The stop Trump campain that never flied

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It's not because they didn't try..

The Republican Party is broken

Updated by Ezra Klein on February 24, 2016, 7:51 a.m. ET 

Could the Republican Party have stopped Donald Trump?

The theory goes like this: The Republican Party had the chance to off Trump early, but it didn't act quickly enough — and now it may be too late. If only officials had coalesced around Marco Rubio earlier, if only the Super PACs concentrated their fire on Donald Trump faster, if onlyJeb Bush had dropped out before South Carolina, if only...

As Trump's insurgency continues to overwhelm the party, the recriminations are growing more scathing. Political scientist Dan Drezner suggests Republicans might have thought it so obvious Trump would lose that they didn't think they had to do anything. "Just how much of Trump’s rise came about because the people who could have stopped him read analyses asserting that he had no chance of winning?" Drezner asks.

But the Republican Party did try to stop Trump. It just failed. And until the nature of that failure is appreciated, the strength of Trump's candidacy is going to be underestimated.

The Republican assault on Donald Trump was vast

The GOP didn't, in political science parlance, "decide" on a single champion — no one candidate received the bulk of official endorsements before Iowa. But parties do more than decide; they also veto. And the Republican Party did try to veto Trump — as did everyone else. Trump has come under a coordinated assault from the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and the media that is unlike anything in my lifetime.

The first Republican debate featured Fox News — arguably the single most powerful actor in the modern Republican Party — trying to cut Trump's candidacy to shreds. The harsh questioning, which touched on everything from his past heterodoxies to his friendship with Hillary Clinton to his misogyny, kicked off a feud between Fox News and Trump that continues to this day.

The National Review, which acts as the official magazine of American conservatism, pulled contributors from every wing of the movement to write a Stop Trump issue. The festival of contributions — which included everyone from Glenn Beck to Erick Erickson to Bill Kristol — were clustered under the headline "Conservatives Against Trump." The magazine's own editorial was titled "Against Trump," and it began by calling Trump "a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones."

National Review

And there have been plenty of smaller skirmishes. RememberMcCain-gate, when the Republican Party tried to use its base's veneration of military heroes to destroy Trump?

This is how parties veto. They send signals. They mobilize their influencers. They use the media. They make sure the party faithful know that this isn't our kind of guy, he doesn't believe what we believe, he isn't the kind of person we support.

Republicans know all that. They've heard their party. They've heard everyone else, too — the condemnations of Trump have been a nonstop clamor, a roar that's drowned out all other political coverage. But Republican primary voters just don't give a shit. It's worse than that — they like that Trump pisses off the establishment. The backlash only makes him stronger.

The realities of an anti-establishment wave
Everyone says this is an anti-establishment year, but elites are just mouthing the words; they still don't quite believe it. They still think that if only the Republican establishment had been a bit better organized, a bit quicker on the draw, they could have kept control. The truth is probably closer to the opposite.

What would've happened if the party had somehow muscled out Chris Christie and Jeb Bush and John Kasich before New Hampshire — a level of coordination and control unheard of in modern politics — and circled the wagons around Rubio? Would it have helped him or hurt him to look so much like the choice of the establishment?

"You can consolidate all day long around whoever," Rep. Mark Sanford, a South Carolina Republican, told me, "but if the people perceive that candidate to be establishment or establishment-lite, they ain’t going to go that way."

The Republican Party is broken
The hope now is that Trump is at his ceiling and his continued dominance simply speaks to the fracturing of the field. Some polls show Rubio beating Trump in a head-to-head matchup, though others show him losing.

This is the best argument for how the Republican Party could help Rubio — it could somehow force all the other candidates from the race. But would that help Rubio? Or would it anger Republican voters and help Trump, or perhaps even anger some of the spurned candidates and lead to them endorsing Trump?

The party doesn't have any magic powers. All it has is its credibility with its voters. Because, in the end, parties can only influence — it's voters who actually decide. And the Republican Party has, for whatever reason, lost its ability to influence its voters. Donald Trump is winning this thing, and so far, Ted Cruz, the only guy elite Republicans hate more than Trump, is vying for second place.

Parties are vehicles for structuring information. Their role is literally to help voters decide by helping them choose whom to trust. The fact that Republican voters seem to prefer candidates whom their party is screaming not to trust reveals a profound failure in the GOP's core role. The Republican Party is broken.

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Here is another try. Original! Not sure Romney is the one who shold make this point though..

MITT ROMNEY: There's good reason to believe there's a 'bombshell' in Donald Trump's taxes

• Brett LoGiurato

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Wednesday called on Republican candidates to release their tax returns — and speculated there could be a "bombshell" in those of frontrunner Donald Trump.

"We have good reason to believe that there's a bombshell in Donald Trump's taxes," Romney told Fox News host Neil Cavuto on Wednesday.
"What do you mean?" Cavuto asked Romney.

Romney said:
Well, I think there's something there. Either he's not anywhere near as wealthy as he says he is, or he hasn't been paying the kind of taxes we would expect him to pay. Or perhaps he hasn't been giving money to the vets or the disabled, like he's been telling us he's been doing.

Romney's statement came after Cavuto asked him why he had not yet made an endorsement in the Republican presidential race. As Trump has continued to march toward the nomination, Republican Party establishment members have rallied around the candidacy of Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.

Romney said he'd like to see the taxes of each candidate.

"Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have not shown us their back taxes," Romney said. "This was an issue on my campaign."
Indeed, the Obama campaign and its Democratic allies in 2012 made Romney's taxes a signature issue. Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid famously speculated that Romney didn't pay any taxes for a decade.

Romney eventually released two years' worth of returns that showed he had paid an effective rate of less than 15%. He called on the Republican candidates to do the same but zeroed in on Trump's supposed hesitance to do so.

