Revenge of the Moderate Republicans

There are only two scenarios which could possibly lead to a Donald Trump victory on November 8th.  The first is the one I'm most terrified of; someone assassinating, or gravely wounding, Hillary Clinton.  I'm very concerned nefarious elements are working on a plan to attempt this as we speak, and being from Minnesota, having lived through the tragic loss of Sen. Paul Wellstone, a major party would have a tremendous problem getting a national write in campaign launched (and what do you do with all the votes already cast for her, including mine?).

The other path to a Trump win would be massive voter fraud perpetrated by hackers/Russia.  I still don't think it'd work, as too many states have a paper trail which would negate any electronic discrepancies.  Plus a lot of the states without a paper tail are already safe Republican.

In two weeks, God willing, Hillary Clinton will become the next President of the United States.  We don't need to wait for the ashes of the Trump ticket to settle to figure out how the GOP got into this mess.  It's a mess they themselves created.  They've unintentionally formed a perfect storm which will haunt their party for decades to come, or might even destroy the party from within.

The first mistake they made is one I've brought up numerous times, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove welcoming in the extremist far right as major players in the Republican party.  They needed foot soldiers.  The extremists needed validation.  Cheney and Rove embraced a modern GOP platform tentpole, short term gains over long term consequences.  They knew the ultimate result of their decision would come to light well after W. was out of office.  Ron Paul, the retired Libertarian-Republican Congressman, realized a far right extremist establishment candidate could take over the party by acting as a pied piper, driving the extremist's decisions at primaries and caucuses, where a political party is most betrothed to their extremist elements.  In 2008, he began to assume control; 2012, he gained control, and Trump grabbed the controls in 2016, fulfilling Cheney and Rove's prophecy of ignorance.

The second mistake the GOP made comes from Reagan; 'Never Trust Government.'  This was always an amazingly foolish mantra for any political party, and now the GOP machine seems to have a less qualified political candidate every election.  Look at the Presidential tickets for the GOP since Ron Paul took over.  In 2008, Senator McCain had to take on a wildly under-qualified, but outside of mainstream politics, Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, who felt foreign policy experience had to do with line of sight visual identification, and who couldn't name one magazine she'd ever read.  Then in 2012, the top of the ticket had a 50/50 candidate, with Mitt Romney portraying himself as more of a businessman than a seasoned politician.  Now the top of the ticket is Trump, someone with zero political experience.  For most Americans, it's an unappealing, and mildly terrifying, quality.  For his followers, it's what makes him perfect.  With the GOP having a candidate with more minuses than pluses, the line between governmental stooge and outsider politician are getting blurred.  Republicans are having trouble identifying the party members they can trust.

The vast majority of this country is not receptive to extremists, so when any Republican has to distance themselves from the party's extremist Presidential candidate, they put a target on their back.  If Trump represents the perfect 'outside of government' candidate, and the GOP has a generation of members who deeply believe government is the problem, it becomes impossible for a sitting Senator, Congressperson or Governor to disagree with the top of the ticket without immediately becoming a politician who represents the evil government empire; more against the Republicans than for them.

Thirdly, the GOP's war on the media has come back to bite them in the ass.  Similarly to the never trust government ideology, hating on a portion the media was also a dangerous standard to try to ascertain.  It worked fine when you just had to vilify CNN and MSNBC, or stifle the handful of non-conservative controlled radio networks and newspapers.  Sure the online world presented a differing opinion, but the tried and true Republicans were committed to listen to only the media which they were told to listen to.

Even far right media in this country was realizing Trump was a mistake back in the Fall of 2015.  They've been able to overlook sub standard Republicans of the past, but it becomes very difficult to do so when the problem child is a Presidential candidate; a person so bombastic, an attention whore screaming on the biggest political stage.  They HAD TO cover him, and even they can't candy coat his mistakes.  Once Fox News and their ilk started reporting on Trump in a less than rosy demeanor, they themselves became part of the media they had trained the Republicans to hate.  Now rank and file Republicans can't use their biggest megaphones to wrangle the Republican voters back in.

The final mistake the Republicans made seemed initially to be a good idea.  Make all Republican voters loyal to the entire GOP ticket, top to bottom.  By removing any individual thought, taking away the ability of GOP voters to weigh individual candidates on their own merit, they've created a no win situation.  Republicans will either blindly vote for a straight party ticket, or, if the Republican hates Trump, they might not vote at all, or (GASP) vote for another party, maybe even Hillary!  Some will skip the first ballot question, voting all R's afterwards, but not too many.  They don't know how anymore.

Don't get me wrong, Trump will indeed get a shocking amount of votes in November, but referring back to the title of this piece, his undoing will be at the hands of the Moderate Republicans, the same moderates the GOP has made persona non grata within their own party.  If Moderate Republicans were behind Trump, this would be a nail biter.  The Christian Right, the Fiscal Conservatives, and even the Reagan Republicans will probably all blindly vote for Trump, but most Moderates don't want anything to do with a sexual assault bragging, lewd, bloviated, ignorant, disconnected, uninformed, wealth worshipping, racist pig.  In the end, Trump's loss of the Moderate vote will lead to a blowout victory for Clinton.

Reiterating another point I've made, I have NO IDEA how the GOP gets themselves out of the vicious circle.  This isn't like the aftermath of the post 1964 election, where the GOP was able to get rid of the extremists who had infiltrated the party.  The extremists today have control of the decision making process at the state primary and caucus level.  You can't just shake that.  The GOP will try, but when they realize how hard it will be, and how long it will take, my guess is the Reagan Republicans and Moderates will decide to start a new political party, one with rules in place preventing a catastrophic mistake like 2016 from happening again, or at least not for another 160 years.