Dan Balz:
It’s highly questionable whether anyone emerged as the winner in Thursday’s Republican presidential debate in Detroit, though the candidates’ spinmeisters would all quibble with that. There was one clear loser: the Grand Old Party.
The 11th debate of the Republican campaign tested the patience and the limits of viewers and voters. Insults and interruptions overwhelmed sober discussion. The raucous audience, now a staple of the GOP debates, only added to the sense of game-show politics.
Can anyone credibly suggest that the Republicans put their collective best face forward on Thursday night? At a time when the party is in crisis over the possibility that Donald Trump will become the nominee, the debate did next-to-nothing to make Trump or his three remaining candidates look or sound presidential.
Bruce Bartlett:
I voted for Trump to destroy the GOP
Flush with such "victories," extremists of all shapes and sizes were attracted to the Tea Party ranks—Christian religious fanatics, gun nuts, anti-gay bigots, nativists opposed to all nonwhite immigrants, secessionists, conspiracy theorists and, of course, racists.
What binds them together is hatred. Hatred of government, yes, but also hatred of liberals, minorities, homosexuals, non-fundamentalist Christians, environmentalists, feminists, and many other groups.
Donald Trump, to his credit, figured this out instinctively and pandered to it brilliantly. He channeled the anger and hatred of many whites on the fringes of the economy and society who blame "others" for stagnant wages and other real problems that Republican gridlock in Washington has prevented legislative action on.
Trump understood that these people didn't so much want solutions to these problems as someone in power to acknowledge their existence and give voice to their frustrations.
Eric Levitz:
Have you heard the old fable about the pundits who cried "peak Trump?" If you haven't, here's the Cliff Notes: Once upon the 2016 campaign cycle, political commentators would cry out after nearly every GOP debate that Donald Trump had finally done himself in. And so, when the Republican front-runner finally had a truly damaging debate performance in Detroit on March 3, no one believed the columns that said so.
And why should they? Rubio, Cruz and Kasich will support him in November, they say, so why should anyone believe anything on the GOP side? So far, #NeverTrump is a hashtag for nervous and unhappy conservative voters to rally around in the primary. It needs to be a rallying point beyond Cleveland, site of the GOP convention. We‘ll be watching for signs and portents that it’ll happen.
We know it will, we don’t know how large it will be. But it doesn’t have to be large.
Politico:
“The party will not fracture but will likely splinter,” says former Minnesota Rep. Vin Weber, a senior party strategist. “The question is: How big will the piece that splinters off actually be?”
Matt Dowd, George W. Bush’s chief strategist in 2004, cast the day’s events in equally dramatic terms. “I think the GOP as a national party will have to be reconstituted,” he said. “There doesn't seem a good way to put this all together. If Trump is the nominee, there will be a third-party establishment conservative running. If he gets taken out, he will run.”
Amanda Taub with an important long read:
Perhaps strangest of all, it wasn't just Trump but his supporters who seemed to have come out of nowhere, suddenly expressing, in large numbers, ideas far more extreme than anything that has risen to such popularity in recent memory. In South Carolina, a CBS News exit poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters supported banning Muslims from the United States. A PPP poll found that a third of Trump voters support banning gays and lesbians from the country. Twenty percent said Lincoln shouldn't have freed the slaves.
Last September, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst named Matthew MacWilliams realized that his dissertation research might hold the answer to not just one but all three of these mysteries.
MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.
So MacWilliams naturally wondered if authoritarianism might correlate with support for Trump.
John Cassidy:
Who else is there? Some cynical folks believe that Mitt Romney, who gave a Trump-bashing speech, in Salt Lake City, on Thursday, is trying to position himself as the Republican Party’s savior. Come the convention, this theory goes, it’s possible that no single candidate will have a lock on the nomination, and the Republicans may be forced to turn to a unifying figure like the Mittster.
When you stop laughing, I’ll move on to the second reason I doubt Trump can be stopped. In rallying disaffected Republicans and independents, he has identified a set of internal contradictions in the G.O.P. that no amount of negative advertising can conceal. And rolling out somebody like Romney only highlights these contradictions.
Larry Sabato, et al:
What will happen to the most vulnerable part of the GOP elective empire, the U.S. Senate? The Crystal Ballhas argued since 2014 that the current Republican majority is very fragile, and that the seats up in 2016 give the Democrats a fair to good chance of takeover — depending on the presidential outcome, in part.
How does a Trump nomination change the Crystal Ball Senate map?
David S Bernstein:
Donald Trump Needs 7 of 10 White Guys
Read more: www.politico.com/...
“I don't think that Trump can win, frankly," wrote Bill James last week, before adding dismissively: "because I don't think there are enough morons to elect him." James, a revered baseball statistician and consultant whose work has transformed the business of sports, cited some back-of-the-napkin math to support his theory. Not to argue with the godfather of Moneyball, but in Donald Trump's case, the problem may be much clearer: The problem is that there aren't enough white men.
If Trump wins the GOP nomination, he will be testing the limits of a strategy that has long haunted the Republican Party. Since the civil rights era, the Republicans have relied heavily upon white male voters in order to overcome a disadvantage among minorities and some subsets of women. Mathematically, that was an easier strategy a half-century ago, when white men dominated the electorate. But as the GOP failed to broaden its coalition and the demographics of America have shifted dramatically, an ever-greater percentage of white men has been required to secure a GOP victory.
Nate Silver:
Republican Voters Kind Of Hate All Their Choices
Yes, they do.
Ariel Edwards-Levy:
Sixty-eight percent of Republican primary voters say they would vote for Trump if he becomes the party nominee, with a roughly equal 65 percent saying the same of Rubio and Cruz. (Another recent poll, conducted for CNN, found more of a divide.)
Truth is, Nate’s right. They all suck.
Frank Bruni:
There have always been Republicans, many of them, who felt this way passionately, but they often spoke in muffled voices or chose to keep silent. There were racist, sexist, bigoted voters whom they were all too happy to have. A party needs to reach the 50-percent mark to win elections, and it makes ugly deals and unseemly compromises to cross that threshold.
But disgust with Trump and a recognition of the damage that he could do have prompted many of the Republican Party’s stewards to make unwavering statements and articulate principles that they’ll be judged by — and maybe even have to live up to — down the line.
Trump has reconnected them with their soul or rather, if you want to be a cynic, forced them to find one.
Maybe the detour down his pants will amount to something more and better, in the end, than phallic braggadocio.
Mark Liebovich:
But in the end, the Republican debate came down to the one question I really wanted answered by the non-Trumpeters: Would they still commit to supporting the nominee of the Republican Party, even if he were Donald Trump? I mean, if he were as pure evil as they have been suggesting, shouldn’t that, er, trump whatever musty notions of party loyalty they still cling to?
Even with all the breathless predictions of catastrophe from many Republicans in recent weeks, relatively few elected officials have actually come out and said they would not support Trump in November under any circumstances — whether that meant staying home, holding out for some still-unseen third-party alternative or actually pulling the lever for Hillary Clinton. Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska and the former New Jersey governor, Christie Whitman, have all said they would choose one of those alternatives. I’m sure there have been others, but not many. The band has been more of an a cappella group than a full orchestra to this point. That would have changed instantly had Cruz, Rubio or John Kasich actually joined them, which I would have thought — given some of the scorched-earth rhetoric — at least Cruz and Rubio would be ready to do.
But nuh-uh. All three of them answered the question by reiterating their vow to support the Republican nominee, even if it were Trump. Wow. This was the moment where Vince McMahon and all the W.W.E. performers came out and assured everyone not to worry, that they would never let things get really out of hand here. They were all just following a script and putting on the same old show.