it fell to Reince Priebus to formally surrender on behalf of a shellshocked party Establishment. This being 2016 and the Age of Trump, Priebus, the long-serving chairman of the Republican National Committee, did so in a tweet: “@realDonaldTrump will be presumtive [sic] @GOP nominee, we all need to unite and focus on defeating @HillaryClinton #NeverClinton.”
.. In the weeks before Trump prevailed, the political media made a sport of trying to get Priebus to concede that his party was falling to pieces, while Priebus insisted against all evidence that things were going great. Commentators on both the left and right likened him to “Baghdad Bob,” ..
.. And his vision of the GOP’s future is in many ways the diametrical opposite of what Priebus and the party Establishment had imagined. Many politicians, Trump told me, had privately confessed to being amazed that his policies, and his lacerating criticism of party leaders, had proved such potent electoral medicine.
.. In 2007 he became the youngest-ever chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, and part of a triumvirate with Paul Ryan and Scott Walker that led the GOP takeover of Wisconsin in 2010.
.. control debates to shield candidates from what Republicans believed was hostile questioning by liberal moderators trying to embarrass presidential hopefuls. While the report was unblinking about the need to win more support from women, minorities, and young people, it betrayed no hint that Republican policies beyond immigration reform might need adjusting to attract them. Emphasis fell instead on such things as hiring a more ethnically diverse staff (“The RNC must hire [Asian Pacific Islander] communications directors and political directors for key states”) and injecting a dash of Hollywood glamour to impress fickle millennials (“Establish an RNC Celebrity Task Force of personalities in the entertainment industry … to attract younger voters”).
.. “After Romney’s loss, every major donor was just distraught and ready to bail, convinced we could never win a national election. So the autopsy was absolutely necessary from a donor maintenance standpoint. But it was public relations, nothing more. Reince never had the power to implement it.”
.. “I told him, ‘Listen, you’ve had four unbelievable years,’ ” says Georgia’s Evans. “ ‘If you stop now, you’re gonna be regarded as one of the most successful party chairmen in history. If you run [for another term], you’re going to be judged by one presidential election.’ He said, ‘You’re right.’ But he really thought we had in place all the pieces to dominate the election cycle.”
.. But then came Trump, a walking exaggeration of every negative attribute the autopsy had warned against.
.. “Reince is not the general,” says Murphy, the Republican strategist. “He’s stuck in the job of being the supply clerk to a losing presidential army.”
.. I asked Trump what he thought the GOP would look like in five years. “Love the question,” he replied. “Five, 10 years from now—different party. You’re going to have a worker’s party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years, that are angry. What I want to do, I think cutting Social Security is a big mistake for the Republican Party. And I know it’s a big part of the budget. Cutting it the wrong way is a big mistake, and even cutting it [at all].”
.. He’s the subject of a steady stream of articles that describe how Republicans are working to “shape” and “guide” his views—meaning block his ideas. On May 9, Priebus took the unusual liberty of dictating terms to Trump by telling a conservative radio host that Trump wouldn’t touch the platform, and furthermore ought to “tell people that you don’t want to rewrite—you like, you appreciate, and agree with the platform the way it is.”
.. A moment later, Scavino hustled in and handed him a folder, from which he drew, from beneath printouts of the Drudge Report, a bright-red map of the U.S. showing how he dominates Google search ratings in all 50 states. His point was that he has the power to convey any message he likes: “I have the loudspeaker.”
.. To spend $2 billion or $1 billion, I was saying to my people the other day, I said, ‘Explain it to me. I just won against 17 people, all governors and senators who are very successful people. I just won, and I spent $45 million. That was over a period of a year.’ ” Did he really think he would raise $1 billion? “No,” he replied. “I’d say over $500 million. I just don’t know why you need that much money.”
.. Even as Trump takes over, Priebus is trying to enforce a distinction between “Trump” and “Republican Party” that might preserve the inroads he believes he’s made in minority communities.
