https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/campaigns-elections/how-much-damage-will-domnald-trump-do/Trump Takes the GOP Down With HimNOAH ROTHMAN /
OCT. 9, 2016
The dam has broken. The center could not hold. One after the other on Saturday, Republicans withdrew their support for Donald Trump. Many called on him to drop out of the race and cede the nomination to his running mate. The Republican National Committee has all but put its operations in support of Trump’s candidacy on pause. The party is projecting chaos, and parties in chaos don’t win presidential elections. Trump is unlikely to become the 45th President of the United States, but how Republicans farther down the ballot will perform remains an open question. How much damage Trump will do to the Republican Party’s electoral prospects, both inadvertently and intentionally, is the most urgent unknown of the 2016 campaign.
Quietly and without fanfare, the Republican National Committee conceded the presidential race on Saturday. While the news was dominated by Republican officeholders and conservative Trump supporters begging the party’s presidential nominee to drop out of the race, the RNC was dismantling the operation it had built to help Trump win in November.
In an email, the committee announced it had suspended the operations of the “Victory” program’s mailing operations. Later, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus reportedly told party officials to redirect funding and resources to the GOP’s Senate and House races. The practical results of that decision means that the committees will now be turning out Hillary Clinton voters if those voters also indicate that they will support Republican candidates. For a campaign that has outsourced its get-out-the-vote efforts to down-ballot candidates and the party committees, this is a fatal blow. No one will admit it, but the GOP has given up on Donald Trump.
Just because a party that never particularly loved its nominee has given up on him doesn’t mean that the Republican Party’s voting base has, too. Trump’s support might not be particularly wide, but it’s a mile deep. The celebrity candidate’s voters would walk over broken glass to vote for him, but many are surely less enthusiastic about voting for the GOP’s candidates for House and Senate. The Republican Party has all but openly turned on its nominee, and that will almost certainly depress the enthusiasm of Republican voters. How much remains to be seen, but even a little reduced base turnout could threaten the Republican Party’s prospects for holding its majorities in both chambers of Congress. Yet the goodwill the party’s candidates could generate among centrist crossover voters for distancing themselves from Trump could minimize the damage done to the GOP’s candidates as a result of reduced turnout.
This scenario presumes, however, that Donald Trump doesn’t decide to burn the party to the ground on his way out the door. Trump ran as an outsider with no affinity for the Republican Party. Many of his voters share his antipathy for the GOP. Already, Trump is not holding back his criticism of the Republican Party’s leaders, and his surrogates are telegraphing their intention to run against the party itself in the final days of the campaign. “[Former New York City Mayor Rudy] [Giuliani, leaving Trump Tower, signals Trump is ready to wage war against his party,” CNN’s Manu Raju revealed. “‘This is basically the insiders versus the outsiders.’” Trump’s surrogates have now been ordered to attack their fellow Republicans in the harshest of terms.
Donald Trump is not known for admitting his mistakes or accepting blame when things around him start going pear shaped. The Republican presidential nominee will need a scapegoat to blame for his likely loss at the polls, and the GOP provides a readymade target that his voters are already predisposed to loathe. What if Donald Trump decides to spend the remaining days of a losing campaign insulating himself from criticism by attacking the Republican Party? Such a course would all but guarantee the GOP’s loss of its Senate majority and would likely threaten the party’s House majority, too. The damage such a campaign could do to cohesion within the party’s voting base might be irreparable.
But what other option does Trump have? He is likely to lose in November, and it’s hard to imagine he will go quiet into that good night. The Republican Party now provides a perfect foil for Trump to attack and upon which he can lay the blame for his failure at the polls, breaking the party apart in the process. The damage the GOP’s presidential nominee could do to the party on his way out the door could be catastrophic.
