Parade of seasoned Republicans lining up against nominee points to ‘ideological schism’ – and dismal poll numbers don’t give much cause for hope

Some Republicans fear Donald Trump is reaching the point of no return as party stalwarts turn against him and his national poll numbers continue to plunge.



Susan Collins of Maine, the most senior Republican woman in the Senate, on Monday announced her intention not to vote for her party’s nominee, while 50 of the GOP’s former national security officials signed an open letter calling Trump the most reckless candidate in history.

Opinion polls show Hillary Clinton consolidating a significant lead. A Fox News survey shows her up by 10 percentage points; an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll puts her nine points ahead; and a Washington Post/ABC News survey gives her a margin of eight points. Real Clear Politics’ current polling average gives Clinton a lead of 7.5 points.

“There’s a lot of writing on the wall,” said Rick Tyler, former spokesman for Trump’s Republican primary rival Ted Cruz. “Three weeks after the conventions, the candidate leading the polls usually wins. There’s still a week to go until we reach that point, but I don’t see what’s going to move 10 points.”

Three weeks after the conventions, the candidate leading the polls usually wins Rick Tyler, former spokesman for Ted Cruz

There are growing signs that Republicans who sense Trump cannot win might move to ostracise him, whether out of principle or self-preservation or both. Tyler added: “The peeling off is remarkable. You have a conservative, Ted Cruz, and now the most moderate Republican in the Senate, Susan Collins, not endorsing Trump.

“It’s very problematic. You have Republicans on both ends of the spectrum distancing themselves from Trump. It represents an ideological schism; the party is substantially divided.”

A generation after the so-called “Reagan Democrats” ensured a landslide victory for Ronald Reagan, some commentators now speculate that “Clinton Republicans” could produce a similarly one-sided result, putting once safe states such as Arizona and Georgia into play.

Collins, who is not seeking re-election this year, is the sixth out of 54 Senate Republicans to say they will not vote for Trump. She explained that the tipping point in her decision was his recent attacks on the family of fallen US army captain Humayun Khan. “He does not have the restraint and the consideration and the judgment and the knowledge to handle those dangerous events with which presidents are inevitably confronted,” Collins told CNN.

The senator, a close ally of Senate colleague John McCain, added that she would not vote for Clinton but had yet to decide whether to vote for the Libertarian party or write in a name on the ballot paper. “I have always supported my party’s nominee. That’s what made this decision so difficult, but in the end I just cannot support Donald Trump. I do not believe that he is the president that we need at this time in our country’s history and I believe that in many ways he is antithetical to the values of the Republican party.”

Following hard upon the joint letter from former national security officials, it was the last thing Trump needed as he tried to get his campaign back on track with a speech in Detroit setting out his economic platform. This followed a wretched run of gaffes following a Republican national convention last month that had been billed as a moment of party unity.

Instead, the trickle of defections threatens to turn into a stampede. Meg Whitman, the technology executive and former Republican candidate for governor in California, is backing Clinton. On Tuesday, William Ruckelshaus and William Reilly, former administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency under Republican presidents, also endorsed the Democrat.

“Republicans have a long history of support for the environment dating back to Theodore Roosevelt,” they said in a joint statement. “Donald Trump threatens to destroy that legacy of respect for the environment and protection of public health ... That is why as Republicans, we support Hillary Clinton for president.”

Four Republican former secretaries of state – James Baker, Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice and George Shultz – have yet to announce their intentions. None responded to requests for comment from the Guardian on Tuesday.

And Republicans facing tight congressional races in November are weighing whether to back or sack Trump. Colorado congressman Mike Coffman has launched a TV advert in which he promises to “stand up” to the nominee. “People ask me, ‘What do you think about Trump?’” the Iraq war veteran says. “Honestly, I don’t care for him much.”

But some in the party argue that the divisions cannot be blamed on Trump alone. Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the Guardian via email: “The cracks have been there a long time. If Trump were not the nominee you would still have tensions, they would just manifest differently (as we saw in 2012).

“Trump’s strongest argument is, ‘the ones who are not supporting me are the very ones who created the mess I’m trying to fix’. There will be more defections – likely by people who didn’t support Trump in the first place. For Trump he now has to figure out how to navigate around those headlines – not be creating negative ones of his own – and resecure his base support and grow it with independent voters he may have lost in the past week.”

George Ajjan, a Republican strategist, said: “As bad as the Republican convention was for Trump, he still managed to get a bounce. This suggests that there is a broad constituency for Trump’s anti-establishment brand of politics, which should not be underestimated.

“But the infighting is a major distraction. Normally a candidate seeks endorsements from neutral figures outside of his party. Clinton is doing this successfully but Trump’s energy is wasted on internal rebellion. To be fair, some of these defections on the part of senators in close races reflect their own self-preservation instincts and not necessarily a systemic breakdown of party unity.

“A worst-case scenario would be a third party plucking away a prominent former Republican senator or governor as its [presidential] nominee in a bid to steal away disgruntled establishment voters. That would mean open war and a total collapse of party unity.”

On Monday, a former CIA agent, Evan McMullin, launched an independent run for president in the hope of offering conservatives an alternative to Trump. He has already missed the deadline to get on the ballot in numerous states, but, as a Mormon from Utah, could hurt Trump among Republicans there.

Even three months out, some pundits believe it is all over bar the shouting. Stuart Rothenberg, an analyst and publisher of the Rothenberg Political Report newsletter, wrote in the Washington Post: “Three months from now, with the 2016 presidential election in the rear-view mirror, we will look back and agree that the presidential election was over on Aug. 9th.

“A dispassionate examination of the data, combined with a cold-blooded look at the candidates, the campaigns and presidential elections, produces only one possible conclusion: Hillary Clinton will defeat Donald Trump in November, and the margin isn’t likely to be as close as Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney.”

But one recent ray of light for Trump came when he was endorsed by George P Bush, the Texas land commissioner and son of former candidate Jeb Bush, who clashed bitterly with Trump during the Republican primaries.

And Trump’s campaign can still hope that he will be viewed as the lesser of two evils by those who have long been hostile to Clinton. On Tuesday, Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee’s chief strategist, issued an email headed “We Can’t Afford The Consequences Of A Clinton Presidency”, which spent 10 paragraphs attacking her record and only mentioned Trump in the final sentence.

The nominee himself suggested on Tuesday there would be no major shift of strategy. “I think it’s just, you know, steadiness,” Trump told Fox Business. “And it’s just doing what I’m doing.”