I’m not a betting man, but if someone held a gun to my head and forced me to bet D vs R, even odds, sure, I’ld pick the D for taking the presidency this year. I wouldn’t put a percentage on the odds, because of the Trump factor, but, sure, things don’t look good fr the Rs this year.
But while taking the winning side of a bet may be good for your pocketbook, it’s the death of thought on any topic. It’s more revealing to look at how the less likely side of the bet would play out, how it would happen, if you’re still trying to understand what’s going on. Since there’s no actual money riding on any of this idle speculation, looking at the less likely side of the bet is all good.
I see three ways that the Rs might still pull it out this year and win the White House. They are, in order of convenience, my convenience in explaining the thinking behind them:
1) They dump Trump
2) Trump beats Clinton
3) The Speaker becomes president
They Dump Trump
I start with this possibility, because its assumptions are most in line with what most of the people who visit this site seem to believe.
Most of us would attribute Trump’s success at winning the R nomination, and then his recent problems pivoting to the general election, to his unusual willingness to pander to their base. He went further feeding the id of the base than any of the competition for the nomination when he proposed actually deporting 12 million undocumented, building a wall along the Mexican border, and closing off all immigration of Muslims. It’s what their base wants, it’s what a generation of their supposedly more “moderate” politicians have played off, with their only actually moderation being their care to dog whistle the red meat for the base, while leaving themselves room to pivot to the center for the general election.
Well, they played that game for so long, they coddled and encouraged their base’s worst impulses, that they have finally created a Frankenstein, a candidate who just threw away the dog whistle, and spoke the racism and nativism loud and proud. The base found this refreshing compared to the usual hypocrisy, so they gave the nomination to Trump. But throwing away the dog whistle has done to general election swing voters exactly what has always been feared, frightened and repelled them. There’s a reason that Rs have used that dog whistle, because they need deniability of the racism to keep their centrist swing voters. By this theory, this alienation of the usual, centrist, swing voters is why Trump is sinking in the polls. And he can be expected to sink even further, as he keeps saying things that repel the center.
If he has sunk so low in the polls a month from now when the R convention opens in Cleveland that he seems certain to lose, and worse, to drag down ballot Rs with him, the Rs would have this potential out, get rid of Trump and replace him with someone more conventional.
The mechanics of dumping Trump are quite doable. The party just has to change the rules. At least two such rule changes would do the trick, either removing the requirement that delegates vote on the first ballot (or ballots #1 through 3) to a candidate they are pledged to, or raising the majority needed to get the nomination to 2/3, instead of a simple majority. This could be done by an RNC committee before the convention opens, or by the convention itself.
This works because the indirect selection of delegates means that while Trump may have a comfortable majority of delegates pledged to vote for him on ballots 1-3, he doesn’t have a majority that actually wants him to win. I don’t believe anyone has a firm count on the number of these Trump delegates who don’t want Trump to win, but it seems safe to say that there are enough to constitute, along with the non-Trump delegates, a majority. Even without a rules change taking away their pledge to vote for Trump, they are not at all bound to vote for his interests on procedural votes. Such a procedural vote is where the Dump Trump movement would do the deed, before that first ballot.
Do I think such a Dump Trump movement is at all likely? Not really. But I base that on the overall lack of actual organization that remains in either major party. I do not put any stock at all in the idea that they wouldn’t dare because this would be an outright theft of the nomination, and they either wouldn’t dare because of the wrath of the voters, or it wouldn’t work — the Trump replacement would lose big — because of the wrath of the voters at having the nomination stolen.
You can’t have confidence that swing voters would be repelled by dumping Trump, and also believe at the same time that Trump would lose big because he is perceived as an ogre by swing voters. You can’t have it both ways.
Look at it this way. One of the constant refrains from our side is the challenge to “moderate” Rs to stand up to their base, to stand up to the ugly racist things that base clamors for. Well, if moderate Rs do summon the cojones to dump Trump, they will have done exactly what we have asked them to do, repudiated a radical R for his hateful racism. Insofar as the swing voters have listened to us over the years in our demand that the Party of Lincoln do something to live up to that legacy, well, they will finally have produced. If Trump is causing swing voters to abandon the Rs because he is too radical for them, won’t the moderate Rs who boot him be heroes, the political heroes of this cycle?
Again, I’m just following a theory of what has happened so far this cycle, the theory that Trump won the R nomination because he’s too open and radical for the general electorate swing voters he’s now repelling. I don’t find that theory very compelling, and so I suspect that there would be a price to pay for these “moderate” Rs for stealing the nomination. But for stopping the fascist that this theory has Trump playing, well, there will be kudos among the centrists, not brickbats. The convention that dumps Trump will be idolized by the media, and that convention will be a week of breathlessly adulatory free media for whatever moderate they put forward to replace Trump. That person will be seen as the hero who came from behind, came out of nowhere, to rescue America from the fascist. If their replacement is otherwise not a horrible candidate, I see him or her being very competitive with our candidate with centrist swing voters.
And why would the party’s string-pullers not choose their most attractive, “moderate”, candidate? One feature of this way of choosing a candidate is that he or she doesn’t have to go through the meat grinder of their primary process, doesn’t have to lurch way right to pander to their base in order to get the nomination, then lurch back to the center. We may call for the fainting couch and clutch our pearls if they get to do this, get a candidate without putting him or her through the meat grinder, but exactly why do you expect swing voters to think it unfair? Our side will have to agree that the nation has been saved from a great threat, but we won’t get anyone else to agree that the people who did the threat removal must be punished because they broke the sacred rules of the Republican Party.
But, the objectors say, the big problem for conventional Rs who dump Trump is with their base. Their base voted for Trump, in large numbers. Steal the nomination from him, and they will be enraged. They will stay away from the polls this November, then wreak vengeance the next cycle by primarying any moderate R who had a hand in this theft.
Sadly, no. Their base is not going to vote for Hillary, or help Hillary win by inaction. These people are crazy, open racists. They are passionate and involved, if grossly misguided in that passion. And while the Tea Party was and is threatening to moderate Rs, that’s because it has exactly what Trump lacks, an organization and and an enduring ideology separate from any individual politician’s campaign. People who wonder whether Trump has the patience to stay with the game long enough to claim his nomination next month should not worry that he will lead a movement to punish the moderate Rs who dumped him four years from now.
Trump Beats Clinton
Assuming the Dump Trump movement fizzles, and he secures the nomination, sure, he goes down to ignominious defeat if the theory of his success up to now that is outlined above is true. So this second possible way the Rs win this year depends on the assumption that the above theory is wrong, or at least incomplete. Under this set of assumptions, Trump could find a way to make the anti-messaging style of campaigning that won him the nomination also work for him in the general election.
This set of assumptions is a harder sell with this audience, and I’ve already droned on enough for one day, so this second way the Rs could win has to wait for tomorrow’s continuation.