Hey, GOP. You built this.
After the ignomious defeat of Mitt Romney, Republican officials decided they really had to do something about their nominating process, instituting a bunch of new rules to make sure that the country wasn't exposed to just how crazy the Republican party has become during a very prolonged campaign. Boy,
was that a failure.
The Republican rule changes reflected the lessons learned from Mr. Romney's defeat, after a long primary fight left him short of money and pulled to the right on issues, weakening him among undecided voters when he faced Mr. Obama. The party compressed its nominating calendar to try to make the process end sooner, limited the number of debates, moved the convention to July from August, barred all but the traditional early nominating states from holding contests until March and shortened the period in which states could hold primaries or caucuses that award delegates proportionally.
So they figured they'd front-load the crazy, and what they've ended up with is 16 candidates, at least 14 of whom are scrambling to see who can be the furthest to the right to lock up the most delegates. And Donald Trump is leading among them. Which is, of course, the primary concern of Republican leaders and strategists interviewed for this story, who say it's "doubtful that a candidate would be in place before late spring—or even before Republicans gather for their convention in Cleveland in July."
And they said they were increasingly convinced that Donald J. Trump could exploit openings created by the party's revised rules to capture the nomination or, short of that, to amass enough delegates to be a power broker at the convention. […]
"Somebody like Trump, who is operating in a crowded field, could put this contest away early if the crowd doesn’t thin out," said Eric Fehrnstrom, who was a senior adviser to Mr. Romney.
Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to Senator John McCain of Arizona when he ran for president in 2008, said Mr. Trump could also be helped by the fact that candidates like Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, with thinner financial resources and therefore likelier to run out of money, are, like Mr. Trump, political outsiders. So their supporters would be more inclined to fall in behind Mr. Trump than, say, Mr. Bush or Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.
"There is a bubble of delusion among Republicans and Democrats in Washington, D.C., with regard to their parties' respective nominating processes," Mr. Schmidt said. "There is no magic date upon which the air will come out of the Donald Trump balloon. The notion that Donald Trump cannot be the Republican nominee is completely and totally wrong."
Perhaps, just perhaps, getting Donald Trump as their nominee will be the clue to the Republican establishment that they've allowed the party to become batshit crazy. That making structural changes to the nominating process can't do a damned thing about the lurch off the far-right of the spectrum they're about to take. That flirting with the worst aspects of their base—the racism, the sexism, the xenophobia, the far-right fundamentalism—has made them the party of racism, sexism, zenophobia, and far-right fundamentalism. That and massive amounts of corporate money. That's what they're really going to have to reckon with, eventually.