Movement Conservatism and Angering Liberals

[_honorentheos]

What interests me in revisiting it is how the overrun of the party by the fringe took them by surprise. Rather than being a train moving closer on a track that was wrongly assumed to be further way, it is more akin to a building up of flood waters behind a dam those responsible for maintaining felt was easily up to the task of containing -- and then it blew wide open. Yet even then, if we look at Trump's progress in 2016 there was constant denial right up until Ted Cruz was defeated.

Basically, this strategy locked in a solid 30-something % of Republican primary voters for Trump the moment he declared for the election in the way he did. It wasn't a solid majority but the rest of the party was so divided his ability to count on that 30% paved the way for his victory. Had the party taken him and the threat of being overrun by crazy seriously early on, they could have consolidated support around a different candidate and likely stopped him from getting the nomination. It was a feature of the Republican convention, where attempts to oppose his nomination were visible but overshadowed by the party's need to win an election regardless of who was the candidate. Today, this is little more than Jeff Flake hate two years later. He's normalized.

That should give Democrats and the rest of the world pause because it's exactly where we are now at the national level. Trump has his core 30-to-40 something % of supporters who embody this liberal-hate and eat up Trump taking on this mantel so blatantly and openly without pretense to have a core ideology that guides him. And Democrats as well as never-Trump Republicans can't believe he can win again in 2020 precisely because of the idea's cartoonish nature. Yet his support is rock solid. That means there is a real potential to not consolidate against him because of other differences until it becomes too late, too many voters are turned off from participating, and those who remain are too ideologically divided to rally together because cartoon villains can't be taken seriously enough to imagine they are the bigger threat. He won in 2016 primarily because states that went for Sanders rather than Clinton couldn't get the Democrats to rally behind her. The margins of his victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin show how little divisiveness it took.

[_EAllusion]

Ted Cruz is a dangerous radical himself, though. One of the things that really stands out in the 2016 Republican primary was what a complete clown show it was with anything resembling a "normal" candidate not getting the time of day.

[_honorentheos]

Ted Cruz is a dangerous radical himself, though. One of the things that really stands out in the 2016 Republican primary was what a complete clown show it was with anything resembling a "normal" candidate not getting the time of day.

Oh, I absolutely agree that Cruz was, and is, a dangerous theocrat. When it came down to Cruz, Trump and John Kasich there were no pieces on the table that left me thinking the world would be ok regardless of whether the Democrats won or the Republicans did. McCain and Romney weren't candidates I would support but I didn't view them as actually threatening. It makes it all the more crazy that when you wrote the OP of this thread the conventional wisdom was still viewing the 2016 election as almost certainly a Bush v. Clinton election. One has to wonder if that early forecasting colored public sentiment and made that outcome impossible which fed the clownish outcome that actually occurred?