My latest column for The Week is extremely similar to Philip Diehl’s piece at TAC, in that we’re both writing about how Rule 40(b), designed to benefit the candidate who wins with the blessing of the establishment, is blowing up in the GOP’s face in this year of the insurgent.
Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,
The GOP has a history of manipulating the primary, but this time they are going all out to destroy Trump. Is it any wonder that Ohio’s ballot – which will be cast next week – is so confusing that Trump may lose votes just as a result of the ballot’s design?
I am preoccupied with Trump, and what he means for our nation. He is single-handedly destroying the Republican Party. We haven’t seen a political party collapse in this country in well over a century. It’s happening now. Institutions that are strong don’t collapse overnight. I don’t know that even Trump saw the rot in the GOP. But it was rotten, and that’s why it’s collapsing.
Republican leaders have given Donald Trump a ferocious pounding over the past week, and have come away with very little to show for their efforts. The Republican front-runner matched or outperformed his polling in the states voting last night, while establishment favorite Marco Rubio saw his support collapse. As anxious anti-Trump eyes turn towards the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the RNC’s rules are turning against them.
If 2012 was the presidential election in which data-driven journalism really came into its own, the 2016 Republican nomination contest has been the one in the conventional wisdom has continually been shattered.
Donald Trump has been the bane of everyone from data geeks like Nate Silver and the New York Times’s Nate Cohn to more old school analysts like Ron Brownstein of National Journal. The former television star’s unorthodox background and brash demeanor has upended the conventional wisdom about how American political parties’ nominations are determined.