Establishment Republicans may be trying to talk themselves into accepting that Donald Trump might be their party’s presidential nominee, a fascinating piece of stenography from Politico suggests, and lurid fantasy is one of their major tactics for convincing themselves, it appears. First off, black voters:
“If he were the Republican nominee he would get the highest percentage of black votes since Ronald Reagan in 1980,” said Republican messaging guru Frank Luntz, referring to the year Reagan won 14 percent of that bloc of voters. “They listen to him. They find him fascinating, and in all the groups I have done, I have found Obama voters, they could’ve voted for Obama twice, but if they’re African-American they would consider Trump.”
Color me skeptical until I start seeing some of this bombshell polling in the context of a general election campaign rather than a hypothetical. And color me cracking up over this scenario:
The rest of Trump’s path to general-election victory, as laid out to POLITICO by pollsters, his campaign and his former advisers, looks like this: After winning the nomination on the first ballot, Trump unifies the party he has fractured behind him and reinvents himself as a pragmatic businessman and family man at the Republican National Convention. News of small-scale terror plots on American soil, foiled or successful, keep voters in a state of anxiety. Trump minimizes his losses with Hispanics by running Spanish-language ads highlighting his support for a strong military and take-charge entrepreneurial attitude, especially in the Miami and Orlando media markets. He draws the starkest possible outsider-insider contrast with Hillary Clinton and successfully tars her with her husband’s sexual history.
If he does all that, holds Mitt Romney’s states, and drives extraordinary levels of working-class white voter turnout in the suburbs and exurbs of Ohio and Virginia, as well as in the Florida panhandle and Jacksonville, he can flip those three Obama states and rack up 266 electoral votes. Winning any one of Iowa, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Nevada or New Mexico would put him over the top and make Donald John Trump the 45th president of the United States.
That’s … a lot to ask. First off, Trump has to unify the party he has fractured. This is Donald Trump we’re talking about. That’s a lot to ask to begin with. Next, he reinvents himself as a family man (are both of his ex-wives involved in this reinvention?) while attacking Hillary Clinton over her husband’s sexual history. Then he and his party keep voters scared about terror plots—reading between the lines here, ones they’ve manufactured, if necessary—while … winning over Latino voters? This is a plan that hinges on a lot of big ifs and relies on Trump to take other people’s counsel about 900 percent more than he’s done at any other point in this campaign, or possibly his life.
But if this is what Republicans need to tell themselves to live with the path their primary seems to be taking, it seems cruel to take it away from them.