From the Washington Post: Trump faces growing tension with key Republicans over national security issues

A look at the next four years.

- Click here for the article.

President-elect Donald Trump, who clashed with leading Republicans throughout his campaign, faced growing tumult in his national security transition team on Monday as key members of his own party appeared to question his views and personnel choices.

Former congressman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), a respected voice on national security thought to be a leading candidate to run the CIA, was among those pushed out of the team over the past two days, two individuals with direct knowledge said, in a series of moves that have added to the anxiety across the upper ranks of U.S. intelligence agencies.

The changes came as Trump met Tuesday with incoming Vice President Mike Pence to discuss Cabinet and top White House personnel choices. Pence last week replaced New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) as head of Trump’s overall transition efforts, and Christie’s associates — who had been Trump’s link to the GOP mainstream for months — now find themselves losing influence.

What happens to the Republican Party after the election?

The internal struggle continues.

Little has been written about what happens to Democrats - I'll post what I find soon - and if this plays into a potential realignment of the parties.

A couple sources:

(note the reference to the 1948 election - there's nothing new going on)

- From Politico: The GOP’s Breakdown Is Only Just Beginning.

For years, pundits have predicted that the Republican Party is breaking apart. But it took Donald Trump to make it happen.

The Republican Party is like a gigantic Antarctic ice shelf with fissures we’ve watched develop for years. Those cracks were evident in 2010, when the Tea Party emerged, and in 2014, when GOP primary voters rejected establishment favorites, including the sitting House Republican Leader, Eric Cantor.

The obvious legacy of the 2016 election is a split between pro- and anti-Trump forces, but this division has a twist rarely seen in American political history: The party’s voters and its elites are not only separate constituencies, but ones whose interests and beliefs are incompatible. The two groups are starting from different places and ending up perhaps even further apart.As the fractures grew, the party held together—for the past eight years, opposition to President Barack Obama was more or less enough to ice over major intraparty differences. But in the glaring sun of Donald Trump, those dividing lines are no longer survivable: The party has melted down and cracked apart, and its various components are drifting away.

In the past, party splits have frequently been unclear, messy and short-lived. When the Democratic Party splintered over civil rights in 1948, the faction of the party that didn’t like President Harry S. Truman or the platform walked out and formed its own

“Dixiecrat” ticket. In 1952, some of those Democrats who didn’t like Adlai Stevenson endorsed Dwight D. Eisenhower. And Theodore Roosevelt ran on his own Bull Moose ticket in 1912 after losing the Republican nomination to incumbent President William Howard Taft. In the end, those divides either healed over in some way, or they happened so quickly that the Band-Aid was ripped off, the pain ended and the parties could get to work building new electoral coalitions.

By contrast, this year’s Republican unwinding is hesitant and halting—and it’s not clear at all where it will end. Trump’s nomination and, at this point, presumptive loss is probably just the beginning. Nationally, there is much more infighting yet to come. At this point, the possibly alarming news for Republicans is that what defines the GOP breakup isn’t its severity or depth: It’s the great degree to which it’s still incomplete.

- From Vox: The Republican civil war starts the day after the election.

If Donald Trump loses the election next week, “there will be a lot of blood left on the floor between November and the 2020 primaries,” predicts GOP consultant John Weaver, who advised John Kasich’s campaign.

For all the attention on the fights between Trump and a faction of Republicans who have refused to support him, most GOP elected officials have so far taken the path of least resistance. They’ve supported their party’s nominee, even if they’re not thrilled about him.

These Republicans — from Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Reince Priebus to Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and many others — have calculated that since Trump was the nominee chosen by Republican voters, and the only person standing in between Hillary Clinton and the presidency, they should stand by him.

Should Trump lose on Election Day, though, many Republicans will want to say "I told you so" and turn the page on the Trump experiment, returning to a more generic Republicanism that they see as a better vote-getter and a more substantively defensible ideology. And to discredit Trumpism, they’ll make the case that Trump is to blame for his defeat — that he blew what should have been a winnable election for Republicans.