"The reason I think there's a bombshell in there is that every time he's asked about his taxes, he dodges or delays and says, 'Well, we're working on it,'" Romney said of Trump.

Trump mocked Romney as a "tough guy" on Twitter later Wednesday.

"Mitt Romney, who totally blew an election that should have been won and whose tax returns made him look like a fool, is now playing tough guy," the mogul wrote.

Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday that he would release his returns "at some point, probably." He has also bristled at the notion, as Romney suggested, that any of his financial statements might show that he is not as wealthy as he has claimed.
He told Hewitt:

We'll be working on it. Everything is very much, you know, I gave my financials ahead of schedule, much ahead of schedule. I had a long time to give them, and I gave them immediately. And they were very complex, also, and very big, and they turned out to be extremely good, much better, actually, than people thought.

Romney, who has long been critical of Trump, emerged back into the public discussion over the 2016 presidential race on Wednesday when he was quoted discussing the year's political environment.

"We're just mad as hell and won't take it anymore," he said of the electorate on Tuesday, according to The Washington Post.
"The failure of current political leaders to actually tackle major challenges, or to try at least, or to go out with proposals," he added, speaking at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

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Inside the Republican Party’s Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump

DAMON WINTER / THE NEW YORK TIMES

FEBRUARY 27, 2016

The scenario Karl Rove outlined was bleak.
Addressing a luncheon of Republican governors and donors in Washington on Feb. 19, he warned that Donald J. Trump’s increasingly likely nomination would be catastrophic, dooming the party in November. But Mr. Rove, the master strategist of George W. Bush’s campaigns, insisted it was not too late for them to stop Mr. Trump, according to three people present.

At a meeting of Republican governors the next morning, Paul R. LePage of Maine called for action. Seated at a long boardroom table at the Willard Hotel, he erupted in frustration over the state of the 2016 race, saying Mr. Trump’s nomination would deeply wound the Republican Party. Mr. LePage urged the governors to draft an open letter “to the people,” disavowing Mr. Trump and his divisive brand of politics.

The suggestion was not taken up. Since then, Mr. Trump has only gotten stronger, winning two more state contests and collecting the endorsement of Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.

In public, there were calls for the party to unite behind a single candidate. In dozens of interviews, elected officials, political strategists and donors described a frantic, last-ditch campaign to block Mr. Trump — and the agonizing reasons that many of them have become convinced it will fail. Behind the scenes, a desperate mission to save the party sputtered and stalled at every turn.

Efforts to unite warring candidates behind one failed spectacularly: An overture from Senator Marco Rubio to Mr. Christie angered and insulted the governor. An unsubtle appeal from Mitt Romney to John Kasich, about the party’s need to consolidate behind one rival to Mr. Trump, fell on deaf ears.

At least two campaigns have drafted plans to overtake Mr. Trump in a brokered convention, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has laid out a plan that would have lawmakers break with Mr. Trump explicitly in a general election.

Despite all the forces arrayed against Mr. Trump, the interviews show, the party has been gripped by a nearly incapacitating leadership vacuum and a paralytic sense of indecision and despair, as he has won smashing victories in South Carolina and Nevada. Donors have dreaded the consequences of clashing with Mr. Trump directly. Elected officials have balked at attacking him out of concern that they might unintentionally fuel his populist revolt. And Republicans have lacked someone from outside the presidential race who could help set the terms of debate from afar.


The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has laid out a plan that would have lawmakers break with Mr. Trump in a general election.
DOUG MILLS / THE NEW YORK TIMES

The endorsement by Mr. Christie, a not unblemished but still highly regarded figure within the party’s elite — he is a former chairman of the Republican Governors Association — landed Friday with crippling force. It was by far the most important defection to Mr. Trump’s insurgency: Mr. Christie may give cover to other Republicans tempted to join Mr. Trump rather than trying to beat him. Not just the Stop Trump forces seemed in peril, but also the traditional party establishment itself.

Should Mr. Trump clinch the presidential nomination, it would represent a rout of historic proportions for the institutional Republican Party, and could set off an internal rift unseen in either party for a half-century, since white Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party en masse during the civil rights movement.

Former Gov. Michael O. Leavitt of Utah, a top adviser to Mr. Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said the party was unable to come up with a united front to quash Mr. Trump’s campaign.

“There is no mechanism,” Mr. Leavitt said. “There is no smoke-filled room. If there is, I’ve never seen it, nor do I know anyone who has. This is going to play out in the way that it will.”

Resistance Runs Deep
Republicans have ruefully acknowledged that they came to this dire pass in no small part because of their own passivity. There were ample opportunities to battle Mr. Trump earlier; more than one plan was drawn up only to be rejected. Rivals who attacked him early, like Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal, the former governors of Texas and Louisiana, received little backup and quickly faded.

Late last fall, the strategists Alex Castellanos and Gail Gitcho, both presidential campaign veterans, reached out to dozens of the party’s leading donors, including the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, with a plan to create a “super PAC” that would take down Mr. Trump. In a confidential memo, the strategists laid out the mission of a group they called “ProtectUS.”

“We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval Office, with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips,” they wrote in the previously unreported memo. Mr. Castellanos even produced ads portraying Mr. Trump as unfit for the presidency, according to people who saw them and who, along with many of those interviewed, insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The two strategists, who declined to comment, proposed to attack Mr. Trump in New Hampshire over his business failures and past liberal positions, and emphasized the extreme urgency of their project. A Trump nomination would not only cause Republicans to lose the presidency, they wrote, “but we also lose the Senate, competitive gubernatorial elections and moderate House Republicans.”

