So there’ve been a series of articles recently in The Washington Post about a certain Willard Mitt Romney: one about whose voters 3rd party Mitt might capture, one speculating that his chances of running have increased, and one bluntly titled he “has no more excuses.”
You can tell that the Post, which has no love for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, really wants to see Utah’s favorite son provide an alternative to voters come November.
However, unfortunately for those who might want to see a third Romney run, many Republicans feel otherwise and have quietly dropped the #NeverTrump banner. The Wall Street Journal last week detailed Romney’s “increasingly lonely challenge to Donald Trump” with more GOP leaders falling in line with Trump now that he’s won the nomination.
Now a lot of the initial push against Trump was because he seemed so unelectable in a general election, and because Republicans had other, more potentially viable candidates. Once that changed, you could expect a lot of party members to fall in line. However, current resistance to Romney as a third-party, center-right challenger might not just be because Trump is the nominee, but because he might actually be president.
Despite the fact that half of HIS OWN party seems to hate Trump, he is in a statistical dead-heat with Hillary Clinton in most recent national polls.
Again: Trump, despite massive resistance in his own party, is evenly matched with the presumptive Democratic nominee.
It’s yuge.
Of course what you’re going to tell me is that national polls don’t mean much (and you’re right) when what matters is electoral counts. And there things might look even better for Trump. Given that much of his appeal is with working-class Americans, many of them Union voters who used to be the heart of the Democratic Party, Trump puts the Rust Belt and other states into play for the GOP in a way no Republican has since Reagan.
(Note: he still has a yuge problem in Florida, something which would have been an asset for Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. However, given Trump’s success in New York, he could offset that lost by capturing the Democrat’s second most-precious electoral jewel.)
So it’s unpredictable how the map could be colored this November. What is predictable is that his attack machine against “Crooked Hillary” is just underway.
The next five months will see a relentless offensive against Hillary Clinton, someone whose skeletons in her closet have skeletons in their closet. With his ability to capture unprecedented media attention, Trump will conduct a more brutal offensive against her than any of the other, frankly more gentlemanly, Republican candidates could have waged. (Including alas the mature, dignified Mitt Romney.) Trump will force the media to discuss Hillary’s scandals they’ve brushed aside, all while she’s still busy fending off an upstart in her own party and the FBI.
So given that: a statistical dead-heat, a disrupted electoral map, and a vicious media war … you can understand why a lot of Republicans have stopped looking for an alternative.
