Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Well-placed Republican insiders are mobilizing to block Donald Trump from winning the GOP presidential nomination. …
Trump’s march to the 2016 GOP nomination represents the most explicit recent exception to the “party decides” theory. Trump amassed almost none of the assets that usually boost nominees. During the 2016 primaries, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio all outraised him. Those rivals also won far more endorsements than Trump did; only Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama and three governors endorsed Trump at any point in the primaries. And to describe Trump’s ground-level political organizations in the early states as skeletal would be to overstate the meat on their bones.
Trump in 2016 overcame these limitations with forceful and flamboyant performances at Republican debates, arena-size rallies in the key states, and, above all, a wave of unprecedented national-media coverage in which he appealed to white voters’ anxieties over racial and cultural change more openly than any national candidate in either party had since George Wallace. …
To many of Trump’s GOP skeptics, the biggest difference from 2016 is the possibility that DeSantis might unify the party’s anti-Trump forces more thoroughly than anyone did then. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic
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