I’m a little puzzled over this statement by Erick Erickson:
People forget that Donald Trump won the GOP nomination with the smallest percentage of the vote any Republican nominee got through his party’s primaries. Trump got 44.95%. For reference, Romney got 52.1% of the GOP primary vote in 2012, and McCain got 46.7% in 2008. McCain was the second most divisive GOP nominee in the history of Republican primaries. Trump was the most divisive.
I’m not saying it’s insightful or unusual or poorly stated. But I have to wonder if it’s an accurate conclusion.
To me there’s an unstated assumption that “the Party” is malleable in its views and it allegiance to those views. Not infinitely malleable, but changeable by the various politicians running for the nomination, if they only know how.
But that’s not true, especially in this era of arrogance and disdain for compromise. Folks cling to their views with an apocalyptic certitude that I view with dismay and even disgust. Is Trump divisive within the Republicans? Or is he merely a reflection of a Party that is becoming less and less capable of compromise, of that necessary self-doubt that is the heritage, loathed as it might be, of every American who has read the Constitution?
Does Trump, McCain, and for that matter Dukakis cause the divisions, or are they the source of illumination of the abysses that riddle the parties, crevasses that are not bridged because of the pride of those on the heights?
Given Trump’s intra-party approval poll numbers, I actually find it hard to label him divisive in that context. Of course, such polls don’t accurately evaluate those folks who are former members of the Party, driven away by Trump, and so it does become a bit of a statistical mystery.
But it throws doubt on Erickson’s observation:
We should not memory hole the massive establishment rally to Trump when Cruz was the last man standing against him.
Even more importantly, it’s worth remembering that, from a cast of dubious and even repulsive characters (the “deep bench” of laughable reporting), probably the two most repulsive, the most shallow duo, ended up mano y mano.
Think about that.
