Donald
Trump’s decisive victory in the Indiana primary election, coupled with the
withdrawal of his principal rival, Ted Cruz, has made him the party’s presumptive presidential nominee.
It has exposed a deeply divided Republican party whose leadership has lost all
credibility and whose conservative philosophy, which it has held dear since
1980, is in tatters. The party’s very survival is now uncertain.
This
near-apocalypse has been years in the making. The Tea Party insurgency has
badly undermined both state and national party elites, driving the GOP further
to the right and electing highly ideological congressmen and senators who
refused to compromise with the Obama administration – not least Cruz, who
defied the GOP leadership and forced the US government into a total shutdown in
2013.
But
this collapse is also the fruit of decades of economic deterioration of the
party’s white working-class voters, especially those without a college
education. Compounded by the 2008 financial crisis, decades of
deindustrialisation have left a legacy of unemployment, underemployment,
falling living standards and expanding social and economic inequality. This has
also hit middle-income Republicans hard. Many of them now support higher taxes
on corporations and the very wealthy and back some kind of redistribution of
income and wealth.
This
is a rejection of the core principles of the Reaganite conservative consensus:
low taxes, free markets, welfare cuts, laissez-faire government. Trump has also
shown that social conservatism is not a prerequisite for victory in the GOP
primaries, another blow to the party’s Reagan-era principles.
And
so, is the GOP leadership left with no choice but to get behind Trump? There
have been recent overtures. Some GOP stalwarts responded noticeably warmly to
Trump’s first “serious” foreign policy speech, and Karl
Rove’s well-funded campaign organisation has reportedly indicated that if necessary, it would
back Trump against Hillary Clinton.
But
Cruz’s verdict on Trump, which is shared by a majority of Republican voters,
speaks to just how toxic the GOP’s presumptive nominee really is. “This man is
a pathological liar, he doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies … in
a pattern that is straight out of a psychology textbook, he accuses everyone of
lying,” said Cruz on the threshold of the Indiana vote.
“Whatever lie he’s telling, at that minute he believes it...the man is utterly
amoral.”
The
GOP civil war is unlikely to abate any time soon—and that’s a boon to Clinton.
The big question now is whether Clinton can turn the other party’s crisis into
the Democrats' opportunity. She must now fashion a message that inspires and
unites her party for the general election—even as Bernie Sanders, her flagging
but still formidable opponent, continues to win states and vows to continue his
campaign against the party’s establishment.
Donald
Trump has been declared the Republican Party’s nominee for the presidency of
the United States—and for once, not only by himself. This victory defies all
the laws of political gravity.
The
traditional Republican way is to elect the establishment’s chosen candidate,
generally someone who has served the party faithfully and well—and preferably
someone plausibly electable against the Democrats' standard bearer. The nominee
is expected to stick to mainstream conservative principles and to be broadly
acceptable to those pulling the strings at Fox News.
Trump
fails all these tests. And with his signature blend of populism, provocation
and spectacle, he has driven the party into a schism, pitting conservative
against conservative.
In
the immediate wake of the Indiana result the audience of Fox news was treated
to a downcast debate between the network’s two principal conservative voices,
Bill O’Reilly and Charles Krauthammer. While O’Reilly tried to defend Trump as
a misunderstood populist hero, Krauthammer declared himself implacably opposed
to a man he declared was not a true conservative and who could not be trusted
to defend conservative values.
The
party shows no sign of being ready to unite behind Trump. The Hill, an
influential political newspaper published in Washington, D.C., has
even provided a list of Republicans who have declared on the
record that they simply will not back him. The list is long, and includes some
very influential conservative names.
These
horrified “NeverTrumpers”, who’ve been pushing their own #NeverTrump
hashtag, are all too aware that nominating “The Donald” would not only betray
the party’s core principles, but possibly doom the GOP to electoral
catastrophe. Disgusted conservatives might well decline to vote at all. That
would contaminate Republican candidates across the country; the party would
probably lose control of the Senate, and perhaps even of the House of
Representatives.
So
what exactly are Trump’s chances against Hillary Clinton? The Real Clear Politics average of the most recent
half dozen polls has Clinton leading Trump by an average of 6.2 percent in a
hypothetical (and now very likely) match-up.
Take
out the poll by the Rasmussen firm, which has a very chequered history—not
least projecting a Mitt Romney victory on the eve of
the 2012 election—and Clinton leads by 7.8 percent.
The
respected Sabato Crystal Ball project at the University of
Virginia’s Center for Politics offers another perspective. This uses expert
judgement on a state-by-state level to assess the likely number of electoral
votes that would be won in a match-up between Clinton and Trump.
The
best estimate offered, as of today, is a projected 347 votes for Hillary
Clinton in the electoral college, with 191 going to Donald Trump. A total of
270 votes is required to win the presidency. By way of comparison, Barack Obama
won 332 electoral votes in 2012 to 206 for Mitt Romney.
The
betting and prediction markets tell a broadly similar tale.
Finally,
let’s look to the PollyVote
project, which combines evidence derived from polls, expert judgement and
prediction markets, plus a few other indicators, to provide an overall forecast
of the likely outcome in November. As of today, the PollyVote predicts the
Democrats to obtain 53.3 percent of the two-party popular vote, compared to
46.7 percent for the Republicans.
Trump
stands today at the top of the Republican tree. He has won the battle. He will
find it much harder to win the war.
Insurmountable obstacles
Matthew Ashton, Nottingham Trent University
Now
that Trump has vanquished his Republican rivals, he can start setting out his
stall for the general election and perhaps trying to pivot to the centre
ground. But as a presidential candidate, his flaws are glaringly apparent.
Trump
has burnt an unprecedented number of bridges within the GOP. Primary races are
normally fairly rough-and-tumble affairs, but Trump has taken name-calling and
mud-slinging to a whole new level.
Given
the level of vitriol he unleashed, it is difficult to imagine many of this
year’s failed candidates enthusiastically endorsing him, as usually happens
once a presumptive nominee emerges. This might in turn make finding a credible
vice-presidential candidate difficult.
Equally,
given some of his exceptionally provocative remarks, Trump will struggle to
appeal to crucial voting groups—Latinos, African-Americans and women in
particular. He’ll also struggle to attract independent and moderate voters
while holding on to his more angry radical supporters.
In
terms of organization, Trump currently has quite a weak ground game. One of the
reasons Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney back in 2012 was the fact that he
arguably had the best campaign machine in history. While Hillary Clinton will
inherit some of that equipment to augment her already formidable primary
operation (and perhaps some of Bernie Sanders’s too), Trump is essentially
starting from scratch. He’s shown the ability to adapt politically, but
building a serious machine requires a lot of effort very quickly.
To
compound all this, Trump will now come in for a lot more personal scrutiny. One
of the arguments in favour of the primary system is that it means the eventual
nominee will have been thoroughly vetted by the party establishment and media.
But apart from in one or two cases, notably the brief flurry of stories about Trump University, they’ve given Trump a
relatively easy ride on his record. With the Democrats prepared for the general
election fight, that is going to change.
None
of these obstacles are insurmountable, but they will demand monumental
organisation and discipline. So far, Trump has demonstrated neither. And his
temper and natural instinct to defend by attacking might be his biggest
downfall.
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