No major donors committed to the project, and it was abandoned. No other sustained Stop Trump effort sprang up in its place.
Resistance to Mr. Trump still runs deep. The party’s biggest benefactors remain totally opposed to him. At a recent presentation hosted by the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch, the country’s most prolific conservative donors, their political advisers characterized Mr. Trump’s record as utterly unacceptable, and highlighted his support for government-funded business subsidies and government-backed health care, according to people who attended.

But the Kochs, like Mr. Adelson, have shown no appetite to intervene directly in the primary with decisive force.
The American Future Fund, a conservative group that does not disclose its donors, announced plans on Friday to run ads blasting Mr. Trump for his role in an educational company that is alleged to have defrauded students. But there is only limited time for the commercials to sink in before some of the country’s biggest states award their delegates in early March.

Instead, Mr. Trump’s challengers are staking their hopes on a set of guerrilla tactics and long-shot possibilities, racing to line up mainstream voters and interest groups against his increasingly formidable campaign. Donors and elected leaders have begun to rouse themselves for the fight, but perhaps too late.

Two of Mr. Trump’s opponents have openly acknowledged that they may have to wrest the Republican nomination from him in a deadlocked convention.

By REUTERS 00:53Gov. Christie Endorses Donald Trump

Video Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who dropped out of the presidential race earlier this month, endorsed Donald J. Trump for president on Friday.

Speaking to political donors in Manhattan on Wednesday evening, Mr. Rubio’s campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, noted that most delegates are bound to a candidate only on the first ballot. Many of them, moreover, are likely to be party regulars who may not support Mr. Trump over multiple rounds of balloting, he added, according to a person present for Mr. Sullivan’s presentation, which was first reported by CNN.

Advisers to Mr. Kasich, the Ohio governor, have told potential supporters that his strategy boils down to a convention battle. Judd Gregg, a former New Hampshire senator who had endorsed Jeb Bush, said Mr. Kasich’s emissaries had sketched an outcome in which Mr. Kasich “probably ends up with the second-highest delegate count going into the convention” and digs in there to compete with Mr. Trump.

Several senior Republicans, including Mr. Romney, have made direct appeals to Mr. Kasich to gauge his willingness to stand down and allow the party to unify behind another candidate. But Mr. Kasich has told at least one person that his plan is to win the Ohio primary on March 15 and gather the party behind his campaign if Mr. Rubio loses in Florida, his home state, on the same day.

In Washington, Mr. Kasich’s persistence in the race has become a source of frustration. At Senate luncheons on Wednesday and Thursday, Republican lawmakers vented about Mr. Kasich’s intransigence, calling it selfishness.

One senior Republican senator, noting that Mr. Kasich has truly contested only one of the first four states, complained: “He’s just flailing his arms around and having a wonderful time going around the country, and it just drives me up the wall.”

Mr. McConnell was especially vocal, describing Mr. Kasich’s persistence as irrational because he has no plausible path to the nomination, several senators said.

While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.

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Graphic | 2016 Primary Results and Calendar The 2016 primaries and caucuses have begun. See results and upcoming primary dates.

He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.

The Rubio Hope
There is still hope that Mr. Rubio might be able to unite much of the party and slow Mr. Trump’s advance in a series of big-state primaries in March, and a host of top elected officials endorsed him over the last week. But Mr. Rubio has struggled to sideline Mr. Kasich and Senator [url=http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/ted-cruz-on-the-issues.html?inline=nyt-per]Ted Cruz of Texas, who is running a dogged campaign on the right. He has also been unable to win over several of his former rivals who might help consolidate the Republican establishment more squarely behind him.

Mr. Rubio showed a lack of finesse in dealing with his fallen rivals’ injured egos.
Mr. Christie had attacked Mr. Rubio contemptuously in New Hampshire, calling him shallow and scripted, and humiliating him in a debate. Nevertheless, Mr. Rubio made a tentative overture to Mr. Christie after his withdrawal from the presidential race. He left the governor a voice mail message, seeking Mr. Christie’s support and assuring him that he had a bright future in public service, according to people who have heard Mr. Christie’s characterization of the message.

Mr. Christie, 53, took the message as deeply disrespectful and patronizing, questioning why “a 44-year-old” was telling him about his future, said people who described his reaction on the condition of anonymity. Further efforts to connect the two never yielded a direct conversation.

Mr. Trump, by contrast, made frequent calls to Mr. Christie once he dropped out, a person close to the governor said. After the two met at Trump Tower on Thursday with their wives, Mr. Christie flew to Texas and emerged on Friday to back Mr. Trump and mock Mr. Rubio as a desperate candidate near the end of a losing campaign.

‘Verging on Panic’
Efforts to reconcile Mr. Rubio and Mr. Bush, a former governor of Florida, have been scarcely more successful, dating to before the South Carolina primary, when Mr. Rove reached out to their aides to broker a cease-fire, according to Republicans briefed on the conversations. It did not last.

Mr. Bush has been nearly silent since quitting the race Feb. 20, playing golf with his son Jeb Jr. in Miami and turning to the task of thank-you notes. In a Wednesday conference call with supporters, he did not express a preference among the remaining contenders. When Mr. Rubio called him on Monday, their conversation did not last long, two people briefed on it said, and Mr. Rubio did not ask for his endorsement.

“There’s this desire, verging on panic, to consolidate the field,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a former supporter of Mr. Bush. “But I don’t see any movement at all.”

Mr. Rubio’s advisers were also thwarted in their efforts to secure an endorsement from Mr. Romney, whom they lobbied strenuously after the Feb. 20 South Carolina primary.

Mr. Romney had been eager to tilt the race, and even called Mr. Christie after he ended his campaign to vent about Mr. Trump and say he must be stopped. On the night of the primary, Mr. Romney was close to endorsing Mr. Rubio himself, people familiar with his deliberations said.

