Kirsten Powers

Who is to blame for the unraveling of the Republican Party?

If you listen to establishment gurus, you'd be led to believe that the Republican primary voter revolt was birthed by the governance of President Obama, creating fertile ground for the emergence of one Donald Trump. This fairy tale version of reality casts Trump as the villain who has swept in to capitalize on voter frustration with Obama’s alleged weakness, lawlessness and rampant liberalism.

The villain must be stopped or the Republican Party will be destroyed. Or so we are told.

The old saw that you have to first acknowledge that you have a problem to solve the problem applies here. What the GOP "leaders" refuse to accept is that Trump is not the problem. They are.

The dissatisfaction among a large cohort of GOP voters is directly attributable to their unhappiness with a party that they believe does not represent their interests. In exit polls, high percentages of GOP voters registered displeasure with their leadership. In Tennessee, 58% of Republican voters said they felt “betrayed” by their leaders, as did 47% in New Hampshire, 52% in South Carolina and 54% in Ohio.

Those who feel betrayed have been most likely to vote for Trump. Trump has been a particular draw to white working-class voters who feel left behind economically. Such voters have been treated with dismissal and outright contempt by the GOP establishment even as this group has become more critical to Republican success. Pew reported in 2012 that “lower-income and less educated whites … have shifted substantially toward the Republican Party since 2008.”

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The fact that so many establishment types continue to blame a Democratic president for GOP primary voters disliking their own party leadership demonstrates how disconnected from reality they are, how incapable of self-examination they seem to be. This is the same detachment from reality that led them to believe wholeheartedly in 2012 that Obama would never win re-election. That led many to expect a Mitt Romney victory up to the last minute, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary. Or more recently, that led them to insist long after it was reasonable that Trump would be slain by Marco Rubio even as Rubio lost state after state.

We know that the GOP establishment is a long way from accurately diagnosing its problem because the ostensible solution it has devised is so patently self-destructive. These people are going to save the Republican Party by destroying the Republican Party. The plan is simple: Stop the person with the most votes from getting the GOP nomination through a contested convention.

What could go wrong?

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Whatever damage the Republican mandarins believe Trump will cause the GOP brand, it pales in comparison with party bigwigs overruling the will of the people to install their choice for nominee. They'd be engaging in exactly the kind of behavior that led voters to be drawn to an anti-establishment candidate like Trump in the first place. Trump voters would be understandably enraged, and it’s hard to imagine they'd turn out for whoever was installed as the GOP standard-bearer for the general election. Moreover, some portion of non-Trump voters would likely recoil at the party's heavy-handedness.

A more useful response would be for the GOP to take a look in the mirror, stop blaming others and own up to the facts.

Sorry, Republican Party: You built this.

Kirsten Powers writes often for USA TODAY and is author of The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech.

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