national election. A year after an election that Obama had won by 10 million votes ..
.. “Do you think that Barack Obama legitimately won the presidential election last year, or do you think that ACORN stole it for him?” Among Republicans, only 27 percent say Obama actually won the race, with 52 percent—an outright majority—saying ACORN had stolen it, and 21 percent were undecided.
.. 43 percent of Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim
.. more than half of Republicans do not think Obama was born in the United States.
.. That may help explain why they have nominated a candidate who in 2011 repeatedly and insistently argued that he had unearthed evidence so astounding that “you wouldn’t believe” what his investigators had turned up. We still haven’t seen it.
.. wouldn’t the Republican Party use every device at its command to thwart the Democratic president’s malevolent goals? Threaten to default on the government’s debt, thus risking the collapse of the global financial system? Sure; that’s the way to force Obama to sign the repeal of Obamacare. Refuse to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee with a year left in the president’s term?
.. “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
.. Much like the most militantly revolutionary radicals of the late 1960s and early 70s, Trump’s most ardent supporters are convinced that they are battling an irredeemably corrupt system, which must be combated “by any means necessary.” If the only way they can lose (as Trump said of Pennsylvania) is to be cheated out of their victory, the normal reconciliation between victor and vanquished does not apply.
Why Trumpism Will Outlast Donald Trump
Think he doesn’t represent anything besides himself? Turns out a whopping 65 percent of white Americans say they’d consider supporting a nativist third party.
.. Is the Trump campaign about the man or the message? In other words, will Trumpism survive Trump?
.. I solicited white Americans’ support for Donald Trump, but also for a hypothetical third party dedicated to “stopping mass immigration, providing American jobs to American workers, preserving America’s Christian heritage, and stopping the threat of Islam”—essentially the platform of the UK’s right-wing British National Party, adapted to the United States. How many white Americans do you think would consider voting for this type of protectionist, xenophobic party?
65 percent.
Clearly, Trump’s allure is bigger than Trump himself.
.. those who would consider voting for this third party are more likely to be male, of lower socioeconomic status, without a university education and ideologically conservative—in other words, the Republican Party’s longtime base. They are also more likely to be young (under 40 years old)—so this is not a phenomenon likely to pass quickly.
.. if Republicans, in an attempt to appeal to independent voters and the growing minority population, pivot away from Trump’s rhetoric, they could face internal upheaval, and perhaps even widescale defection to a third party from this 65 percent of whites. On the flip side, if Republicans do allow Trumpism to define the party, they risk ushering in an era of unprecedented Democratic dominance. Current polling predicts a Democratic landslide.
.. From six months of fieldwork in post-industrial cities in the British and American Rust Belts, I observed a remarkable sense of loss. Lost wealth in many cases. But more poignantly, I observed a sense of lost status.
.. For Democrats, their challenge is to draw white working class voters into their diverse coalition by convincing them that challenges in the household and workplace are general working class challenges that have very little to do with being white.
Trump and the Republican Dilemma
Two weeks of the candidate’s invective inspired a number of G.O.P. officials to retract their support for his campaign. But where will they go?