WashPost: Conservatives willing to give the election to Hillary to preserve their integrity.
Al Cardenas: "A movement can survive the loss of an election cycle, but it can’t survive the loss of its purpose, and that’s what we’re battling here.”
The extraordinary resistance of many figures on the right this past week to Trump has not been prompted merely by objections to his temperament and fears about his electability in November. At the core has been a calculation by self-identified “movement conservatives” that they would rather preserve their entrenched ideological project than promote a nominee whom they believe would violate their creed and ethos.
“It’s a crisis,” said Al Cardenas, a former chairman of the American Conservative Union who is withholding support for Trump. “If we do away with the fundamental strength of the conservative movement, which is our ideas and values and principles, then you don’t have anything left but politics. A movement can survive the loss of an election cycle, but it can’t survive the loss of its purpose, and that’s what we’re battling here.”
The moment potentially marks the closure of a historic half-century in Republican politics in which conservatives have accrued dominant influence — on Capitol Hill, in gubernatorial mansions, at think tanks, on talk radio and in the grass roots. Since Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful but edifying 1964 presidential run, the conservative movement has been at the crux of Republican campaigns, from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 sweep to the 1994 revolution to the tea party’s rise in 2010.
Yet, by taking a stand they see as a stroke of moral clarity, conservative leaders are at risk of separating their coalition from a Republican Party in which voters coast to coast have effectively shifted the center of gravity by choosing Trump as their standard bearer. In the primaries, Trump defeated a string of classically conservative candidates by peeling away many of the movement’s core supporters: evangelical and working-class white voters.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-spurs-some-conservative-leaders-to-step-back-from-the-gop/2016/05/07/9aedf0bc-13d3-11e6-81b4-581a5c4c42df_story.html
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This is a remarkable perhaps historic development within the Republican party.
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... or at least the end of the GOP as we know it. I doubt that the party will completely dissolve, but it's well on its way to becoming impotent, fragile, and a mere shell of what it once was. It opposes everything and stands for nothing. It's the party of NO solutions, NO ideas, NO compromise, NO common ground.
Their base is dying off (in some regards, this can also be taken quite literally) and they've spent so much time catering to that base, that they've failed to bring in new people and new ideas. And in the process, not only have they failed to bring IN new people, they've PERMANENTLY ALIENATED an entire generation. As a result of that, whatever changes they do make will only be meaningful to the next generation. So, we're looking at about 20 years before they're a threat again.
In the meantime, their majority in Congress will likely last only as long as their terms do. Over the course of the next few elections, the worst of the worst will be voted out, or they'll just age-out in office. Same thing goes for the governors and state-held offices. If we can take more control of those before the next census in 2020, then we can start to do something about the horrid gerrymandering.
All these things are so important, and obviously so, it still amazes me how Bernie-voters are less likely to vote in down-ballot races. (And then they act all proud about how they're "sending a message" by not voting.) 
~ President Barack Obama
