RE: Could the Republican Party Just Bypass Trump This Year?
august > May 7th, 2020, 08:39 AM
Yep, I think the above is absolutely correct. The mechanism is simple - nominate someone else. But they won't do it. People who respond to polls are lukewarm about Biden - most worrisome is that potential swing voters whom he is supposed to appeal to (farmers and workers in factory towns and rural areas who supported Carter, Clinton and Obama - but also Reagan, Bush and Trump) just don't care. But they are even less likely to support someone perceived as more liberal, such as Bernie or Warren. Or Hillary. She was in a lose-lose position, where swing voters thought she was ultra liberal, while Bernie supporters thought she was a Wall Street-backed neo-Con. Anything she actually believed was irrelevant.
The GOP has a different issue. Few of the actual party care for Trump personally, and see him as a Democrat who switched parties to get elected. But they like him better than any Democrat anywhere with any platform or belief or agenda. And they realize he has a big base of Wallace Democrats, Enquirer-readers, Fox-watchers, infrequent voters, and reality tv fans that starched-and-pressed Republican candidates (Bush jr and sr, Romney jr and sr, Mr. and Mrs. Dole, Howard Baker, Jack Kemp, McCain, Ford, Lamar Alexander, Lindsey Graham, etc. ) have never been able to attract and/ or retain.
So they will stick with him.