{"id":91069,"date":"2016-03-23T16:03:03","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T00:03:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=91069"},"modified":"2016-03-23T16:03:03","modified_gmt":"2016-03-24T00:03:03","slug":"republican-establishment-is-increasingly-prepared-to-lose-with-cruz-than-hand-the-party-to-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=91069","title":{"rendered":"Republican Establishment is increasingly prepared to lose with Cruz than hand the party to Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Politico<\/a>: \u201cPeople think we lose with Cruz, but we don\u2019t lose everything,\u201d said the operative, who opposes Trump and asked to speak anonymously. \u201cHe\u2019s still a real Republican. We don\u2019t lose the House and Senate with Cruz. We don\u2019t lose our soul as a party and we can recover in four years and I\u2019m not sure people think we can recover from Donald Trump.\u201d
\nSaid one high-level operative inside the Koch network: \u201cHe\u2019s the devil you know.\u201d
\nIndeed, many establishment Republicans would rather lose with Cruz and play a long 2020 game than risk having their party and conservative principles hijacked by Trump\u2014a candidate they do not trust even as they recognize his political dexterity and the possibility that he could be just cagey enough to win on Election Day.<\/p>\n

\u201cDonald Trump is a centrist,\u201d said Ron Kaufman, a close ally of Mitt Romney and Bush who lives in Massachusetts. \u201cYou may not like him, but policy-wise he\u2019s a centrist. He\u2019s between Cruz and Kasich. If Donald Trump is the nominee, he\u2019ll be far more centrist in language than he has been.\u201d
\nTrump\u2019s repeated requests for the party to recognize the new voters he has drawn into the Republican fold and embrace the possibilities of his candidacy have yet to convince most establishment figures; many are taking steps to emphasize their still implicit opposition to him.
\nOn Wednesday, Paul Ryan used a 30-minute speech to argue against Trump\u2019s brand of divisive identity politics without mentioning the candidate by name, urging the country to \u201cstay unified\u201d and dismissing the notion \u201cthat we\u2019re going to win the election by dividing people.\u201d Meanwhile, a top RNC official was meeting privately with several high-level anti-Trump activists to explain what an open convention might look like.
\nAnd on Monday, Our Principles PAC, a group founded by establishment donors to oppose Trump, sent a tracker to shoot video footage of members of Congress showing up to meet with Trump in an effort to intimidate more rank-and-file Republicans from showing any openness to his candidacy. Suddenly, the party establishment, which has long been stymied by the Tea Party movement\u2019s demands of ideological purity, now has its own litmus test in Trump, demanding nothing less than rejection of the current front-runner for the GOP\u2019s presidential nomination.
\n\u201cNo one thought we would be here at this time,\u201d said Austin Barbour, who ran Rick Perry\u2019s super PAC until he quit last year and then backed Bush until he, too, quit, and is now casting his lot with Cruz.
\nThe unifying factor among the establishment Republicans now begrudgingly coalescing behind Cruz is a deep, visceral revulsion to Trump: to his divisive demagoguery that is so unmoored from traditional conservative ideology and, many believe, the party\u2019s and country\u2019s bedrock values. It has little to do with Cruz, who has simply done better than anyone else in the first two months of the nomination process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Politico: \u201cPeople think we lose with Cruz, but we don\u2019t lose everything,\u201d said the operative, who opposes Trump and asked to speak anonymously. \u201cHe\u2019s still a real Republican. We don\u2019t lose the House and Senate with Cruz. We don\u2019t … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4677],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-republicans"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91069"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91070,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91069\/revisions\/91070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}