I Have A Theory. Which Is Mine.

Bear with me, here.

So how does the GOP save the party, the conservative movement, the country, and perhaps Western Civilization itself – from the Dems, from Trump, and even from themselves?

I’ve got an idea.

Assumptions:  Trump is going to get slaughtered by Hillary – but he’ll drawn a lot of “disenfranchised”, PC-weary voters from both parties; Dems who’d never dream of voting for Cruz, but find Hillary warmed-over and underwhelming.

So Here’s The Plan:  Here’s how it works:

  1. The GOP should “steal” the nomination from Trump.  And they shouldn’t be even a little bit subtle about it; they should make it big, arrogant and blatant.  They should poke the bear’s gargantuan ego with big nasty sticks – the better to inflame The Donald.    They should do it, and do a big, ugly, arrogant end-zone happy dance when they do.
  2. The Donald, his ego suitably affronted, will launch a “Great” third party bid – The Trump Party”, most likely.  It’ll be the best ever; Trump will bring more money to the table than Croesus himself.  By the time he’s done, nobody will care about “that loser” Cruz or “that witch” Hillary.
  3. Of course, they will.  The three parties will split the vote such that nobody gets 270 electoral votes.    Oh, it’ll be close – but let’s look at the Electoral College under my scenario:

3PartyElectoralCollege

Lets assume Hillary takes Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – none of which I consider givens, but lets be, ahem, conservative here.

Hillary comes up one electoral vote short.  Cruz, 24 shy of a win.  Trump, 247 light.

And then what?

Here’s What:  According to the Constitution, if there is no winner in the Electoral College, the House of Representatives chooses the President.

Disclaimers:  I’m not going to bet money on any of this.  Also, I’m being tongue-in-cheek as can be (which, I’m going to guess, completely escapes any left-leaning commenters and bloggers who read this.  In fact, just watch; that, I’d bet money on) .

20 thoughts on “I Have A Theory. Which Is Mine.

  1. Interesting theory, and you can have it.

    The reality is that has been extremists like the Tea Party, and the GOP going so far right that is fracturing your party and which will make it impossible to move forward until it heals.

    You seem to miss that the only successful legislation to come out of Congress since the ascendancy of the GOP has been that which was led by Dems, with the cooperation of Dems. That would be true as well of any election; there would be no conservative control or dominance of that process, because the right can’t govern or compromise. Your policies lead to disaster, like that in Louisiana and Kansas. Your policies do not work (much like Republican math).

    I just read polls which show that 60 percent of voters are ashamed of the GOP campaigns. No equivalent polling for the Democratic campaigns.

    The disapprovals of your right wing nutjob candidates — and they are ALL right wing nut jobs, extremists – show Republicans voting in large numbers for the Dems than their own party candidates, ranging on geography and poll from 25% to 40%.

    As I observed last year, the GOP had a lot of candidates; but they never had any good candidates.

    The right is reaping what they have sown, and they are reaping the whirlwind. You are likely to lose the White House, and the Senate. If enough people are fed up with the right, you might even lose the House.

    If there is anything on which we might agree and find common ground this morning, it is certainly going to be our shared support and solidarity with Belgium in the face of the attacks there. I find it comforting that there are still events which can unite us; what a shame that they tend to be tragedies. Perhaps we can learn something from that going forward.

  2. DG, you aren’t alone in believing that recent extremism has been destructive, why just recently Bill Clinton said: “we’ve finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us”
    see: https://youtu.be/o9bsP2As3uc

  3. So now the GOP is joining the “the Americans don’t deserve our party’s rule” club?
    Let the delegates vote and choose a candidate. The GOP has not had a record of choosing either winning candidates or conservative candidates lately.
    If Trump is elected president, you need to deal with him.

  4. I just read polls which show that 60 percent of voters are ashamed of the GOP campaigns. No equivalent polling for the Democratic campaigns.

    It says something about Democratic voters that they are not ashamed that their party’s front-runner belongs in jail for exposing classified information to theft, nor are they ashamed that the #2 guy went to the Soviet Union and never apparently figured out that something was horribly wrong there. It took me about ten minutes after walking through Checkpoint Charlie to realize that all I’d heard about how awful East Germany was was an understatement.

  5. I think Trump will be the best thing to happen to America since Cheese Whiz.

    I hope he nominates Carrot Top for SCOTUS, Oliver North for Sec of State, George Soros for his Chief of Staff, Cliven Bundy for Interior Sec., Bill Ayers for Homeland Security. I hope he guilds the residence. I hope he bangs hot girls in the Rose Garden. I hope he designates a destroyer as the Presidential yacht, and throws stripper parties on it. I hope he tweets a picture of his middle finger to everyone. I hope he rakes in millions in graft and brags about it. I hope he pisses everyone off.

    When the dust settles, maybe we can start again.

  6. “I just read polls which show that 60 percent of voters are ashamed of the GOP campaigns. No equivalent polling for the Democratic campaigns.”
    This is a lie. You will notice that there is no link. That’s because there is no such poll. DG is making up ‘facts’ as usual.
    You know what? I just read a poll that said 60% of voters would rather slash their own wrists than listen to Hillary Clinton speak. It must be true, I wrote it!

