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- 2 hours ago ... News Analysis: As Donald Trump Rolls Up Victories, the G.O.P. Split Widens to a Chasm. Home » Political ... News Analysis. Donald J. Trump before his news conference Tuesday night at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla.
As Donald Trump Rolls Up Victories, the G.O.P. Split Widens to a Chasm
Democrats are falling in line. Republicans are falling apart.
The
most consequential night of voting so far in the presidential campaign
crystallized, in jarring and powerful fashion, the remarkably divergent
fortunes of the two major parties vying for the White House.
The steady and seemingly inexorable unification of the Democratic Party behind Hillary Clinton stands in striking contrast with the rancorous and widening schisms within the Republican Party over the dominance of Donald J. Trump, who swept contests from the Northeast to the Deep South on Tuesday.
Now, as the parties gaze ahead to the fall, they are awakening to the advantages of consensus and the perils of chaos.
“If
the Republican Party were an airplane, and you were looking out a
passenger window, you would see surface pieces peeling off and wonder if
one of the wings or engines was next,” said Tim Pawlenty, the former
governor of Minnesota and a Republican candidate for president in 2012.
Even
as he rolled up commanding victories in seven states on Tuesday, Mr.
Trump confronted a loud and persistent refusal to rally around him as
leading figures in his own party denounced his slow disavowal of white
supremacists, elected officials boldly discouraged constituents from
backing him, and lifelong Republicans declared that they would boycott
the election if he is their nominee.
Turning Out on Super Tuesday
CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
“I
could not in good conscience vote for Trump under any circumstance,”
said Blake Lichty, 33, a Republican who worked in the George W. Bush
administration and now lives near Atlanta.
“If this becomes the Trump Party,” he added, “we’re going to lose a lot of people.”
Not
since the rupture of 1964, when conservatives seized power from their
moderate rivals and nominated Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona, has a major
party faced such a crisis of identity.
“History
is repeating itself,” said the historian Richard Norton Smith. “The
party changed then as permanently and profoundly as can be in politics,
effectively becoming two parties.”
Even
as Mr. Trump’s performance Tuesday illustrated his strength, Senator
Ted Cruz’s success in Texas and Oklahoma underscored the broader
Republican dilemma: There is no consensus among Republicans about who
could be Mr. Trump’s most formidable opponent, and there is probably not
enough time for one to emerge.
The
cultural and ideological fissures opening in the party could take a
generation to patch, according to Republican leaders, historians and
strategists — and many are convinced that Mr. Trump will guarantee
Democrats another four years in the White House. “Nominating Donald
Trump would be the best gift the Republican Party could give to Hillary
Clinton,” Bobby Jindal, the former Louisiana governor, said in an
interview on Tuesday.
Democrats
are now poised to exploit a fortuitous intersection of forces: an
improving economy with low unemployment; a Democratic president with a
nearly 50 percent approval rating; a Supreme Court battle in which
Republicans are energizing liberal voters with vows of obstruction; and
now, what is likely to be a relatively smooth nomination process that
will give Mrs. Clinton a chance to bring together the party’s disparate
strands.
Of
course, Mrs. Clinton, should she prevail in the primary campaign, has
plenty of repair work left to do: wooing the thousands of liberal
supporters whose feelings of alienation with the Democratic
establishment drew them to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. She began
that effort on Tuesday night, in a victory speech that focused heavily
on the Sanders campaign theme of economic justice. And there is little
indication, so far, that these voters will spurn Mrs. Clinton for a
Republican.
And
Mrs. Clinton needs to navigate a series of potentially damning
investigations into her use of a private email server that have raised
enduring questions about her judgment and management. Those inquiries
have introduced a level of unpredictability that her campaign can do
little to control.
Super Tuesday Speeches From Candidates
Watch highlights of speeches from the Republican and Democratic candidates after the results came in.
Publish Date March 1, 2016.
Photo by Sam Hodgson for The New York Times.
Watch in Times Video »
But
officials in both parties acknowledge that Democrats are now better
positioned to capture the presidency in November.“The Democrats are
having a loud squabble, but the party is broadly unified behind certain
themes,” said David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist. “The Republicans
are engaged in a full-out civil war, fundamentally riven by mistrust,
and it is very hard to see how they put the pieces back together once
this fight is done.”
With
every nasty turn of the Republican nominating contest, Mrs. Clinton’s
position seems to strengthen. Day by day, the anti-Trump forces are
marshaling, vowing to drag the primary process out until the convention
in July.
In
an extraordinary show of defiance toward a potential presidential
nominee, Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, just wrote an
open letter to Trump supporters explaining why he could not support the
real estate mogul should he become the party’s nominee. “I sincerely
hope we select one of the other G.O.P. candidates,” Mr. Sasse wrote,
pledging not to vote for Mrs. Clinton. “But if Donald Trump ends up as
the nominee, conservatives will need to find a third option.”
In
the past 48 hours, Representative Scott Rigell of Virginia appealed to
fellow Republicans in his state to reject Mr. Trump, calling him “a
bully unworthy of our nomination,” and Gov. Susana Martinez of New
Mexico would not commit to supporting him if he won the nomination.
Speaker
Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the party’s vice-presidential nominee four
years ago, took the unusual step of scolding the Republican front-runner
from the halls of the Capitol building for failing to reject the
support of David Duke. “If a person wants to be the nominee of the
Republican Party,” Mr. Ryan said, “there can be no evasion and no games.
They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry.”
In
a discussion with little modern precedent, several high-profile
Republicans are expressing uncertainty about how aggressively they would
support Mr. Trump as the nominee, suggesting they might need to lose
the campaign to save the party.
“President
Trump, which I don’t believe is possible, would be an unmitigated
disaster and would set the party back decades,” said Mike Murphy, a
longtime Republican strategist who oversaw the “super PAC”
that supported Jeb Bush this year. “It’s like a computer designed him
to lose elections for us. Who does he offend? College-educated white
women and Latinos, the groups we need to win.”
But any move to deny Mr. Trump the nomination risks further provoking the angry movement that he has ignited.
Heather
Cox Richardson, a Boston College professor and the author of a new
history of the Republican Party, predicts a violent rupture that cleaves
the party in two: a hard-line conservatism, as embodied by Pat
Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Mr. Trump, and an old-fashioned strain of
moderate Republicanism that recalls Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight
Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller. “It is going to be really ugly,” she
said.
For
now, the revulsion for Mr. Trump could produce a nightmare scenario for
Republicans on Election Day: abandonment by rank-and-file voters who,
like a growing number of party leaders, cannot stomach the concept of
the mogul as their standard-bearer. “I think it’s a sad day for the
Republican Party,” said David Phillips, 72, an executive recruiter and
longtime Republican from Avon, Conn., who called Mr. Trump “a tremendous
divider.”
“If he were the nominee,” he said, reluctantly, “I would probably vote for Hillary.”
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