Many of Trump’s most passionate supporters won’t see it that way at all, though. They’re being primed to see a candidate betrayed by an out-of-touch establishment that is compromised by its social and economic ties to a cosmopolitan elite. So if Trump loses, his backers will try to turn grassroots disappointment at his defeat into grassroots rage against Republicans who were insufficiently supportive, thus leveraging their own way into power. (If he wins, the party will face a whole different set of issues.)

From NPR: Why Texas Is Closer To Turning Blue Than It Has Been In Decades

No one is predicting a Clinton victory, but the race is tighter than it would normally be.

We would not be having this conversation if Senator Cruz was the Republican nominee.

- Click here for the story.

Polls show the presidential race in Texas is closer than it's been in decades. Some even show the two candidates within the margin of error.

Does Hillary Clinton actually stand a chance in Texas? It's unlikely, but it could be closer than at any time in the past 20 years. The reason for how competitive the race looks lies in two demographic groups — Republican-leaning suburban women offended by Trump's comments about women, and Latinos, who are fired up to vote against him.

From the Washington Post: And now, some legitimately good news for Republicans

Trump's low numbers may not have the down ballot effect some have predicted.

- Click here for the article.

The nightmare scenario for Republicans has long been that Donald Trump would crash and burn, and drag every other Republican on the ballot down with him.

The first part of that could very well be happening. The second half? Perhaps not.
Of the four high-quality mainstream media polls conducted since that "Access Hollywood" video emerged, Trump has trailed by 11 points, 9 points, 7 points and 4 points. And even that last, closest poll, from The Washington Post and ABC News on Sunday, includes some big red flags for Trump.

But those same polls don't suggest doom and gloom for downballot Republicans just yet. And in fact, there's real reason for GOP optimism that Trump won't ruin their year completely.

For one, the so-called generic ballot -- i.e., whether people prefer a generic Democrat for Congress or a generic Republican -- still only favors Democrats by a small margin: 3 points in both the Post-ABC poll and NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, among likely voters. That same Democratic edge on the generic ballot is actually down from 6 points in last week's NBC-WSJ poll.

Put plainly, these generic ballots are unremarkable and don't suggest a big Democratic wave ahead.

Part of the reason Trump's woes might not have filtered downballot could be that a strong majority of people don't really associate Republicans with their party's presidential nominee. And many people also appear to dislike Clinton enough that they like the idea of a Congress that could keep her in check.

The Post-ABC poll includes a question about whether people think Trump represents the "core values" of the Republican Party, and a strong majority of likely voters say he doesn't -- 57 percent overall.

For a timeline of generic poll results, click here.

From the NYT: Some in G.O.P. Who Deserted Donald Trump Over Lewd Tape Are Returning

The dump Trump movement didn't last long.

Republican incumbents are worried about their base - who not only support Trump, but participate feverishly. A wrong move now can encourage a potentially powerful primary opponent in 2018, if not a defeat in three weeks.

To me, this demonstrates the importance of voter turnout - otherwise, why should incumbents care?

- Click here for the article.

Stung by a fierce backlash from Donald J. Trump’s ardent supporters, four Republican members of Congress who had made headlines for demanding that Mr. Trump leave the presidential race retreated quietly this week, conceding that they would still probably vote for the man they had excoriated just days before.

From Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the only member of the Republican leadership in either chamber who had disavowed Mr. Trump, to Representative Scott Garrett of New Jersey, who is in a difficult re-election fight, the lawmakers contorted themselves over Mr. Trump. Some of them would not mention him by name, preferring instead to affirm their support for the generic “Republican ticket,” still grasping for a middle ground.

They said that if Mr. Trump would not make way for his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, to lead the party after the release of a recording on Friday showing Mr. Trump bragging about groping women, they had little choice but to vote for their embattled nominee. But the collective about-face owed less to his refusal to exit a race in which ballots are already being castthan to the fury his supporters unleashed at the defectors at rallies and on social media.