  7. Bento, instead of posting unvarnished BS, dg should hire Emery to sniff stuff out on the web for her to post as her own. They’d make a great team.

  8. I suspect that, as usual, DG has discovered the findings of this “poll” discussed in the comment section of some radical leftist website, and simply repeated the claim uncritically. This is more than an inability to critically evaluate sources. Sometimes people want to drink the poison. They want to find people — fellow citizens, friends and neighbors — that they can hate.

  9. Thanks kel-
    I have no idea if this was the poll that DG based her comment on.
    From the NYT article
    And 60 percent of Republican primary voters said the campaign had made them feel mostly embarrassed about their party, while only 13 percent of Democratic primary voters expressed that opinion.
    While DG wrote:
    I just read polls which show that 60 percent of voters are ashamed of the GOP campaigns. No equivalent polling for the Democratic campaigns.

    I did not vote in my state’s primary (We don’t have them for presidential candidates, we have caucuses). If I were a republican, I would be embarrassed at the way the party had mishandled the Trump candidacy. Overall I enjoy the dynamism of the GOP primary season. The Democrats, ironically, used rules devised by the Clintons to make voting for anyone but Clinton a waste of time.

  10. I haven’t been polled, but count me in the 60% ashamed of my Parties current Primary.
    I’m ashamed that our debates have devolved conversations about policy and ideas into theatrics filled with insults and bragging about the size a candidate’s junk.
    I’m ashamed that decent a former candidate that could’ve been a good Surgeon General has endorsed the man that insulted him, but only after being promised a job.
    I’m ashamed that the candidate with a plurality of support was until recently a Democrat that talks about buying politicians.
    Etc, etc, etc.

  11. The best outcome for the Republican party establishment is a Cruz nomination. After he crashes and burns, the Tea Party model for victory will have been shown to be false, and they can return to the Bush/Rubio model, which, given the weakness of the Democrats, might work for another generation. Currently both parties value parts of the current status quo too much for anything to change.

  12. “The Bush/Rubio model, which, given the weakness of the Democrats, might work for another generation.”
    The Bush/Rubio model has only succeeded in winning the popular vote one time, in 2004, with an incumbent, by a very small margin, and was repudiated by the voters in 2006 — two years before the financial crisis.
    Try again, this time without presuming that you reasoned yourself to your preferred outcome.
    My advice to conservatives who cannot bring themselves to support Trump (I am one) is to attack Hillary relentlessly and ignore Trump. According to 538, Trump is on track to get within tens of the delegates he needs to secure the nomination. The party cannot repudiate its own voters, fer God’s sake.

  13. More interesting for the country would be a Trump run that draws away most of the Democrat’s white working class supporters. That could lead to a move for the Democrats away from organized labor and towards small business, which would then allow them to support government reform, education reform, and tax reform. It would also probably lead to a President Trump, for 1-2 terms; I said interesting, not good.

    Some sort of realignment of the two parties has to happen to provide some resolution that allows reform rather than gridlock. As I mentioned, both parties value parts of the current status quo too much for anything to change. The public knows it wants change (although not what flavor of change), so it is angry, which provides the impetus for change. The re-alignment that will eventually happen will be to a pro-reform and anti-reform party. Whoever ends up pro-reform will probably lose short term and win long term. It’s not clear which way each party will jump.

  14. The source of voter anger, in one graph:
    https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MEHOINUSA672N
    Free trade and open immigration will not turn it around, and both teh D’s and R’s are dedicated to free trade and open immigration.
    Libertarians will tell you that automation actually increases jobs. Where are they?:
    http://www.businessinsider.com/labor-force-participation-rate-falls-to-38-year-low-2015-7
    Libertarians will tell you that immigration increases GDP growth. Here is a graph showing GDP growth rate, 1945-2015: http://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-growth-rate. Show me where immigration has increased GDP growth.

    “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
    -Richard P. Feynman

  15. Fair enough. As the Boomers exit, as the white working class protest their (irreversible) relative decline, as unions in their present form become fossils of the 20th century, as inequality mounts, there will be change. These elections will give us some clues as to which direction each party will move.

  16. I think that the ground is moving, Emery. The GOP primaries are wide open compared to the Dem primaries. The Democrat ‘superdelegates’ tilt their presidential candidate selection process towards the status quo.
    The thing about human beings is that they are not predictable. What is true about human behavior in 1916 is not going to be true in 2016. In an economy which provides little reward for risk taking, little risk will be taken.

  17. Tom Smith, at rightcoast.com (a UC San Diego Law Blog) on the NY Times/ CBS poll:
    “True enough, but at least we’re *capable* of embarrassment, instead of evolving at breakneck speed, saying that everybody lies, the Clintons are just fine people, black lives really do matter more than everybody else, etc., etc. GOP embarrassment is actually a sign of, not health perhaps, but at least life.”
    Rightcoast is probably the best blog that you’ve never read.

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