..
In 2011, when Trump was still in the embryonic stage of learning how to roil the national political debate, he began insisting Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. Priebus, as the new chairman, had to field awkward questions about Trump’s “birther” antics, and while he made clear his own view that Obama was born in Hawaii, he never denounced Trump and Trump never recanted. How, I asked, could his plan to moderate his party’s image possibly withstand a nominee who’s a birther and has labeled Hispanics “rapists” and “drug dealers”?
Priebus reddened and replied, with Freudian clarity, “What the RNC doesn’t do, we’re not able to muzzle people and put a sock in people’s mouth and take duct tape out and tell people what they can say and can’t say. Nor is it fair to then criticize the national committee for something that some person says somewhere around the country.” He added, “I can’t be judged based on things I don’t control.”
..
“What do you know about—you know something about voter data and outcomes and messaging and microtargeting? I mean, what kind of expert are you?”
“I know that the public face of the party saying these things has driven his own negatives up astronomically high.”
“I’m not so sure about that. Did you see the poll yesterday that he actually had better numbers with black and Hispanic voters than Mitt Romney?”
“I did.”
“What did you think of it?”
“I was surprised.”
“OK, well, then you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
At this, Priebus’s deputy jumped in to announce that we were going off the record.
.. Trump criticized Ryan’s proposed entitlement cuts as unfair and politically foolish. “From a moral standpoint, I believe in it,” Trump told Ryan. “But you also have to get elected. And there’s no way a Republican is going to beat a Democrat when the Republican is saying, ‘We’re going to cut your Social Security’ and the Democrat is saying, ‘We’re going to keep it and give you more.’ ” Afterward, both sides offered platitudes, but Ryan didn’t endorse.
If Trump Breaks Up the G.O.P., It Won’t Be a First
Only months ago, Senator John McCain of Arizona, a professed maverick Republican, was berating Mr. Trump for inciting the fringe “crazies.” Now he backs the presumptive nominee. “I believe that the Republican Party must maintain its viability as a party,” he said.
But what if the Republicans are no longer a viable national party?
.. The first momentous collapse occurred in the election of 1800, and nativism proved central to it. In order to suppress rising unruly democratic forces aligned with Thomas Jefferson, the dominant Federalist Party of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton stirred popular fears of a menacing enemy within, including immigrants friendly to the Jeffersonians.
.. In 1854 the Whigs, one of the two major parties, collapsed over slavery. But while some Whigs joined the antislavery cause, others switched to the nativist Know-Nothing or American Party, which for a time looked as if it would supplant the Whigs. Out of the chaos emerged a new antislavery party, the Republicans, which got Lincoln elected to the presidency in 1860.
.. After World War I, though, the old guard in the Republican Party, announcing a return of American greatness, regained the initiative, buoyed in part by a resurgent nativism that brought about the law drastically restricting immigration in 1924.
.. Yet when the crash of 1929 led to the Great Depression, conservatives had little to offer. The Republican supremacy collapsed in the election of 1932; the Democratic Party picked up the mantle of reform, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal shaped the contours of American government and politics for the next two generations. Between 1932 and 1968 only one Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, won the presidency.
.. The reckoning began to unfold with the election of Barack Obama, weeks after the crash, which signaled the impending defeat of the Republican culture war. By momentarily corralling the rebellious Tea Party movement, the Republicans regained control of the House in 2010, thereafter blocking much of the Obama White House’s agenda.
.. As the 2016 elections approached, old and new fissures began to crack open. The party’s base, including Tea Party insurgents and evangelicals, had become furious with a Republican leadership powerless to halt the growing diversification, racial inclusiveness and cultural openness of American life, which it associated with Mr. Obama. At the same time, the party establishment had nothing to offer hard-pressed, working-class Republican voters except discredited bromides about tax cuts, deregulation and plans to slash Medicare and privatize Social Security.
