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The GOP Establishment Panics Over Trump..... And CruzThe Republican Establishment is in a panic....
...With the GOP stable cleaned, the party had new energy. Two years later the GOP won 47 House seats and increased their numbers in the Senate. Among the gubernatorial winners was a million-vote landslide in California for Ronald Reagan. Two years later Richard Nixon would become the first of four elected Republican presidents who dominated the political scene from 1968 until 2008—a stretch of forty years....
Establishment Republicans love to talk about the “Big Tent,” a phrase of my old friend the late Lee Atwater. But Lee’s idea of a Big Tent and the current GOP Establishment’s idea of a Big Tent are two very different animals. Lee made a point of doing things like attending professional wrestling matches because he loved to talk to the people in the audience—which, to say the least, were hardly country club Republicans. In 1980 Ronald Reagan made it a point to court evangelicals who, it is now long forgotten, first appeared on the national political scene in 1976 as supporters of the born-again Jimmy Carter. That approach by Reagan brought a personal and political friendship with the Reverend Jerry Falwell. The “Christian Right” or “Religious Right” as its critics called it streamed into the Big Tent, along with Reagan Democrats—and GOP landslides ensued...
The kicker? All of this “Big Tent” outreach drove the GOP Establishment of the day crazy...GOP figures who love to talk the inclusion game but when push comes to shove, they want to shove the conservative of the moment—Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and a long list of others—out of the tent...
...One of the real reasons for the Establishment GOP panic over Donald Trump is that Trump is bringing in new blood to the GOP, as Reagan himself did over the howls of the GOP Establishment of his day. A look at the internals of the new Quinnipiac shows the same phenomenon with Trump that was on display with Reagan. Trump is running away with the Tea Party vote, the self-identified “Born Again Evangelical vote,” the “Very Conservative” and “Somewhat Conservative” vote, the “Moderate to Liberal vote,” not to mention the women’s vote and the men’s vote.
...This is exactly what a Republican nominee needs to accomplish. To bring in those “outside the tent” regardless of religion, gender, race or political philosophy. Recall as well that December, 1979 Gallup poll that was published in the New York Times that had then-President Carter beating Reagan 60%-36%, with Carter pollster Pat Cadell saying he was “salivating” over all the data in the poll that showed Carter would trounce Reagan. Also in the New York Times even earlier, in February of 1978, was a cover magazine story by longtime correspondent Tom Wicker pronouncing the GOP’s “divisive right-wing may be abating and the party may be moving toward a broader middle ground.” Two years later Reagan defeated Carter in a landslide, bringing in with him the first GOP Senate in over a quarter of a century...
...Cut to today and this week’s latest Times prediction of disaster and nothing, nothing, has changed in the almost forty years since those dire predictions that Reagan would doom the GOP...
...And whatever else that long piece about panic in the GOP over Trump—and Cruz—says, that is precisely why they fear both men. Because the election of either means the status quo is toast.
- See more at:
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2015/12/the-gop-establishment-panics-over-trump-and-cruz#sthash.ImyijNNy.dpuf
