Donald Trump Forces G.O.P. to Choose Between Insularity and Outreach

[IronLionZion]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/us/politics/donald-trump-republican-convention.html

As Republicans stream into Cleveland to nominate Donald J. Trump for president, they confront a party divided and deeply imperiled by his racially divisive campaign. He has called for cracking down on Muslims and undocumented immigrants, stoked fears of crime and terrorism and repeatedly declared that the United States is in a war for its very survival.

But amid gloom about Republican prospects in November, Mr. Trump may have endangered the party in a more lasting way: by forging a coalition of white voters driven primarily by themes of hard-right nationalism and cultural identity.

Republicans have wrestled for years with the push and pull of seeking to win over new groups of voters while tending to their overwhelmingly white and conservative base. Now, Mr. Trump’s candidacy may force them into making a fateful choice: whether to fully embrace the Trump model and become, effectively, a party of white identity politics, or to pursue a broader political coalition by repudiating Mr. Trump’s ideas — and many of the voters he has gathered behind his campaign.

With his diatribes against Islam, immigration from Mexico and economic competition from Asia, Mr. Trump has amassed dominant support from restive white voters. His political approach would have Republicans court working-class and rural whites, mainly in the South and Midwest, at the grievous cost of alienating minorities and women, who often decide presidential races.

A starkly different path forward for Republicans would involve rejecting that base and the ideas that Mr. Trump has used to assemble it.

In order to build a winning party again, some Republican leaders say, the party will have to disavow Mr. Trump’s exclusionary message, even at the price of driving away voters at the core of the Republican base — perhaps a third or more of the party.

This approach would amount to a highly risky lurch away from the faction that made Mr. Trump the Republican nominee, and toward a community of female, Latino and Asian voters who have never been reliable Republicans. Should the effort falter, and Republicans fail to win a second look from these Democratic-leaning groups, they could find themselves stranded with virtually no base at all.

[dubyadiprecession]

1. Trump has been running a "no apologies campaign" and thinks that he can insult just the people..

who won't vote for him and get to 51%. He is (after all) a moron.