.. Should Mr. Trump and his followers consolidate their control over the Republican Party, they will have converted it into something that Reagan would hardly recognize. But no matter how the power struggle is finally decided, it is clear that the party of Reagan’s era, uniting free market, small government conservatism with white working-class cultural fears and resentments, has come unglued — and no Republican leader or faction seems capable of putting it back together.
Does Democratic Weakness Create Republican Opportunity
Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and a presidential candidate in 2012, released a set of recommendations for Republicans running for election this year. Gingrich put together the 22-page manifesto, “2016 Election Principles,”
The document — in essence a master plan that comes with the strong endorsement of Reince Priebus, the chairman of the R.N.C. — stresses the need for “widespread inclusion of ethnic groups.” It sounds remarkably like an across-the-board renunciation of Donald Trump’s campaign strategy.
This presents something of a paradox, though, because Gingrich claims to be one of Trump’s strongest supporters.
.. But Trump won the Republican presidential nomination by appealing specifically to just those voters most opposed to “widespread inclusion of ethnic groups.” His core support in primary after primary has been white voters who rank highest on scales of ethnocentrism and racial resentment.
.. Gingrich argues that
the goal has to be inclusion, not outreach. Outreach is when the old order makes a decision and then calls the community leaders to inform them. Inclusion is when the community is in on the discussion before the decision.
.. Gingrich is convinced that there has been a weakening of the Democratic Party over the last eight years at the state and local level — including in key battleground states — which has left a door open for a broad Republican victory this November.
.. when Barack Obama took office, 51.8 percent of voters identified with the Democratic Party and 38.4 percent with the Republican Party, a solid 13.4 point Democratic advantage.
In 2016, however, the average of the first five polls shows that the Democratic advantage has shrunk to a far more modest 5.2 point edge ..
.. In Pennsylvania, the 16 point Democratic advantage fell to 3 points.
.. In effect, Stewart supports Gingrich’s claim that the Obama years have “done more to grow the Republican Party than any Democratic president in our history.”
.. To get a sense of the depth of the Democratic Party’s decay at the state legislative level in the Obama era, consider that since President Obama took office, 85 of 98 legislative bodies have become more Republican than they were when he was inaugurated.
.. Gingrich claims that Republicans are on the cusp of a game-changing “revolution” in microtargeting through the use of a new technology called “Voter Score.” Voter Score is a database that ranks every voter in the nation on a series of 100 point scales for their likelihood of casting Republican or Democratic ballots, their stands on issues and their turnout history.
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Republicans on Capitol Hill Have Reasons to Unify Behind Donald Trump
Congressional districts are far more gerrymandered than they were even 20 years ago; Republican members of Congress, by and large, come from very Republican districts. In the relatively few swing districts, Republicans cannot afford to alienate their base voters, many of whom may have voted for Mr. Trump in the primary (or other Republican presidential candidates) but could stay home in November if they are put off by party infighting.
.. 3. They think they can control him
Then there is the nature of Mr. Trump himself, whose policy positions are most politely understood as flexible. Congressional Republicans hope that if he becomes president, it will be they, not he, setting the agenda in Washington.
.. In contrast, Mr. Dallek said, “I think Republicans may feel they can control Trump because he is such a novice.
.. The policy areas in which Mr. Trump has shown the most commitment — trade and immigration — are ones Congressional Republicans who oppose him realize they may not be able to win. They seem poised to cede them in the name of broad unity with Mr. Trump on other matters.
.. His biggest critics on Capitol Hill among Republicans are those not up for re-election — Senators Jeff Flake of Arizona, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
.. “I consider him to be a malicious and malignant figure on the American political landscape — cruel, crude, vindictive, obsessive, narcissistic, a nativist and xenophobe, a man who seems to relish demeaning and dehumanizing others,” wrote Peter Wehner, a former director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives under President George W. Bush and friend of Mr. Ryan’s, in an opinion article.