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60%
Of GOP voters think that if no candidate wins a majority of the delegates in the first ballot at the Republican convention, then the delegates should vote for “the candidate with the most support in the primaries and caucuses,” according to a new CNN/ORC poll.
4.8 million
Amount raised by the Anti-Trump PAC, Bloomberg reports. “The prospect of a Donald Trump nomination is accomplishing what a diverse and talented field of Republican presidential contenders could not: uniting the party’s big-money donor establishment,” the New York Times reports. “Some of the wealthiest conservative givers in the country are helping pay for a series of last-ditch attacks to wound Mr. Trump, disclosures filed on Sunday night revealed, even after previously backing rival Republican candidates. And officials involved with the political groups have made clear that they are aggressively raising more money to fight Mr. Trump, hoping to deprive him of enough delegates to win the Republican nomination outright. That would set the stage for a contested convention in July.”
It’s 2 a.m. The bar is closing. Republicans have had a series of strong and nasty Trump cocktails. Suddenly Ted Cruz is beginning to look kind of attractive. At least he’s sort of predictable, and he doesn’t talk about his sexual organs in presidential debates! … Well, Republicans, have your standards really fallen so low so fast? Are you really that desperate? Can you remember your 8 p.m. selves, and all the hope you had about entering a campaign with such a deep bench of talented candidates?
He is a total moron. He is the worst.
— Donald Trump, saying that Republicans “are never going to win another presidential election listening to Karl Rove,” Bloomberg reports.
If you nominate Trump and Cruz, I think you get the same outcome. Whether it’s death by being shot or poisoning doesn’t really matter. I don’t think the outcome will be substantially different.
— Sen. Lindsey Graham, quoted by the New York Times.
For Republicans, the only good outcome of Trump vs. Cruz is for both to lose. The future of the party as the carrier of a humane, inclusive conservatism now depends on some viable choice beyond them.
— Michael Gerson, who worked with Ted Cruz on George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign, writes in the Washington Post that “he is actually more of a demagogue than an ideologue.”
42%
Of registered voters said the primary race has made them feel less favorable about the GOP, compared to just 19% who said they feel more favorable, according to the latest NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll. Thirty-eight percent said the brawl for the Republican nomination hasn’t changed their view of the party as a whole.
1,200
Number of full-time, year-round staffers in 107 offices nationwide that Charles and David Koch have quietly assembled, piece by piece, to create a privatized political and policy advocacy operation like no other in American history that today includes hundreds of donors as well. “The political machine that Charles Koch launched a dozen years ago in a Chicago hotel conference room with 16 other rich conservatives has exploded in size and influence in the past few elections and now eclipses the official GOP in key areas,” Politico reports. That’s about 3½ times as many employees as the Republican National Committee and its congressional campaign arms had on their main payrolls last month.”
79%
Of GOP insiders told Politico it would be either “impossible” or “very difficult” for the Republican nominee to win the general election if Donald Trump launches a third-party bid, based on electoral math and a general inability for the party’s nominee to focus on the Democratic competitor.
There’s the intellectual conservative movement, a decades-long project of institutional actors like the Heritage Foundation and the American Conservative Union, which seeks to push the party toward strict adherence with a set of ideas about limited government, strong national defense, and the traditional family. And then there is the populist, nativist strain, which isn’t really about ideas so much as a raw appeal to emotion. Trump’s dominance of the primary field is forcing the party to confront a frightening prospect: that the populist bloc may be the bigger of the two.
