Trump shatters the Republican Party
Article subtitle:
How the 2016 primary will define the GOP for years to come
Article publisher:
Politico
Article date:
24 February 2016
Article category:
National News
Medium
Article Body:
...The populist billionaire’s rise to the pinnacle of Republican politics has upended what had been decades of relative GOP stability, a 40-year span in which most Republican presidential contests since 1976 neatly narrowed to an establishment-embraced front-runner and a conservative insurgent alternative.
No more.
Suddenly, there are three strands of the Republicanism, each entrenched and vying for supremacy in 2016. Ted Cruz is the leader of the traditional conservative purists. Marco Rubio is emerging from the mud of a multi-candidate brawl to lead the once-dominant, now diminished, mainstream lane of the GOP.
But it is Trump’s new alliance of angry populists that is ascendant — and on the precipice of dominance...
“What Trump is consolidating is the people who are unhappy being in either camp — those who don’t see themselves as conservative insurgents or as mainstream Republicans,” said Yuval Levin, an influential Republican thinker and editor of the quarterly conservative journal, National Affairs. “They’re insurgents but they’re not conservatives. And they’re not happy with the system that gave us that binary choice.”...
So far, none of the Republican Party’s three distinct wings has proven it holds a majority, but Trump is inching closer — topping 40 percent for the first time in Nevada...
“We’re kind of at a stalemate,” said Tony Perkins, the prominent evangelical leader who heads the Family Research Council and supports Cruz, “We could be on our way to a brokered convention.”...
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