Yet Mr. Romney pulled back, instead telling advisers that he would take on Mr. Trump directly. After a Tuesday night dinner with former campaign aides, during which he expressed a sense of horror at the Republican race, Mr. Romney made a blunt demand Wednesday on Fox News: Mr. Trump must release his tax returns to prove he was not concealing a “bombshell” political vulnerability.

Mr. Trump responded only with casual derision, dismissing Mr. Romney on Twitter as “one of the dumbest and worst candidates in the history of Republican politics.”

Mr. Romney is expected to withhold his support before the voting this week on the so-called Super Tuesday, but some of his allies have urged him to endorse Mr. Rubio before Michigan and Idaho vote March 8. Mr. Romney grew up in Michigan, and many Idahoans are fellow Mormons.

But already, a handful of senior party leaders have struck a conciliatory tone toward Mr. Trump. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader, said on television that he believed he could work with him as president. Many in the party acknowledged a growing mood of resignation.

Fred Malek, the finance chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said the party’s mainstream had simply run up against the limits of its influence.

“There’s no single leader and no single institution that can bring a diverse group called the Republican Party together, behind a single candidate,” Mr. Malek said. “It just doesn’t exist.”

On Friday, a few hours after Mr. Christie endorsed him, Mr. Trump collected support from a second governor, who in a radio interview said Mr. Trump could be “one of the greatest presidents.”
That governor was Paul LePage.

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Why Can’t the G.O.P. Stop Trump?
By HANS NOELMARCH 1, 2016

If Republican Party leaders dislike Donald J. Trump so much, why haven’t they done more to stop him?
They should be able to. In “The Party Decides,” a book I wrote in 2008 with Marty Cohen, David Karol and John Zaller, we argued that the leaders of party coalitions have great influence over the selection of a presidential nominee.

Before then, the conventional wisdom was that such broad and diverse coalitions of politicians, activists and interest groups within parties were largely shut out of the nominating process by primaries and caucuses in the 1970s. This led to a free-for-all among narrowly factional candidates. In 1976, Jimmy Carter emerged from a crowded field to win the nomination despite having no connections to most leaders in the national party.

We argued that since that 1976 contest, party leaders had been exerting influence by coordinating on their choice during the “invisible primary” — the period before any voting when the leaders observed, met with and vetted candidates — then supporting that candidate throughout the process. When party leaders work together, they nearly always win, we said.

The book’s argument became influential: “The Party Decides” was called “the most-cited and the most-maligned book of this election cycle” by Nate Silver. While we stand by the theoretical contributions of the book, events in 2016 show that it has earned some of its criticism.

This year’s election has not followed our script. Mr. Trump is the clear front-runner, but is loathed by the party establishment. Until the past week, almost no nationally prominent Republicans had endorsed him. Another top candidate, Senator Ted Cruz, is no more popular with Republican leaders.

Party leaders have been obsessing and scheming, but until recently, they had barely taken any action. They seem to have finally settled on Senator Marco Rubio, far later than we would have expected. If Mr. Rubio wins, it would be at best a partial victory for “The Party Decides.”

The parties converged on a favorite candidate early in eight of nine contested nominations from 1980 to 2000, with that selected candidate winning all eight. Since then, in only two out of six races has the favored candidate won. Either the theory was wrong all along, or at the very least, we need to think harder about why the party leaders can coordinate sometimes and not at other times. Here are some possible explanations.

Maybe the political environment has changed. For one, the invisible primary has become far more visible, with more televised debates that have greater audiences and more media scrutiny. By early 1999, for example, party leaders had evaluated and chosen to back George W. Bush long before most people had turned their attention to the nomination. In contrast, by 2007, the parties’ conversations about the candidates were entirely public; together, the two parties held 47debates in the 2008 campaign.

Several factors — the fragmented media market, super PACs, new media — have made it easier for factions both within and outside the party to coordinate on their own. The Tea Party and the progressive movement can empower candidates like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders. Campaign finance laws have undermined parties and empowered individual candidates: Most think Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum lasted longer in 2012 than they would have without super PACs.

In several contests, party leaders were hesitant to challenge candidates who appeared to have independent support. In the 2004 Democratic contest, most party leaders did not want Howard Dean as the nominee, but his fund-raising was impressive. It took Mr. Dean’s failure in the Iowa caucuses to embolden party leaders to back John Kerry.

That the evolving political environment would give the party leaders trouble is no surprise. The invisible primary itself evolved as a response to the 1970s reforms, but it took party leaders a few cycles to work it out. They may yet work out these changes as well.

Maybe the party is falling apart. Even without those obstacles, coordination was going to be especially difficult for Republican leaders in 2016. To see why, look no further than the House of Representatives. In October, House Republicans struggled to find a speaker who could win the support of the conservative House Freedom Caucus as well as more mainstream party members. That same cleavage is now doing for the presidential nomination what it did for the routine in Congress.

We argued in the book that you should think of the party as a collection of different, often competing groups that nevertheless find ways to bridge their differences. Right now, the largest divide is between those groups that some call “party regulars,” or the establishment, and more ideological groups — the Tea Party, religious conservatives and other movement conservatives.

Jeb Bush was a clear early choice among many regulars, but he was just as clearly not the choice of movement conservatives. And Mr. Cruz, rejected by the national party, has been embraced by many movement conservatives. Before voting began, Mr. Cruz led in endorsements from politicians at the state level, where the Tea Party movement has been most effective.

We argued that the party wants a candidate who is acceptable to all factions, not just half of them. Mr. Cruz or Mr. Bush is (or was) the first choice of his own group, but unacceptable to the other’s. Neither is the choice of the whole party.

