“When it comes to policymaking, traditional establishment priorities appear to maintain influence over agenda setting,” she wrote:

Although reforming the tax system and repealing the ACA (Obamacare) are traditional Republican priorities, these were ranked far lower, below a border wall, among Trump’s core set of supporters. So while the establishment may be hanging back such that they avoid conflicts with Trump, they are still engaged in the policymaking process.

Expanding on this theme in “Intraparty Democracy and the 2016 Election,” Julia Azari and Seth Masket, political scientists at Marquette and the University of Denver, argue that the breakdown of establishment forces has endangered the workings of the political system. Democratization, in other words, has undermined democracy:

It is not without irony that the most recent presidential election produced a result that so violated a great many substantive ideas about democracy. From his campaign promises to jail his opponent to his pre-election lamentations that the general electoral contests were rigged to his vows to strip citizens of their rights for expressing unpopular political views, Donald Trump proved to be one of the most hostile presidential candidates toward basic democratic norms in the modern age.

How “did such democratic parties produce such an anti-democratic result?” Azari and Masket ask. Their answer:

The parties’ moves toward internal party democracy, we maintain, helped create an environment in which a candidate like Trump could succeed. We believe that several aspects of party democratization are responsible for the inability of the Republican Party to thwart Trump’s candidacy.

Put another way, the demotion of Republican power brokers opened the door to the Trump presidency.

In a separate essay, “Weak parties and strong partisanship are a bad combination,” Azari wrote:

Voters do not have to listen to elite signals. Elites do not have to listen to each other’s signals. Parties have been stripped (in part by their own actions) of their ability to coordinate and bargain.

Not only have party establishments lost their ability to coordinate and bargain, but Trump has successfully pushed the Republican Party elite into a corner. As Masket wrote in an email,

Trump has access to a group of voters that they’ve been courting for decades — working class whites. They’re eager to claim the support of this demographic and, more importantly, terrified to offend it by turning on Trump.

The Trump insurgency, in this context, amounted to an internal realignment or revolution within the Republican Party. What is now the party’s largest bloc of voters — whites without college degrees — wrested power from the establishment.

Data provided to The Times by Scott Keeter, a senior survey adviser at Pew Research Center, shows that these non-college white voters cast a solid majority — 62.7 percent — of all the votes Trump received in the 2016 election.

A forthcoming study of Trump’s campaign speeches by three sociologists at Harvard — Michèle Lamont, Bo Yun Park and Elena Ayala-Hurtado — found that Trump purposely capitalized “on and appealed to workers’ desire to assert what they believe is their rightful place in the national pecking order,” including their premier status within the Republican Party.

Henry Olsen, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, explained it this way in a January 2018 essay “Hearing the People” in National Review:

Trump’s populism was simply the expression of one crucial but underrepresented element of the original conservative coalition, fighting back to achieve some measure of respect and equality.

Sarah Treul, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, suggested in an email that by failing to take a firm stand against Trump in the early stages of the Republican primaries,

the establishment may have lost its ability to be persuasive in future elections. The insurgence of inexperienced candidates will make it increasingly challenging for the establishment of either party to coordinate around one candidate even if it wants to.

All this raises a larger question: Can the Republican Party continue to function over time without an elite establishment?

Last week, in Politico, Alex Castellanos, the provocative Republican media consultant, made the intriguing argument that it is possible “to harness Trump’s base and add swing voters, even as we remain faithful to our principles.”

As a first step, Castellanos calls for the renunciation of the traditional establishment, a group that converted the Reagan revolution from a movement into a business and then into

a self-preserving racket. In 2016, the American people judged that Washington Republicans had been poisoned by their success and become the very thing they were sent to the Capitol to change.

In Castellanos’s view, the contemporary Republican Party must capitalize on Trump’s successes:

He has crushed ISIS and increased our paychecks with a tax cut. He has erased regulations that were growing Washington’s economy at the expense of our economy. He has appointed a respected Supreme Court justice and transformed the judiciary to call balls and strikes.

But the party must also steer clear of Trump’s failures:

He left behind a vicious inflationary spiral. That, alongside devouring the country’s expectations for a president’s personal conduct, may be the greatest cost of his t. rex presidency.

Permanently reorganizing the party around Trumpism will not be an easy task. Castellanos believes that Trump is likely

to be assessed as the bipolar leader he has become, both one of the worst and best presidents Americans have ever elected, perhaps the greatest president to be removed from the Oval Office in chains.

Reflecting on the tumult, a Republican strategist who has been involved in campaigns at every level for more than 35 years and who is a dues-paying member of the establishment (and thus did not want his name used to avoid alienating his clients), expressed the contradictions of contemporary Republicanism with precision: