With Donald Trump marching toward a nomination that few believed he could win, Republicans once bent on defeating him are now reassessing their efforts to stop him. Trump’s dazed and demoralized adversaries find themselves at a defining moment: After unloading millions of dollars in attack ads aimed at destroying the real estate mogul, after the party’s 2012 nominee delivered a no-holds barred speech targeting him, and after conservatives far and wide spoke out in unrelenting terms about how he could never be president, he’s more dominant than ever — with another rival vanquished, a massive delegate lead and his two remaining opponents looking increasingly like the next to go.
While some Republicans insist on standing firm against the businessman, more and more are contending that it’s time to reach a point of acceptance — and that a drawn-out primary or convention battle could be worse.
“I’m soul-searching right now,” said Penny Nance, president and CEO of Concerned Women for America, who last year explored the possibility of launching an anti-Trump campaign. “There’s still a pathway to defeating him, but it’s getting harder to see that.”
“We’re at a turning point,” conceded Randy Kendrick, wife of Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick and a major contributor to the stop-Trump effort. “It’s a fork in the road — a political fork.” 20160317_erick_erickson_1_AP_1160.jpg
The talks about how to deal with Trump’s ascendance took on fresh urgency on Thursday. Some were intent on keeping up the fight. Prominent conservative activists gathered behind closed doors at the Army-Navy Club in downtown Washington, just a few blocks from the White House, to discuss how Trump could be defeated — even if it means waging a third-party campaign to run against him. The meeting drew around two dozen figures, including prominent activist Erick Erickson, conservative columnist Quin Hillyer, South Dakota businessman Bob Fischer and former George W. Bush adviser Bill Wichterman.
As attendees filtered out of the conference, one said they had agreed that Trump could still be stopped — and that they would do whatever was necessary to make it happen.
“The consensus was that we need a unity ticket of some sort, and we’ll let the candidates work out who the unity ticket is,” Hillyer told POLITICO, floating the possibility of an alliance between Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
Others, however, appeared more resigned. At a posh resort in Palm Beach, Fla. — just minutes from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate — many of the Republican Party’s biggest donors discussed whether to continue shelling out millions on an anti-Trump offensive that so far has done little, if anything, to halt his rise. Many of those gathered, including New York hedge-fund manager Paul Singer and members of the Chicago Cubs-owning Ricketts family, have been the primary funders of Our Principles, a super PAC that spent heavily to defeat Trump, plastering Florida and other states with TV ads that portrayed him as a heartless businessman. Several of the donors reiterated their hope that Cruz or Kasich could still somehow win, sources familiar with the gathering told POLITICO. But others indicated they would be open to supporting Trump in the general election.
Some in the anti-Trump movement now concede that the push to defeat him hasn’t worked — and may be backfiring. In the final days leading up to the critical Florida primary, outside groups devoted to defeating Trump, including Our Principles PAC, spent more than $10 million against him only to see him notch a double-digit win and knock native son Marco Rubio out of the race.
During Tuesday night’s victory speech, Trump mocked the “vicious,” “horrible” and “mostly false” ads run against him, telling a meandering anecdote about how several of them had aired during the broadcast of a golf tournament at his Trump National Doral club. “Oh what a day that was,” he said. “What a disaster.”
While the anti-Trump groups have outlined a state-by-state bid to deprive him of the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the Republican nomination and to force a contested convention in Cleveland — what would be the GOP’s first since 1976 — there’s growing worry that such an event could be traumatic for the party. Trump has said there could be “riots” if he’s denied the nomination — and while many Republicans, including Kasich, have condemned those remarks as
“You’re going to push the big red button and blow up the party, at least in the short term,” said Ned Ryun, president of American Majority, a conservative group. “It’s asinine, it really is.”
“If it’s not close, how much stomach do I have for a contested convention?” asked Nance.
The possibility of a Cleveland fight has drawn the attention of the Republican National Committee, which is tasked with overseeing the planning for the convention. Over the past several weeks, the RNC has been inviting staffers, in addition to operatives from other Republican organizations and committees, to a series of briefing sessions in which contested convention scenarios were outlined. The briefing sessions were described by three sources as informational in nature, with a heavy focus on logistical planning. One compared them to the hurricane planning the committee did before the 2012 convention in Tampa.
Another factor: Though Trump remains wildly unpopular with the establishment, many in the party hierarchy now lack a figure to support. While Kasich has a virtually impossible path to the nomination, Cruz, who has devoted his Senate career to poking his finger in the establishment’s eye, is seen as an unpalatable choice. One Senate leadership aide said that lawmakers had been trying to reach out to Cruz in recent days, but had been unable to get their phone calls returned or had been rebuffed by Cruz’s top aides. Only two senators — South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and Utah’s Mike Lee — have come forward to endorse Cruz even as Rubio collapsed.
The intense, all-encompassing focus on Trump has arguably distracted the party from what should be its central mission: defeating Hillary Clinton.
One senior GOP operative lamented that with so many of the party’s donors focused on taking down Trump, little had been done to create the infrastructure needed to combat the former secretary of state. Republican strategists believe the party will need to raise $1 billion to $2 billion for the general election.
“What it really comes down to for me is that he’s the last choice, and he’s still the last choice,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group that has come out strongly against Trump. “I also know there’s a very big difference between the person who is the last choice and Hillary Clinton.”
The confusion in the party’s top ranks has left Republicans divided about whether to keep up the anti-Trump offensive at all, or line up behind him. AP_447837092422.jpg
On Wednesday, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, an outspoken Trump critic who had endorsed Rubio, threw her support to Cruz, saying she was praying that that the Texas senator “can pull through this.” Yet that same day, Florida Gov. Rick Scott wrote a Facebook post in which he urged Republicans to rally around Trump, saying it was time for the party to begin preparing for the general election.
“There’s lots of differences, mistrust and angst about this,” said Al Cardenas, a former American Conservative Union chairman. “This dilemma may have to play out a bit longer.”
As long as Trump continues to win, though, some are convinced the opposition to him will start to crack. The mogul is poised for another strong performance on Tuesday, when he’s seen as the favorite in the winner-take-all Arizona primary. He also is expected to rack up a number of delegates in Utah, which votes the same day.
And even Trump’s famously high unfavorable numbers are turning around: Gallup’s tracking poll of Republicans and leaners shows that his net favorable numbers have surged 14 percentage points in the past two weeks, vaulting him past Cruz.
“It’s coming together in my opinion and will continue to do so,” said Jonathan Barnett, an influential Republican National Committee member from Arkansas. “Everyone likes a winner.”
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