This week, the widespread dissension, anger and denial that had been building up in the Republican Party finally exploded into one giant mess, and it's unclear whether Republicans can put together the pieces required to win back the presidency.
Just about everything that could have gone wrong for the Republican Party did. And then some.
Let's quickly run down what happened:
- Donald Trump won seven of 11 states on Super Tuesday, bringing his total to 10 out of 15. His next-closest opponent, Sen. Ted Cruz, (R-Tex.), has won four.
- The establishment simultaneously came to the realization Trump is the most likely candidate to be its nominee and that it's likely too late to stop him.
- Its members bickered and disagreed about what to do anyway and whether to support Trump if he is the nominee.
- The party's 2012 nominee got involved. Mitt Romney gave a scathing speech in Utah where he tried to systematically discount Trump as a politician, as a businessman, as a person and said he's not fit to be president.
- The 11th Republican debate on Thursday immediately devolved into chaos and petty insults. In what will go down in history as one of the most memorable lines from a presidential candidate ever, Trump felt the need to ensure America his hands weren't small and neither was another part of his anatomy:
- By Friday, a number of conservatives seemed resigned to the fact their party is in shambles and is not prepared to take on Democrats in November.
So what does it all mean?
This is nothing short of a nightmare come true for Republicans. The intra-party fighting risks damaging their brand and their hopes at the ballot box.
We'll be debating for a long time how and why things devolved so quickly and so spectacularly for Republicans. In fact, the finger-pointing has already begun. (Should GOP presidential candidates have tried to stop Trump sooner? Could they have spent more time reaching out to his supporters? Did party leaders totally miss the deeply embedded frustration among their base that led to Trump's rise in the first place?)
But autopsies can come later. This is happening eight months before a presidential election that could also sway control of the Senate and determine the ideological leaning of the Supreme Court. So just about the highest stakes possible.
Right now, Republicans have got to sift through the remains of this week and somehow piece back together a cohesive, unified party. Their electoral success in November and beyond may depend on it.
But wait. It gets worse for Republicans …
One of the Republican establishment's most prominent plans to stop the bleeding involves the other three candidates in the race — Cruz, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. The idea is to have those candidates do as well as possible in the next few weeks' nominating contests — especially in Rubio's and Kasich's delegate-rich home states — to try to stop Trump from earning the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination. That will give party leaders until the convention in mid-July to figure out what to do.
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