Who could appeal to both sides, the way that Speaker Paul Ryan has tried to do in the House? Would it be Scott Walker, Mr. Rubio, Mr. Christie, John Kasich or someone else? The party never really decided.

Maybe Mr. Trump just got in the way. I suspect many party members were just waiting for Mr. Trump to go away. They wanted to evaluate the field without him. But Mr. Trump never faded, and now they find themselves well into the primaries without having settled on an alternative. Mr. Trump isn’t the candidate of any particular group in the Republican coalition. His voters are often identified with the ideological wing, but many ideologues also object to him as a false conservative.

Changes in the media environment may have made it easier for Mr. Trump, but he is a unique character. Few politicians can match his style. Ben Carson is a more typical charismatic outsider exploiting the changes, and he surged, then declined. Party leaders might have pushed aside Mr. Trump if they’d had an easy choice among the acceptable candidates. Since they didn’t, the Trump distraction kept them from choosing anyone.

Maybe it’s not too late. None of this is what the book predicts, but it’s not the first time a party has delayed picking a favorite in the nomination process.

In the 1988 Democratic primary, party leaders were similarly divided among the “seven dwarfs,” with Michael Dukakis, governor of Massachusetts, gaining decisive support only after he won in New Hampshire. In 2004, few party leaders endorsed a candidate, uncertain about who could stop Mr. Dean. Only after John Kerry won Iowa did most in the party unite behind him.

In 2008, both parties failed to coordinate around a single candidate. We learned later that some Democrats who had been reluctant to oppose Hillary Clinton had privately encouraged Barack Obama to challenge her. After Iowa, his party support became public. That year, among Republicans, Mitt Romney and John McCain both had backing from different factions of the party.

In most of these cases, party leaders seemed to use Iowa as a winnowing tool, recalling the way they used primaries before the 1970s reforms. Most famously, John F. Kennedy needed to show he could win the votes of non-Catholics in West Virginia before the party would back him in 1960. Lately, the leaders have let voters help them figure out which candidate, among the acceptable, they should coordinate on.
In 2016, the Republicans may be very slowly doing just that.

Mr. Rubio may join Mr. Dukakis and Mr. Kerry as someone party leaders flocked to after the voters narrowed the field. In the months before Iowa, many party leaders had already begun to back Mr. Rubio, and that support accelerated once voting began. It picked up even more once Mr. Bush dropped out of the race. If this were to end in a victory for Mr. Rubio, that would be meaningful from our perspective.

If Mr. Trump is the nominee, many in the party will come to terms with that. The recent string of Trump endorsements is a sign that this might be underway. But even this movement is limited. If party leaders were merely following the polls, they’d all be for Mr. Trump by now. As we observed in the book, when candidates garner the support of party leaders, their poll numbers often rise; but when candidates improve in the polls, endorsements do not necessarily follow.

But not jumping on the Trump bandwagon falls far, far short of making a decision. The longer it takes for the party leaders to find a champion, the less it looks as if they are deciding and the more it looks as if they are just following — even if they follow to a party-acceptable candidate.
Let’s say Mr. Rubio somehow does win the nomination: On the one hand, that means that the party leaders would have stopped a front-runner in the middle of the process, no minor feat. Unlike the way the House chooses its speaker, sequential primaries and caucuses are not suited to finding compromise.

On the other hand, what took them so long? Failure is hardly universal. Such indecision has not been a problem for the Democrats this cycle. The Democratic Party has its own factions, but that conflict has mostly been worked out within party circles. This made the Democratic leaders’ choice much easier. And having backed Mrs. Clinton, party leaders are now going to the mat for her, just as they have done when outsiders challenged their choice in previous elections.

Mrs. Clinton’s march to the nomination shows that parties are still able to make decisions. But Mr. Trump’s success demonstrates that that ability may now be much easier to disrupt.

Hans Noel is an associate professor of government at Georgetown University and an author of “The Party Decides.”
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After Super Tuesday, it's clear that only Hillary Clinton can stop Donald Trump
Updated by Matthew Yglesias on March 1, 2016, 9:53 p.m. ET @mattyglesias matt@vox.com
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Donald Trump's ongoing evisceration of the Republican Party establishment has earned him a reputation in some circles as a teflon-coated magician, a politician whose mind-meld with the American people is so strong it makes him immune to attack.

He's not.

Of course, liberals should not be complacent about Trump's ability to win a general election. Winning a primary is harder than winning a general, and anyone who's secured either major party's nomination is just a bit of good luck away from taking the White House. But the antidote to complacency is not panic.

The fact is that Trump has triumphed in Republican Party primaries because the Republican Party is incapable of mounting effective resistance to him, not because effective resistance is impossible. Their strategies have failed because highlighting his real weaknesses would put them on ground that is too uncomfortable given the ideological rigidity of the GOP structure and the biases of rank-and-file Republicans. But the plain, obvious, truth is that Trump is running a racist campaign based on an unimpressive record in business and bad public policy ideas.

But the pathologies of the Republican Party make it impossible for them to mount this argument in an effective way. That's why to stop Trump, his opponent is going to have to be a Democrat — realistically, Hillary Clinton.

Trump is a badly flawed candidate

There are three main problems with Donald Trump as a candidate for national office, none of which can be effectively exploited by the Republican Party but all of which can be exploited by Clinton. The problems are:

• Trump is a racist.
  
• Trump's business record is unimpressive and ethically dodgy.
  
• Trump's policy ideas are terrible.
  

There is simply no reason to believe that this is what the American people are looking for.
The problem Republicans have is that is that these flaws are not flaws that a Republican Party politician can effectively articulate to an audience of Republican Party primary voters.

• Republican Party primary voters think that white people being shamed for racism is a bigger problem than white people doing racist stuff.
  