And Mr. Trump himself escalated his bitter feud with the country’s highest-ranking elected Republican, Speaker Paul D. Ryan, saying at a rally in Florida on Wednesday that Mr. Ryan’s refusal to actively support his candidacy was part of a “sinister deal going on.”

For some numbers, click here:

- Nevada Republicans Abandon Heck For Abandoning Trump.
 

From Bloomberg: Education Level Emerges as Sharp Dividing Line in Clinton-Trump Race

This is the third article making the same basic claim about an emerging dividing line among Republican identifiers - and the electorate in general.

- Click here for the article.

There are many demographic fault lines emerging in this year’s presidential campaign, but few are deeper than the division among likely voters based on educational attainment.

Those with the least number of years of education are far more likely to support Donald Trump, while those who have had the most schooling are much more likely to back Hillary Clinton, according to a Bloomberg Politics national pollreleased this week.

“The presence or absence of a college degree is more predictive of the vote in this election than we’ve seen in past elections,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, who oversees many political surveys for Bloomberg Politics.

Another trend may also be developing in the campaign that could pose a threat to Clinton: apathy among potential voters under age 35.

Both of these subplots were revealed in the new poll, with educational level offering the starkest contrast.

Clinton wins the college-educated segment by 25 percentage points, 59 percent to 34 percent. Trump’s edge among those without a college education is 10 points, 52 percent to 42 percent.

Trump’s lead is 4-to-1 among white men with less than a college degree, 76 percent to 19 percent. Clinton’s advantage with college-educated women is 64 percent to 31 percent.

That’s vastly different from what was recorded in the 2012 presidential election, when exit polling showed 47 percent of voters were college graduates. In that contest, President Barack Obama only narrowly beat Republican challenger Mitt Romney among college graduates, 50 percent to 48 percent.

It’s also different from the two presidential contests before that. In 2008, Obama won among both those who did and did not graduate college by almost identical margins over Senator John McCain of Arizona (53 percent to 45 percent, and 53 percent to 46 percent).

In 2004, President George W. Bush beat then-Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts among those with no college degree, 53 percent to 47 percent. Among those with college degrees, the two men tied at 49 percent.

From the Christian Science Monitor: Who are Trump voters? A new portrait emerges

This is based on data pulled from the Gallup Poll. He seems to be getting the support of people who do not see opportunities for themselves in the future. They refer to something they call "the politics of malaise." Race place a factor also.

- For Gallup's coverage of the campaign click here.

- Click here for the article.

“The results show mixed evidence that economic distress has motivated Trump support,” writes author Jonathan Rothwell, a senior economist at Gallup. “His supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations,” but higher household incomes also tended to predict support for the candidate. That held true among both white Republicans as well as among a wider swath of the public.

But under a more expansive notion of prosperity – one that takes into account the health of one’s community – Trumpism may indeed be the cry of an ailing America, one detached from the dynamism and diversity of urban areas where older generations are more likely to watch their sons and daughters flourish. And the survey’s findings may indicate that even if Mr. Trump loses the election in November, the politics of malaise may survive him.

. . . The Gallup survey, somewhat conversely, turns out “no link whatsoever” between exposure to trade competition and support for Trump’s nationalist politics. But it was in other measures of what Mr. Rothwell calls “social well-being” – how likely a person’s children are to surpass them socioeconomically, as well as how healthy one is likely to be and how long they are likely to live – that communities thick with Trump supporters tend to lag behind.

Those communities are also more likely to be redoubts of segregated whiteness, meaning the xenophobia that has marred Trump’s campaign is likely giving voice to perceptions that are more a matter of notion than of lived experience. That finding bears out other studies showing that Trump support is strongly correlated with the presence of few immigrants in a given area.

“Constant support for Trump is highly elevated in areas with few college graduates,” writes Rothwell, “far from the Mexican border, and in neighborhoods that standout within the commuting zone for being white, segregated enclaves, with little exposure to blacks, [Asians], and Hispanics.”

From the Texas Tribune: Ted Cruz Shifts Policy Stances to Suit Fractured GOP

For our look at parties in the state of Texas, coupled with the ongoing campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

- Click here for the article.

