Kaufman is for Jeb Bush, who he thinks has an “off chance” to surprise in New Hampshire. The centrist candidate, by his reckoning, has won every Republican primary since 1980; Reagan was only retroactively adopted by the conservative movement, which largely worked against him at the time, according to Kaufman. “I’ve been around since 1865,” he jokes, “so I’m kind of sanguine about the whole thing.” He doesn’t believe that perhaps this year the old rules won’t apply anymore.

If Trump or Cruz does win, he will have laid bare the vacuum where once sat the Republican establishment. Yes, there are the donors, people who give the party a lot of money and think this ought to get them something in return; Trump is running against them. (No less a GOP bigwig than Charles Koch recently lamented his lack of influence on the party.) There are the lobbyists and consultants, but Trump doesn’t listen to them either. There are the elected officials, but they are held hostage by their constituents. There is no smoke-filled room where the poo-bahs could go to work out a deal and end this. In an age of radical disintermediation, parties can’t tell the people what to do. (The Democrats, it should be noted, are struggling with their own version of this same problem.)

I expected to find the establishment’s angst on display at the RNC meeting. The committee, after all, has taken as its project the improvement of the GOP’s image: After Mitt Romney lost in 2012, it commissioned a diverse group of party elders to get to the bottom of its problems. The so-called Growth and Opportunity Project, nicknamed the “autopsy,” concluded that Republicans ought to get behind immigration reform and strike a more tolerant tone in order to attract youth and minority voters. These days, that idea seems a rather distant memory, and the report mostly resurfaces when Democrats and journalists rub it in the GOP’s face.

One of the authors of the report was Henry Barbour, a Mississippi political consultant, committeeman, and scion of a prominent Republican family. Barbour backed Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who has now quit the race. I come upon him, wearing a tweed jacket and slacks, outside the hotel ballroom.

As political consultants are wont to do, Barbour emphasizes the importance of winning. “We have got to nominate someone who can beat Hillary,” he tells me. “This country is ready for change. But Trump and Cruz would have a harder time winning than other candidates who could appeal to a broader coalition.” Nonetheless, if either one is nominated, Barbour isn’t going to defect: “I’m going to support our nominee,” he says.

Not all Republicans are willing to make that commitment. The former George W. Bush aide Peter Wehner, for example, has just published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Why I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump,” putting into writing the pervasive muttering of the Beltway GOP. The readers of the Times surely eat this up, but it’s not clear whom Wehner expects to persuade. John H. Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor and chief of staff to the first President Bush, warned on television this week that Trump would “ruin the Republican Party.” At a private breakfast at the RNC meeting, Holland Redfield, a delegate from the Virgin Islands, implored his colleagues, “There is a limit to loyalty.” (Redfield videotaped himself speaking and then leaked the video to Politico.)