INDEPENDENTS, NOT REPUBLICANS, DECIDE ELECTIONS
Of all of the pernicious lies that have afflicted the 2016 race the worst may be that Donald Trump is losing because of a divided Republican Party.
Certainly having a full scale meltdown in your party less than a month from a quadrennial election is not a good thing. And it may, in fact, turn Trump’s impending defeat into a rout of Goldwaterian proportions. But if he loses, the root cause will be Trump’s failures outside of the Republican Party.
An astonishing 30 million or so Republicans participated in primaries and caucuses this year. As Trump often points out, he received more votes than any nominee in history. He doesn’t point out, however, that more votes were cast against him than any prior nominee.
But if all 16.1 million people who voted or caucused against him and all 13.6 million people who voted or caucused for him marched to the polls to vote for him in the general election, he would still be about 40 million votes short.
As Trump bellows into his Twitter machine about the disloyalty of House Speaker Paul Ryan and Trump supporters go scalp hunting for conservative Republicans who have turned their backs on the party’s nominee, bear in mind this simple truth: there are more Democrats in America than there are Republicans. To win elections, the GOP needs to win a lopsided majority of independent voters. That’s just the way it is.
Coming out of the first debate, Trump was hemorrhaging support among swing voters. His feud with a former beauty queen sealed in the minds of many voters every allegation Clinton had made about Trump. That it would be followed by audio of Trump joking about sexual assault was a calamity of historic proportions.
The conservative press and the mainstream press are going to spend much of the next 20 days kindling every spark they can find of the fires of enmity in the Republican Party.
This is satisfying for both Democrats and Trump supporters. The narrative that the betrayal by the Speaker of the House or other establishment Republicans is to blame for Trump’s failures makes Trump feel better, and cheers Democrats because it is a foretaste of a permanently, hopelessly, divided opposition party in the years to come.
But do not let them fool you.
Trump supporters are threatening to abandon down-ballot Republicans who do not back Trump to the hilt. Establishmentarians and conservatives are withdrawing their support for Trump to deny him victory.
While these acts of protest no doubt satisfy the hatreds that now animate the GOP from an electoral standpoint, this is chicken feed compared to those other 40 million voters Republicans need to be a viable party.
Film at 11....
doesn't sound like a good time to sit back and watch... just sayin...