At the start of the presidential campaign,Ted Cruz told voters he would be the only “consistent conservative” in a crowded Republican field.

Then he confronted the modern GOP — a fractured party, in which each faction has a different definition of what “conservative” means.

To consistently please all of them, Cruz has had to be inconsistent with himself.
Time and again he has shifted, shaded or obfuscated his policy positions — piling on new ideas, which sometimes didn’t fit with the old.

Cruz, for instance, promised libertarians that he would show a strict respect for the Constitution’s checks and balances.

Then, the senator from Texas promised social conservatives that he would scrap one of those checks and balances, stripping lifetime tenure from Supreme Court justices.

He criticized Donald Trump’s plan for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Then he seemed to support it. He appeared skeptical of military intervention in Syria. Then he vowed to find out whether “sand can glow in the dark” there.

Cruz’s maneuvering has helped him build and maintain a base of support among the party’s activist class: If Trump fails to win the GOP nomination outright, Cruz could have enough backing among Republican delegates to win it after the first ballot at the party’s convention in Cleveland in July.

But while Cruz’s rightward shifts might have been politically smart during the primary season, they probably would create major challenges during the general election, putting Cruz far to the right of most voters.

From Slate: How the GOP Is Losing Its Grip on Working-Class Republicans 409 87 447 The Tea Party was a red herring. The real revolt of the Republican rank-and-file is upon us.

The author does a better job describing the historical context of the shift that seems to be going on within the Republican Party than I've been able to so far. We will look this over in 2305.

- Click here for it.

A brief history of white working-class voters in America: Between 1932 and 1964, they were diehard Democrats, core constituents of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Lyndon B. Johnson severed that bond when he committed his noblest deed in signing the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. “I think we’ve just delivered the South to the Republican Party for the rest of my life and yours,” Johnson told his aide Bill Moyers.

George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, began fulfilling Johnson’s prophecy when he led Southern whites out of the Democratic Party. Wallace formed the American Independent Party, which took five Southern states and helped deliver the White House to Richard Nixon in 1968—incidentally, the last time a third party carried any state in a U.S. presidential election. Wallace’s Southern voters and their Northern brethren increasingly supported Republicans thereafter, becoming a pillar of the Reagan coalition in the 1980s.

Now a version of that old split has emerged on the right. The Reagan Democrats have become the Trump Republicans, and signs point once again to a breach with the party they have reflexively supported for decades. At one level, the cause is the same as in 1964: reaction against social change that has eroded the value of white privilege. But at another level, this is a revolt by Republican voters who no longer believe that their party supports their basic economic interests.

For more:

- Factions in the Democratic Party.
- Factions in the Republican Party.

From The Atlantic: Conservatives Face an Impossible Choice They can back Trump, or run a candidate of their own—but either way, they’ll bring this era of American politics to a close.

The author - a well regarded political strategists - seen Trump splitting the party and ushering a new party era.

- Click here for the article.

When people bolt their party, the party changes behind them.

Take, for example, the Progressive Republicans. When they bolted the party to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s independent campaign in 1912, they left conservatives in control of the Republican apparatus. Before 1912, it was very much an open question whether the reformist movements of the 20th century would find their home in the Republican or Democratic Party. After 1912, the most important of those reforms would be carried out at the federal level by Democrats, and opposed by Republicans. When Republicans regained the White House in 1920, it would be under the leadership of the man who’d delivered the nominating speech for William Howard Taft at the 1912 convention. The young people who’d looked to Teddy Roosevelt for change in 1912 would in many cases end up as followers of his cousin Franklin in 1932—most notably, the former Bull Moose who ran most of the early New Deal, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes.

Or consider the example of George Wallace. When he bolted from the Democratic Party in 1968, he offered downscale Southern whites the same political mix they’d supported since Reconstruction: populist economics joined to racial conservatism. His bolt was intended to frighten national Democrats to jettison Kennedy-Johnson liberalism and return to something like the old ways. Instead, the 1968 election confirmed the Democrats as the party of black interests and black votes. Wallace accelerated the great political realignment of the 1970s: minorities and highly educated whites moving into the Democratic party; downscale whites leaving it, especially in the South.

