This week’s cascade of Republican defections from Donald Trump has plunged the GOP into the deepest general-election divide over its presidential nominee in more than 50 years.
The apex of modern GOP general-election conflict came in 1964 when Barry Goldwater, as the tribune of an emerging Sunbelt- and suburbia-based conservative movement, captured the nomination over resistance from the party’s previously dominant Eastern establishment. But the Republican contortions over Trump are surpassing even the fratricide over Goldwater. CONT.
Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic