GOP’s Stop-Trump fever breaks

[Indy Texas]

This is where there is a difference between the establishment and the conservative movement.  The establishment might be willing to cut their losses, lose in 2016, but keep Congress, and win in 2020.  But, both that and the mere idea of Trump being the GOP nominee is unacceptable to the conservative movement.

What, pray tell, is the "conservative movement"? (especially as a monolithic entity)

-College Republicans
-Employees of conservative think tanks and lobbying shops
-Writers at National Review and other conservative magazines
-Campaign consultants for the Republican Party

The first three are opposed to Trump because he's not a "conservative" in the hagiographic, idealized way that Ronald Reagan allegedly was. (They never do explain why taxes went up under Reagan or why the deficit increased under Reagan.)

The fourth are opposed to Trump because they don't think he can win and will drag downticket candidates down with him.

[Mr. Morden]

I bet the "actual" #NeverTrump crowd isn't that big.

You mean among party elites or among “regular voters”?  There’s a decent-sized list of party elites who’ve said they’re not going to vote for Trump in the GE, which we’re tracking in this thread:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=230807.0

Of course, they’re vastly outnumbered by those who’ve said they will vote for him, sure.  Though I do think that #NeverTrump will grow before it shrinks, as many congressional Republicans have declined to answer whether they’d vote for Trump in the GE or not, I’m assuming that while most of them will do so, at least *some* won’t.  Whether they later flip-flop and decide to back him anyway, I don’t know.

Among regular voters…I still think it’s hard to say.  For a major party nominee, Trump is unusually divisive within his own party.  Not just among elites, but among ordinary voters.  People talk about the PUMAs, but that was different.  Obama never had unfavorable numbers among Clinton supporters nearly as bad as Trump does now among Cruz and Kasich supporters.

I think many are currently underestimating how much the media is going to use the post-Trump wrapping up the nomination months to talk about all the divisions within the party.  We’ll have to see how much air time folks like Romney, Baker, Sasse, etc. get, and to what extent they’re interested in speaking up.  We’ll have to see how much elite resistance to voting for Trump in the GE trickles down to regular voters.  And we’ll have to see if any 3rd party materializes, or if there’s at least some kind of “Write in X” movement.  I think it’s too early to say.

Incidentally, Megan McArdle posted an interesting set of testimonials from #NeverTrump Republicans (ordinary voters, not party elites) a couple of months ago:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-02-29/the-die-hard-republicans-who-say-nevertrump

[The Mikado]

Steve Deace ‎@SteveDeaceShow
Apparently @secupp has a #NeverTrump list to see who keeps their word to the end. You can sign my name in blood.
3:46 PM - 3 May 2016

I mean, say what you will, but I'm not seeing Steve Deace, Ben Shapiro, Dana Loesch, Rick Wilson, Liz Mair, Amanda Carpenter, John Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg, or the rest of that "Never Trump" gang changing their tune.

Their problem is that they're about a dozen irrelevant people, but they're also pretty much the sum total of the #NeverTrump movement, a movement that never really existed outside of the conservative press.

There's all this "Will #NeverTrump bend the knee" talk and I really don't think it will. The problem is that #NeverTrump probably never hit the triple digits in terms of actual membership.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

I personally always viewed NeverTrump as about the primaries and never took seriously the idea that they would stay home in November.

[Fuzzy Bear]

This is where there is a difference between the establishment and the conservative movement.  The establishment might be willing to cut their losses, lose in 2016, but keep Congress, and win in 2020.  But, both that and the mere idea of Trump being the GOP nominee is unacceptable to the conservative movement.

I think that the "conservative movement" has an extremely inflated opinion of itself.  I mean this in the sense that they thought that "movement conservatives" were a majority of the GOP to the point where Movement Conservatism and Being a REAL Republican were one and the same. 

The events of this campaign season prove differently.  Notice that no one is really calling Trump a RINO (other than Ted Cruz, and he stopped that tack a while ago).  That's because the GOP Establishment and the Movement Conservatives alike have learned that a MAJORITY (probably a LARGE majority) of individual Republicans disagree with the party on at least one major issue that defined Republican Orthodoxy.  Now, both sides are paying the price.  Trump's supporters have, for the most part, been Republicans for a long time, but they have been marginalized withing the GOP, and remained so until a character such as Trump was able to attract them and get them to vote for him. 

In a real way, the GOP Establishment and Movement Conservatives are both reaping the rewards of extreme partisanship and ideological politics.  Had they been just a wee bit more flexible in this regard, they may have been able to convinced the rank and file to support John Kasich, who still polls best of all candidates, period, in GE polls.  Of course, John Kasich, THE John Kasich who hosted Heartland on FOX News, the network where Establishment GOP and Movement Conservative GOP live in harmony, was considered a MODERATE or even a LIBERAL or a RINO.  The GOP race was set up to where the issue of having "conservative bona fides" ensured that the "conservative" in the race would be a man who was considered the least likeable Presidential candidate in a half-century (Ted Cruz).

[Maxwell]

I personally always viewed NeverTrump as about the primaries and never took seriously the idea that they would stay home in November.

Then it isn't Never. Unless you don't know what the word "never" means.