Or take Ross Perot’s 1992 insurgency. The Republican Party dominated presidential politics from 1968 through 1988, winning every election except 1976, and gaining in 1972 and 1984 two outright landslides: 60.7 percent and 58.8 percent of the vote, respectively.

But in 1992, Perot smashed the old Nixon-Reagan coalition. He won over 20 percent of the vote in the state of California—a solid Republican state before 1992, and never again thereafter. His very best state—Maine—had likewise been a Republican stronghold before 1992, and would never vote Republican again. Perot exposed Republican vulnerabilities in the new purple states of the South, notably North Carolina, where Bill Clinton finished within less than one point of George H.W. Bush.

The white voters most resistant to the Perot message were those who attended church most often. Post-1992, the GOP redefined its base vote in religious rather than economic terms. And while that redefinition reestablished the party’s competitiveness, it also denied it the majority support it had enjoyed pre-Perot. Only once after 1992, in 2004, would the Republican win more than 50 percent of the vote in a presidential election—and then only barely.

Which brings us to the present day.

An anti-Trump bolt will appeal to ideological conservatives, to libertarian leaners, and to the most religiously observant Republicans: what Republican strategist Grover Norquist has called the “leave us alone coalition.” What happens if that coalition does not run strongly in 2016? If it picks up something more like John Anderson’s 1980 6.6 percent of the vote, rather than Ross Perot’s nearly 20 percent? John Anderson ran as a liberal Republican who could not accept Ronald Reagan’s leadership—a group we have not heard much from since 1980. That’s the risk of political tests of strength: Sometimes you lose, and afterward nobody fears you ever again.

A “true conservative” independent race for president may offer anti-Trump Republicans a way to vote their consciences without endorsing Hillary Clinton. But it may also expose “true conservatism” as a smaller factor in U.S. presidential politics than it’s been regarded as since the advent of the Tea Party. And it will leave the instrumentalities of the GOP in the hands of people who were willing to work with Trump, and whose interest post-Trump-defeat will be in adapting his legacy to the future rather than jettisoning it.

Which is not to argue against it. Sometimes a political movement must and should go down fighting. Many conservatives will feel that way about opposing Trump in November 2016. The alternative—ticket-splitting between Hillary Clinton at the top and Republicans down-ballot—also carries daunting dangers. But whatever is decided by conservatives who refuse to board the Trump train, that decision is best made without illusions and false hopes. This election closes a long period in American politics. Whatever comes next, that period will not return.

From the NYT: Why Trump Can’t Break the G.O.P.

Parties are more than their presidential candidates. This - says the author - is why Donald Trump cannot damage the party as much as skeptics think.

- Click here for the article.

. . . the modern Republican Party is a rags-and-riches story. After 1988, it has struggled in presidential contests: The Republican candidate has won the popular vote just once, in 2004.

But this unimpressive presidential record has not signaled a party on the verge of collapse. On the contrary, Republicans have done quite well — holding the House, the Senate or both for much of the past three decades while increasing their tally of governorships and state legislatures. They have done so, moreover, without undertaking the kind of adjustment Democrats did after Walter Mondale’s landslide loss in 1984 (nurturing “new Democrats” like Bill Clinton).

Instead, on major issues, the party’s standard-bearers have moved steadily to the right, at least until Mr. Trump came on the scene. Solving this puzzle is key to understanding why grand electoral losses haven’t killed the G.O.P..

The White House is a major prize, but in our system of checks and balances, the president legislates with Congress. In the context of a divided electorate, highly polarized parties and nonstop combat in an unending string of elections to fill national and state offices, presidential contests are less likely to usher in dominance than to invite opposition.

That’s in part because presidential election years — with high and demographically diverse turnout and more or less equal weighting of votes across the country — look very different from the more frequent elections that fill these other institutions. As the political scientist Thomas F. Schaller argued in his book “The Stronghold,” the Republican Party has become centered in Congress, reflecting the geography of its changing base of support.