• Republican Party elites are ideologically committed to the defense of inherited wealth and opposed to the regulation of business in the public interest.
  
• Republican Party elites essentially share Trump's least-popular and most-obviously-ridiculous policy idea — an enormous tax cut for the rich — so they can't criticize it.
  

This has left them resorting to a smorgasboard of hypocrisy arguments and opportunistic cheap shots that don't have a clear takeaway, occasionally punctuated with with the observation that Trump does not rigidly adhere to the GOP donor class's policy preference.

To the extent that this strategy could possibly accomplish anything, it's actually worked quite well — the GOP donor class has not given Trump money, they have given a lot of money to Trump's rivals, and they've induced the lion's share of donor-dependent Republican politicians to endorse Marco Rubio. The problem is that it can't accomplish the thing that would cause Trump to lose — convince voters not to vote for him.

Clinton will not be so constrained. She can, and presumably will, press all three lines of attack effectively.

Trump keeps saying and doing racist stuff

Trump's hesitancy to disavow David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan at the precise moment when the Republican establishment went into full-scale panic about Trumpmania means that they have made this point.
The problem with this argument, in the context of a Republican Party primary, is that most Republicans don't think white racism is a problem. In a general election, Trump's problem will be that most Americans do think white racism is a serious problem. The Public Religion Research Institute's American Values Survey probably illustrates this best.
Public Religion Research Institute
This is why until recently, leading Republicans did not bother professing to be worried about Trump's racism. Back during the 2012 primary cycle, for example, Trump first injected himself into politics by loudly endorsing racist conspiracy theories about Barack Obama's birth certificate.
Mitt Romney responded to this by seeking, obtaining, and touting Trump's endorsement in order to secure advantage in Republican primaries. Romney knew, at the time, that in the eyes of Republicans being accused of racism is a feature rather than a bug because it shows you are against "political correctness," which is the real enemy.

Romney is singing a different tune these days, but the facts are the same. This line of attack works in a general election but not in a Republican primary.

Trump got rich because he was born rich

The notion that successful businesspeople would make for successful politicians strikes me as dubious, but it's something voters have embraced in a number of races for statewide office over the years and it's not totally shocking to see someone make it work on the presidential level.
That's why it's striking to note that though Trump is very rich, he's not all that successful a businessman. He's a guy who inherited a lot of money and achieved approximately average returns with it.

To give credit where due, the evidence suggests that the typical person would have drastically underperformed an index fund so Trump's ability to roughly match one is at least slightly impressive. And he's clearly adopted a much more fun strategy than a passive investment portfolio.

But Trump's rise to economic then cultural and now political dominance is much more a cautionary tale about unearned privilege than it is an inspiring story of business success.

These are points Clinton won't hesitate to raise, but that the Republican Party is institutionally incapable of making. The GOP, after all, is ideologically committed to the notion that heirs to multi-million dollar fortunes are a currently oppressed class in the United States, who ought to be allowed to inherit their fortunes tax free and that the uber-wealthy in general ought to pay lower tax rates on their investment income. From inside this ideological dead-end, Trump's rich dad can be raised as an insubstantial jibe, but can't be incorporated into a broader ideological critique of Trumpism.

By the same token, Rubio can note that Trump University was a scam and Trump's mortgage company was a scam and Trump in general seems to have run a lot of scams, but he can't incorporate this information into a coherent campaign because he is ideologically committed to opposing any kind of meaningful business regulation.
In the hands of the Democrats, however, this all becomes an indictment of a rigged system in which the haves accumulate more and more political and economic power in a terrifying cycle of doom.

Trump's policy ideas are bizarre and unpopular
People say this year's Republican primary isn't about policy and that's true — but that's in part because Trump's Republican opponents have chosen not to challenge him on policy. That's for good reason in the mirror universe of a Republican Party primary, but in general elections candidates argue about tax policy.

Trump is running on a comically regressive $11 trillion tax cut that will cost more than Hillary Clinton's entire progressive agenda while overwhelmingly benefitting a handful of super-rich people. People like Trump himself.


What voters want, by contrast, is to redistribute wealth through heavy taxation of the rich.
Gallup
Even rank-and-file Republicans have decidedly mixed feelings about giant tax cuts on rich people, but obviously none of Trump's opponents in the primary are going to hit him for this because they are all running on giant tax cuts for rich people.

Hillary Clinton has no such problem — she is running on the popular cause of making the rich pay more, while Trump is promising an enormous unpopular tax cut for himself.

The other issue on which he has real policy proposals is immigration. Trump favors mass deportation, which is what most rank-and-file Republicans favor even as most of the general population agreed with Hillary Clinton that creating a path to citizenship would be better. Trump also wants to reduce legal immigration, a position held by only about a third of Americans that, again, is popular with Republican primary voters.

Hillary might lose, but Trump is very vulnerable
None of this is a guarantee that Trump will lose a general election. He's wily and media-savvy. Clinton has vulnerabilities of her own. And to an extent any election cycle is hostage to the whims of events.
But nobody should mistake Trump's success in winning Republican primaries for unprecedented political genius, or the failure of his GOP rivals' attacks for invulnerability.

Trump has massive, obvious weaknesses as a candidate. He is a mediocre businessman who's become rich largely thanks to having a rich father and in part thanks to ethically questionable business practices. He is a longtime peddler in racist rhetoric and political concepts. He favors an enormous, unpopular tax cut for himself and people like him and he is closely identified with immigration policy ideas that most Americans reject. His Republican Party rivals have been unable to leverage these points against him either because ideological conservatives are incapable of criticizing them or because rank-and-file Republicans embrace ideas that the general public does not.

