(Brendan McDermid/Reuters)

But Republicans could rally around the anger he’s harnessed under a Clinton presidency.

Pollster and author Kristen Soltis Anderson looks beyond November and fears that even after another bitter defeat, Republicans won’t be able to resolve the long-standing internal debate about whether their failures in presidential elections reflect a deflated conservative base or the GOP’s inability to expand its tent.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Trump’s nomination victory is that he won while not quite pleasing either side of that debate. He’s a walking wedge issue and an exceptionally hard sell to Latinos, women, and young voters; he embodies everything the Republican National Committee’s “Growth and Opportunity Project” report of 2013 urged the party to avoid. But at the same time, a Ted Cruz style full-spectrum conservative looks at Trump and sees a Planned Parenthood-touting, irreligious, former gun-control supporter with a long history of donating to Democratic candidates.


“Trump will blame #NeverTrump for his loss. But the two halves of #NeverTrump will hold one another responsible for his rise,” Anderson writes.

The irony is that right now, both Trump fans and #NeverTrump leaders have incentive to overstate their numbers and influence. But there’s not yet clear evidence that #NeverTrump Republicans are numerous enough to swing the election; the GOP has largely unified behind Trump. In Public Policy Polling’s latest, 83 percent of Republicans are backing Trump, while 82 percent of Democrats back Hillary Clinton. Some recent polls are showing signs of Republicans drifting away from Trump; in Quinnipiac, 84 percent of Republicans support Trump, while 89 percent of Democrats support Clinton, and in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 85 percent of Democrats support Clinton, while 79 percent of Republicans support Trump.

RELATED: How Should Conservatives Respond to the Age of Trump?



The bigger problem for Republicans is that a presidential year electorate is almost certain to have more Democrats than Republicans; in 2012 the exit polls split 38 percent Democratic, 32 percent Republican, 29 percent independent. There just aren’t enough self-identified Republican voters to win a national election by themselves. And Trump has so far failed to demonstrate the crossover appeal to Democrats that his enthusiastic fans insisted he could muster.

A lot of other theories about the GOP’s needs will be tested by the Trump nomination. Will a Republican candidate who denounces trade deals do better in Rust Belt states such as Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania? The polls in those states show a range, but there’s some evidence to suggest that is indeed the case. Will a Republican candidate who has no real plausible ties to religious and social conservatives have a tougher time winning a state such as Utah? So far, yeah, it seems he will. Do changing demographics in states such as North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas leave a Republican nominee less room for error? The early signs point to yes.

#share#Anderson’s grim portrait of a post-Trump landscape skips over one key point: Defeat in November would probably remove Trump himself as a serious option for leadership of the party and remove pure “Trump-ism” – to the extent his philosophy can be clearly defined – as a viable path to victory.

Trump didn’t create the populism that will drive the future Republican party; it’s a reaction to the consequence-free Obama years.

The style that has helped fuel Trump success will be hard for many candidates to emulate. Some ambitious, previously unknown figures will no doubt try, but it’s likely to work out badly for them. If the average GOP House candidate said of a primary rival, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?” as Trump said of Carly Fiorina, they would be toast. If the average Republican senatorial candidate called an Indiana-born judge they disliked “the Mexican,” they probably wouldn’t be able to just wait out the storm. No gubernatorial candidate is going to go on at length about how Heidi Klum is no longer “a ten.”


And the path for those looking to copy Trump’s message is no clearer. The average anti-immigration, anti-free-trade populist doesn’t have a prime-time reality show on NBC, or get invited onto the various network late-night shows, or get asked to host Saturday Night Live. Trump is a celebrity, with a long history of surprising, controversial, and attention-grabbing behavior; this is his shtick. A lesser-known, less-wealthy figure trying the same is just going to come across as a nut.


#related#Trump didn’t create the populism that will drive the future Republican party; it’s a reaction to the consequence-free Obama years. Americans have endured eight years of lawlessness: An IRS targeting Americans for their political beliefs goes unpunished; the attorney general shrugs at the government sending guns to Mexican drug cartels; millions of Office of Personnel Management records get hacked; the Department of Veterans Affairs lets veterans die while waiting for care; and the Secretary of State can keep classified material on her insecure private server without legal consequence. The Progressive Aristocracy has been formalized: Environmentalists live in giant houses and fly private jets; gun-control proponents travel with armed bodyguards, voucher opponents send their kids to private schools; and minimum-wage-hike advocates pay their staff less than the minimum wage.

Increasingly, it seems likely that Trumpism will be repudiated in November, and that rather than reconstituting it, the GOP will rally around staunch opposition to the manifestly un-American philosophy represented by the status quo – the idea that political, economic, and cultural elites are free from the constraints of the law – under a President Hillary Clinton.


— Jim Geraghty is the senior political correspondent for National Review.