Over the last generation, Republicans have gained strength in rural areas. This creates a formidable advantage in the Senate, where less populous states get just as many seats as more populous ones.

This structural edge applies to the House. Many Democratic votes are “wasted” in majorities piled up in cities. Republicans can maintain a majority even while Democrats win more votes. In 2012, Republicans had a more than 30-seat edge in the House despite receiving a minority of votes cast in House races.

Our frequent elections offer another structural advantage for Republicans: Voter turnout has always steeply dropped from presidential elections to off-year elections. What is new is the big advantage Republicans now enjoy in the low-turnout environment of nonpresidential years, fed largely by the shift of older voters (who have the highest turnout rates) from the Democratic Party to the Republicans. The imbalance helps explain Republican success in elections for governor, more than four-fifths of which do not coincide with presidential elections.

The electorate is changing in ways that will weaken the Republican advantage in the future — in particular, it’s becoming much more diverse. But Republicans have managed to hold back this tide to some extent by making voting harder (with voter ID laws and the like) and by mobilizing their core voters even more aggressively. And they’ve mobilized them not in spite of their presidential disadvantage, but often by virtue of it.

It is not simply that the G.O.P. enjoys these structural advantages. More and more, it feeds on the failure of its presidential standard-bearers.

Trump v The Republican Party

The latest on a continuing topic.

NYT: G.O.P. Gave Voters a Greater Say, and They Said Donald Trump.

The closer Donald J. Trump draws to winning the Republican presidential nomination over opposition from party leaders, the more his detractors ask: How can this happen? There’s no singular answer. One part of the explanation lies in the modern evolution of presidential competition, another in the special talents of Mr. Trump, and a third in the contours of the 21st-centuryRepublican Party. Today, voters across the United States take their influence over presidential nominations for granted. As recently as 1968, however, just 15 nominating contests were held, in which the rank-and-file selected convention delegates.

The Atlantic: The Great Republican Revolt: The GOP planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war. Can the party reconcile the demands of its donors with the interests of its rank and file?

White Middle Americans express heavy mistrust of every institution in American society: not only government, but corporations, unions, even the political party they typically vote for—the Republican Party of Romney, Ryan, and McConnell, which they despise as a sad crew of weaklings and sellouts. They are pissed off. And when Donald Trump came along, they were the people who told the pollsters, “That’s my guy.” They aren’t necessarily superconservative. They often don’t think in ideological terms at all. But they do strongly feel that life in this country used to be better for people like them—and they want that older country back.

Politico: Trump shatters the Republican Party: How the 2016 primary will define the GOP for years to come.

. . . it is Trump’s new alliance of angry populists that is ascendant — and on the precipice of dominance. Built on the backs of working-class men and women who feel abandoned, economically and culturally, Trump’s coalition has both brought in new voters and carved out support from the other two. Trump won over evangelicals from Cruz in South Carolina, and even more resoundingly again in Nevada. He then took moderates from the mainstream in New Hampshire and Nevada en route to landslide victories in three consecutive states.

“What Trump is consolidating is the people who are unhappy being in either camp — those who don’t see themselves as conservative insurgents or as mainstream Republicans,” said Yuval Levin, an influential Republican thinker and editor of the quarterly conservative journal National Affairs. “They’re insurgents but they’re not conservatives. And they’re not happy with the system that gave us that binary choice.”

The New Republic: The Republican Party After Donald Trump: Conservatism is only doomed if its leaders insist on being radicals.

One way or another, the Republican Party is about to rupture—the only question is from which side. If Donald Trump wins the GOP presidential primary, as he’s heavily favored to do, he will drive some unknown, but large, number of regulars from the party. If Republican officials manage to wrest the nomination from him for nearing but failing to reach the threshold required to win outright, he will bolt, and take some unknown, but large, number of supporters with him—either into a third party, or into a protest movement that haunts the actual GOP nominee and creates an air of illegitimacy around him.

From Vox: Twilight of the neoconservatives The movement's unlikely 20-year reign over the GOP could now be coming to an end.