That's why Republicans haven't stopped Trump so far and it's why they won't be able to stop him in the future. To beat him, Republicans either need to replace their voters or adjust GOP ideological orthodoxy. They can't do the former and they won't do the latter, so they will lose.

Clinton is not constrained in these ways so she — and at this point only she — can stop Trump and keep him out of the White House.
Hillary Clinton has the perfect retort to "Make American great again"

[Admin]

Why we should have seen Trump coming
[img=0x0]http://static.bbci.co.uk/news/1.113.08/img/correspondents/circles/nickbryant.png[/img]
Nick BryantNew York correspondent

• 29 February 2016
  

[img=646x0]http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/FCE9/production/_88454746_gettyimages-508808932.jpg[/img]
Road to the White House

• [/url]Winners and losers on Super Tuesday
  
  
• Who is this new Donald Trump?
  
  
• How radical is Bernie Sanders?
  
  
• Day one of the Republican civil war
  [url=http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-35665834]
  

On Super Tuesday Donald Trump's hostile takeover of the Republican Party should come even closer, and like stiff-collared executives in some wood-panelled boardroom trying belatedly to fight off a corporate raid, the GOP high command seems incapable of stopping him.
For them, Super Tuesday could become Black Tuesday. Friday must have been gloomy enough, when Chris Christie, supposedly a card-carrying member of the establishment, kissed Donald Trump's hands and gave this political outsider his endorsement.

Christie's blessing came as a bolt from the blue, and taught us once more to expect the unexpected. But shouldn't the establishment - and us in the media, for that matter - have seen the billionaire coming? After all, for years the Republican standard bearers have been vulnerable to a challenge from an anti-establishment candidate.

Before going on, we should say what we mean by the Republican Party establishment, a term regularly bandied around but rarely explained. Fifty years ago, it was easier to identify.

It was an eastern establishment dominated by Wall Street bankers and corporate executives, who were strongly pro-business, ideologically moderate and politically pragmatic.
[img=616x0]http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/11FA5/production/_88473637_gettyimages-3065162.jpg[/img]Image captionNelson Rockefeller in 1965
Nelson Rockefeller, the scion of the banking dynasty and Governor of New York - who lived, like Donald Trump, in great splendour on Fifth Avenue - was their figurehead.

These days, however, the Republican establishment is harder to define and more diffuse, which also explains why it is easier to topple.

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More on Trump and the Republican race for the White House:
Anthony Zurcher: Day one of the Republican civil war
Three things Donald Trump always says
What Mexicans think of Trump and his proposed wall

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Commonly it is broadly taken to mean the Republican National Committee, senior office-holders (like Chris Christie), present and past, conservative lobbyists, like the US Chamber of Commerce, big-money donors and opinion-formers, who write for publications like the Weekly Standard, the National Review and op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal. But that definition is open to debate. Its disparate membership explains its inability to exert control.
[img=616x0]http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/58D1/production/_88473722_gettyimages-512088382.jpg[/img]Image captionMitch McConnell is not a fan of Trump
The most obvious reason for the decline of the Republican establishment has been the rise of anti-establishment adversaries. The Tea Party, an insurgent grassroots movement that emerged after Barack Obama's inauguration, has posed the most serious threat.

Its hatred of the president is matched almost by its loathing for establishment Republicans in Washington, like the Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, who activists complain could have done more to thwart the White House.

Tea Party primary challengers have ousted senior establishment fixtures, like Senator Richard Lugar, who represented Indiana for 36 years.
The "Hell No" Caucus on Capitol Hill, a rump of 50 or so Tea Party-backed Republican hardliners in the House of Representatives, was strong enough to push the former House Speaker John Boehner to the point of resignation.

As for opinion formers, most of the loudest and dominant voices in the modern-day conservative movement, like the talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the commentator Ann Coulter, are vehement critics of the establishment.
[img=616x0]http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/16A41/production/_88473729_gettyimages-490005942.jpg[/img]Image captionJohn Boehner resigned from the top Republican position in the House of Representatives last yaer
The Fox News channel, even though it has often given a platform for anti-establishment voices, doesn't fall into that same category. But it has become a rival power centre, outside the control of the GOP high command.

Going into the 2016 campaign, there were big clues that establishment candidates would be vulnerable. Eric Cantor, the House Republican majority leader, was ousted, unexpectedly, ahead of the 2014 congressional mid-terms. Boehner was pressured to resign as House Speaker.
However, most of us made the mistake of interpreting the results of the congressional mid-term elections as a major setback for insurgents, because they failed to make more breakthroughs.

Their attempt, for example, to oust the Republican Senator Thad Cochran in Mississippi, then a six-term incumbent, was unsuccessful. In Kentucky, Mitch McConnell also crushed a Tea Party challenge in the Republican primary.

According to polls, Tea Party favourites, like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, also lost their lustre.
[img=616x0]http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/D9B9/production/_88473755_gettyimages-142004293.jpg[/img]Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage captionThe Tea Party movement emerged after the election of Barack Obama
Even though the Tea Party was waning - in October last year, a Gallup poll suggested its support had dwindled to just 17% - the anger and rage that gave rise to it had not gone away.

Conservative insurgents just needed a better candidate and more effective mouthpiece.
The most obvious figure was Ted Cruz, a long-time darling of the Tea Party. But Donald Trump has proved more adept at giving voice to the politics of frustration and rage, even though he is not a Tea Party candidate per se.

Long before announcing his presidential bid, the billionaire had already burnished his reputation among Tea Party devotees by becoming the most prominent "birther" - claiming, falsely, that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States. His outspoken attacks on Mexicans and Muslims, combined with his contempt for political correctness, are music to insurgents' ears.

