Donald Trump’s ascension to lead a reluctant Republican Party has occasionally been likened to a messy divorce. The celebrity candidate has created a schism between the GOP’s grassroots and its opinion makers (to say nothing of its elected officials). What if Trump finalizes that schism in November? Those are the concerns raised in a blockbuster Bloomberg News profile of Trump’s campaign organization, which the reporters indicate is built for a much longer haul than just one election. What if Donald Trump and his band of insurrectionary wreckers take Trump’s voters and leave the GOP after November? That’s less the apocalyptic nightmare for the GOP than some might think it to be.
Bloomberg’s dispatch is the first real look into the data analytics apparatus the Trump campaign has built to target its potential voters and drive them to the polls. For a candidate who mocked and eschewed a data machine, investing in any analytics operation is a sign of progress. Once you peek under the hood, however, what touts itself as a sophisticated information mining outfit is primarily a vehicle for purchasing targeted Facebook advertisements.
“Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience,” said Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon. “We know its power.” That’s a revealing admission. The article makes plain that the Trump campaign’s digital operation has a shelf life that won’t expire in November. It’s an operation that has as a foundation the Republican National Committee’s list of voter contacts—a list that the Trump operation has only padded since retaining it after winning the party’s presidential nomination.
“Most Republican Party officials ardently hope he’ll go away quietly if he loses,” the profile observed. “But given all that his campaign—and Kushner’s group especially—has been doing behind the scenes, it looks likelier that Trump and his lieutenants will stick around.” Its co-author later took to social media where he postulated a “nightmare” scenario for the GOP: What if Trump doesn’t want to start a television network from which he and his fawning acolytes can agitate for the next four years. What if the Trump-Bannon nexus’ true objective is “an American UKIP?”
The notion that Trump and Company are interested in the creation of a xenophobic nationalist political party to rival the GOP when most of the operation’s members cut their teeth in media is a stretch. Donald Trump himself is barely interested in the mechanics of electoral politics, and he’s running for the presidency. Something that blends political advocacy and celebrity seems more likely the course a post-election Trump campaign will take. If, as seems inevitable, Trump loses the election by a substantial margin, the allure of that countercultural movement will be suspect. Still, with effort, it could be one that siphons off several million Republican voters away from the GOP column and into some kind of protest vehicle. Would that really be the “nightmare” for the GOP that some anticipate? Maybe not.
First, only the truest of true believers in the Trumpian cause would join the exodus from the GOP. Whether or not the candidate’s most noxious, racially-anxious supporters count themselves members of this splinter movement is irrelevant. It would serve those Republicans who remained behind in the GOP camp to portray Trump’s splinter faction in that manner.
Buried within the Bloomberg profile of the Trump campaign is the explicit admission by Trump campaign members that they’re deploying “voter suppression” techniques against African-American voters. They don’t seem to know that what they mean by that is boilerplate targeted negative advertising designed to drive down enthusiasm and turnout among Clinton voters, but that hardly matters. By using the language of the left, which uses this term to impugn the motives of those who support voter identification measures, the campaign has been tainted. You’ll see that quote for the next ten years in Democratic advertising aimed at African-American voters.
This is hardly the only aspect of Trump’s campaign that has poisoned the GOP’s outreach efforts. From calling Mexican migrants “rapists” to contending that black voters have no access to education and have created communities for themselves that are the equivalent of war zones, the GOP brand will take years to recover from Trump.
The self-deportation of the core Trump voter into a new camp would hasten the process of rebranding and rebuilding the GOP. Politics being the process of addition, Republicans would have no choice but to apply the lessons of 2012 to 2016 and to get to work realizing the objectives in its blueprint for attracting members of Barack Obama’s coalition: particularly, minorities, young voters, and single women.
What’s more, the Trump phenomenon will have quarantined itself, thereby making it easier to stigmatize it and winnow it down through attrition. The GOP will not be able to survive as a rump faction, and it will need Trump’s voters to be members of its coalition. Rather than come hat-in-hand to the Trump voter, the party would be able to reintegrate Trump voters gradually and on its terms. That process wouldn’t take especially long, either. There is only one game in town for center-right American voters, and it’s the GOP.
This is, however, a long-term gain for short-term loss proposition. Initially, the GOP would be hobbled by the 2016 schism and the bifurcation of the party. Those are the wages of a Trump nomination. But necessity compels innovation, and the party desperately needs to innovate. A Trump-led breakup after November would be to throw the GOP into the briar patch.