The term "neo-conservatism" was featured prominently in one of the early 2305 section - the one on ideology. It is defined as follows:

Neo-conservatism is a variant of the political ideology of conservatism that combines features of traditional conservatism with political individualism and a qualified endorsement of free markets. Neo-conservatism arose in the United States in the 1970s among intellectuals who shared a dislike of communism and a disdain for the counterculture of the 1960s, especially its political radicalism and its animus against authority, custom, and tradition.

The commonly told story is that these were pro-defense Democrats that grew disaffected with the pro-peace faction within the party, which was becoming increasingly influential. They began to drift over to the Republican Party. Vox reports that that influence appears to be waning, largely due to Trump's reluctance to promote an aggressive use of American power to achieve neo-conservative goals,like the expansion of democracy overseas.


- Click here for the article.

The thing that unifies Trump's foreign policy heresies in the eyes of the GOP establishment — the common theme of his foreign policy divides with the party — is not the positions that are most outlandish, but rather the positions that most diverge from neo-conservatism.

And that hints at something uncomfortable for the party: Its neoconservative foreign policy elites are fighting not just against Trump, but also to hold on to their increasingly fragile dominance of the party itself.

Trump's sins are not just the dangers he would pose to America and the world if elected — though those are real, and earnestly worry neoconservatives — but for what he is exposing: a divide between the party electorate and elite over foreign policy.

It's a divide that, if widened too far, could risk separating neoconservative elites from the party itself. But because elite- and academic-minded neoconservatives seized power by capturing elite institutions — think tanks, policy journals, donors — but not by doing the harder work of attracting voters, this is a divide that may have always been there, just beneath the surface, waiting to be opened by a Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.

Authoritarian Populism

That's term the authors of the Monkey Cage use to describe the Trump phenomenon. They think it is a growing trend.

- It’s not just Trump. Authoritarian populism is rising across the West. Here’s why.

Populist authoritarianism can best be explained as a cultural backlash in Western societies against long-term, ongoing social change.

Over recent decades, the World Values Survey shows that Western societies have been getting gradually more liberal on many social issues, especially among the younger generation and well-educated middle class. That includes egalitarian attitudes toward sex roles, tolerance of fluid gender identities and LGBT rights, support for same-sex marriage, tolerance of diversity, and more secular values, as well as what political scientists call emancipative values, engagement in directly assertive forms ofdemocratic participation, and cosmopolitan support for agencies of global governance.

This long-term generational shift threatens many traditionalists’ cultural values. Less educated and older citizens fear becoming marginalized and left behind within their own countries.

From 538: When Political Parties Splinter

Since conventional wisdom seems to be that Trump's success indicates a shift is underway between the political parties - one that might be fatal to the Republican Party as we know it today - I'll post what I can find relevant to it. It's timely for our upcoming look at political parties in both 2305 and 2306.

Here's the first. It looks at previous splits in American history - they don't happen all the time, but they are not that rare.

- Click here for the article.

The emerging fight within the Republican Party doesn’t look exactly like any of the major party splits of the past. There’s not a clear issue difference at the center of it. Trump is coming in from outside the party; he’s not a former president like Theodore Roosevelt. And party organizations have changed to place more emphasis onvoter input — one of Roosevelt’s chief goals — even as elites play a significant role in managing conflict among factions. That role may become even more important as we head into the later primaries and the convention.

If the GOP does split, it may be for only one or two election cycles, with Trump playing the role of Roosevelt. It’s also possible, however, that the rise of Trumpism within the Republican Party will alienate the Plains states and interior West. How those states vote during the GOP primary could provide some clues (few have voted so far, but Trump has underperformed in Kansas and Oklahoma). Or maybe if Trump wins the nomination, the #NeverTrumps will sleep on the couch for a couple of months but all will be forgiven by the time the general election rolls around.

Regardless, the mere fact that a party splitting seems so plausible is pretty amazing — it doesn’t happen often.

Chart of the Day

From the Rand Corporation.

- Click here for the source.