Another analytical failure was to assume that the Republican establishment could do in 2016 what it has done successfully in the past seven presidential elections: to see its anointed favourite become the nominee.
[img=616x0]http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/175F9/production/_88473759_gettyimages-155691335.jpg[/img]Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage captionMitt Romney was seen by many as an uninspiring but electable candidate - but lost soundly to Barack Obama
George Herbert Walker Bush, Bob Dole, George W Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney. All were Republican establishment favourites. What's perhaps most remarkable about that run of success for the party's high command is that it continued so long.

We should have paid more attention to the difficulty Mitt Romney had securing the nomination in 2012 and also the extent to which he was assisted by the absence of a strong establishment rival.

A central problem for the GOP high command this year, of course, has been that Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie have split the vote.
Not only that, we should have been more mindful of Rick Santorum's surprise showing four years ago. The right-wing former Pennsylvania Senator won 11 states and four million votes, even though he was viewed at the outset of the race as a woefully weak candidate.

It suggested that the Republican establishment would face a more serious problem in 2016 if a more compelling right-winger emerged.
Besides, one of the reasons why anti-establishment fervour is so strong this time round is because the grass roots is so fed up with being saddled with establishment moderates, like Romney.
[img=616x0]http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/151D/production/_88450450_gettyimages-585361239.jpg[/img]Image copyrightAFPImage captionRonald Reagan in 1980
Had we reached further back into Republican Party history we would have seen that hostile takeovers have succeeded in the past.
In 1980, Reagan ran as an anti-establishment candidate, beating the blue-blood Republican George HW Bush, a scion of the establishment.

Then there was Barry Goldwater's success in 1964, when he scored that highly symbolic victory over Nelson Rockefeller, the great pillar of the establishment.
The victory of an Arizonian right-wing firebrand over a New York moderate personified the shift in the Republican Party's centre of gravity during the civil rights era from the north-east to the south and south-west.

It changed the character of the party, setting it on its present course.
Revulsion right now of the permanent political class and party elites seems to be a global phenomenon, but in America it is particularly pronounced, on the left as well as the right.

But an anti-establishment figure like Donald Trump would not have become so strong had not the party establishment become so weak. The GOP, the Grand Old Party, has been ripe for a takeover for years.

[Admin]

It's not going to be the Kochs..

The Koch brothers, the most powerful conservative mega donors in the United States, will not use their $400 million political arsenal to try to block Republican front-runner Donald Trump's path to the presidential nomination, a spokesman told Reuters on Wednesday. The decision by the billionaire industrialists is another setback to Republican establishment efforts to derail the New York real estate mogul's bid for the White House, and follows speculation the Kochs would soon launch a "Trump Intervention."

The powerful Koch brothers just announced they won't try to halt Donald Trump's rise - Business Insider

[Admin]

But others are going to throw everything and the kitchen sink at him, but whether it will work..

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney plans to bash Donald Trump in a speech Thursday, according to excerpts of the speech being passed around social media. In quoted remarks released by Bloomberg Politics editor Mark Halperin, Romney calls Trump "a phony, a fraud." "He's playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat," Romney is expected to say.

Mitt Romney Donald Trump speech exerpts - Business Insider

[Admin]

And others are distinctly underwhelmed..

Romney actually popped back in the news half a year ago — when he (reluctantly) opted out of the 2016 race because he figured Jeb Bush had a better shot. Anyway, on Thursday, Romney speaks at the University of Utah on “the state of the 2016 presidential race.” By all accounts, it’s a bid to rally the anti-Trump cause and set the agenda for that evening’s GOP debate. Because a one-term governor of Massachusetts — the author of RomneyCare, the model for ObamaCare — is the obvious guy to save the Republican Party. He’s definitely gunning for Trump — his opening salvo came last week when he suggested there might be a “bombshell” in Trump’s tax returns. (Hey, at least Mitt’s learned something: That’s the same shot-in-the-dark cheap shot Sen. Harry Reid tossed at Romney for months back in 2012.) In fact — as Utah’s Sen. Orrin Hatch said outright to CNN — it looks like Romney’s aiming for a deadlocked GOP convention that would then nominate . . . him. Because he hasn’t led Republicans to enough disasters. Just go away, Mitt. Just go away.

Why would anyone want Mitt Romney’s political advice? | New York Post

[Admin]

Good luck with this guys..

Cruz, who beat Trump in two states, might hone his message, find his footing, and make his move. Rubio won Minnesota and surged in Virginia, losing by three points when he was projected to lose by 14. He might succeed in staging a similar surge in two weeks in his home state of Florida — where he has guaranteed a win — and gain momentum as the GOP hits winner-take-all states with more of the kinds of voters who like Rubio. Yes, in theory, Trump can lose. But we don’t live in Theory World. In the real world, Trump is going to win without an extraordinary change in the race’s trajectory that seems unlikely, to put it mildly.

Here’s how Rubio and Cruz can still take down Trump | New York Post

They told donors that it was likely Trump could not be defeated outright and in that case the only recourse would be to stay in the race to deny Trump a majority of the Republican delegates, take the race to the convention floor in July, and see if a counter-uprising can be staged against the Trump movement. This can’t be Rubio’s strategy alone. It has to be Cruz’s strategy as well, and that of Ohio Gov. John Kasich. The math works, kind of, if Rubio can win Florida and if Kasich can win Ohio on March 15. It doesn’t, really, if Trump wins both. There are a million problems with this scenario. Foremost among them, Trump’s supporters will not just cry foul, they’ll go completely bananas. The convention could degenerate into a kind of horrifying mess the country hasn’t seen since the Democratic Party found itself under assault from anti-Vietnam rioters at the 1968 convention in Chicago.

Here’s how Rubio and Cruz can still take down Trump | New York Post