From the Pew Research Center: A divide between college, non-college Republicans

An emerging and significant split within the party:

- Click here for the article.

And a couple graphs from it:

From Vox: The rise of American authoritarianism

Some researchers think this is the key to understanding Trump supporters. Until recently each party contained supporters with authoritarian tendencies. Now it seems they are drifting towards the Republican Party.

Authoritarianism is a term we cover in 2305 when we look at ideology.

- Click here for the article.

Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.

Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.

This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which "activated" authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.Trump embodies the classic authoritarian leadership style: simple, powerful, and punitive

These Americans with authoritarian views, they found, were sorting into the GOP, driving polarization. But they were also creating a divide within the party, at first latent, between traditional Republican voters and this group whose views were simultaneously less orthodox and, often, more extreme.

From the Texas Tribune: High Turnout Has Some Wondering if GOP Congressmen in Danger

The Tea Party looks to take out high profile Republicans - powerful ones.

- Click here for the article.

Expectations of a record turnout has some Texas Republicans on edge that a handful of U.S. House incumbents may be in tougher fights than usual.

Republican consultants are projecting the presidential primary will drive turnout for their party's primary to the highest levels in decades. And many of those Republican voters are expected to be first-time voters, drawn to the campaign by anti-establishment figures like real estate magnate Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

The question looming over the next 24 hours is whether those voters only weigh in on the presidential race or continue on down the ballot and vote against sitting members of Congress.

Four Republican incumbents, in particular, are the subject of the strongest interest among Republican operatives: U.S. Reps. Kevin Brady of The Woodlands, John Culberson of Houston, Pete Sessions of Dallas and Lamar Smith of San Antonio.

A key point to consider: All four of these incumbents have powerful committee assignments in Washington. A loss in a runoff may serve as a boon for base conservatives, but would decrease the state’s legislative clout.

None of these Republicans are expected to lose outright on Tuesday. In fact, all four could end up breezing past their rivals and onto re-election.

But they could also be kicked to a dreaded runoff on May 24 if they fail to draw a majority of the vote. Whether or not a runoff, where turning out voters can be tougher, translates to mortal electoral danger for these incumbents has become a point of speculative debate among Texas political observers.

From Vox: Don’t Assume Conservatives Will Rally Behind Trump

It's been a while since we have had a party realignment. Here's an argument that we have one coming up.

- Click here for the article.

If a Trump nomination happens, it will imply that the Republican Party has been weakened and is perhaps evenon the brink of failure, unable to coordinate on a plan to stop Trump despite the existential threat he poses to it. 

Major partisan realignments do happen in America — on average about once every 40 years. The last one, which involved the unwinding of the New Deal coalition between Northern and Southern Democrats, is variously dated as having occurred in 1968, 1972 and 1980. There are also a lot of false alarms, elections described as realignments that turn out not to be. This time, we really might be in the midst of one. It’s almost impossible to reconcile this year’s Republican nomination contest with anyone’s notion of “politics as usual.”

If a realignment is underway, then it poses a big empirical challenge. Presidential elections already suffer from the problem of small sample sizes — one reason a lot of people, certainly including us, shouldn’t have been so dismissive of Trump’s chances early on. Elections held in the midst of political realignments are even rarer, however. The rules of the old regime — the American political party system circa 1980 through 2012 — might not apply in the new one. And yet, it’s those elections that inform both the conventional wisdom and statistical models of American political behavior.

This doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be completely in the dark. For one thing, the polls — although there’s reason to be concerned about their condition in the long-term — have been reasonably accurate so far in the primaries. And some of the old rules will still apply. It’s probably fair to guess that Pennsylvania and Ohio will vote similarly, for example.

Still, one should be careful about one’s assumptions. For instance, the assumption that the parties will rally behind their respective nominees may or may not be reliable. True, recent elections have had very little voting across party lines: 93 percent of Republicans who voted in 2012 supported Romney, for example, despite complaints from the base that he was insufficiently conservative. And in November 2008, some 89 percent of Democrats who voted supported Barack Obama after his long battle with Hillary Clinton.