Monday Open Thread [5.9.16]

“The rift in the Republican Party grew deeper on Sunday and threatened to upset the July convention as Donald Trump refused to rule out blocking Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, from serving as the convention’s chairman,” the New York Times reports.

“Mr. Trump’s warning was his latest affront to Republicans who have urged him to adopt a more cooperative and unifying tone. And it amounted to an extraordinary escalation in tensions between the party’s presumptive nominee and its highest-ranking officeholder.”

“Bracing for a general election fight with Donald Trump, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton and her allies are putting resources into industrial states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania to try to block Trump from making inroads with working-class voters there.”

“Labor leaders, progressive groups and Democratic operatives told Reuters in interviews that they took seriously Trump’s appeal with white working-class voters and were studying how to respond to his promises to create jobs and negotiate better trade deals.”

Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of being “an unbelievably nasty, mean enabler” of her husband’s alleged affairs, CNN reports. Said Trump: “She’s been the total enabler. She would go after these women and destroy their lives. She was an unbelievably nasty, mean enabler, and what she did to a lot of those women is disgraceful.”

Senior Trump adviser Barry Bennett told Bloomberg that Donald Trump may speak on every night of the GOP convention. That’s one way to fix the problem of not having any Republican of any import support you.

Said Bennett: “Our team will be headed out [to Cleveland] next week or the week after to get our first kind of update of what’s going on. But I think when it comes to the program a lot of us feel that we could juice up the format just a little. More entertaining, more interesting. I don’t know why the candidate only speaks on acceptance night, why shouldn’t he speak every night from a different city? How come we are not doing broadcasts on Facebook or Google, why are we just relying on 45 minutes of network television time.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders left the door open to being Hillary Clinton’s running mate, The Hill reports.

Said Sanders: “Right now, we are focused on the next five weeks of winning the Democratic nomination. If that does not happen, we are going to fight as hard as we can on the floor of the Democratic convention to make sure that we have a progressive platform that the American people will support. Then, after that, certainly Secretary Clinton and I can sit down and talk and see where we go from there.”

I like the positive tone here, Bernie.

“Unequivocally, I am not supporting Donald Trump. I think he’s a sociopath.” — Former Sen. Gordon Humphrey (R-NH), quoted by the New Hampshire Union Leader.

The Washington Post on whether Trump has killed the Conservative Movement: “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.”

“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 grassroots. 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.”

Chris Cillizza says the GOP’s problems are bigger than Trump: “The current Republican disadvantage in the electoral map is less about any individual candidate than it is about demographics. As the country, and the voting public, has become less white and as Republicans have proved incapable of winning over nonwhite voters, a number of states have moved toward Democrats over the past decade.”

“Trump doesn’t help matters. But the Republican map problem goes deeper than him — or any one candidate. Blaming Trump for a loss in November would not only miss the point but may ensure that Republicans are doomed to repeat history in 2020.”

Charles M. Blow at The New York Times says the GOP has only itself to blame:

The Republican Party is trapped between a rock and huckster.

Now that all of their other presidential candidates have dropped out of the race, Donald Trump is the last demagogue standing. He is their presumptive nominee. Their party belongs to him. It’s a YUUGE … disaster.

Now the few remaining serious folks in that party have to make a decision: support this man who, if current trends in polling hold, is likely to lose the general election by an overwhelming margin (and likely do even more damage to the party brand and hurt the chances of down-ballot candidates), or they can … wait, they don’t really have another option other than to sit out this cycle and pretend that their party hasn’t gone stark raving mad.

From John Stoehr’s “The Donald’s Trump Card Isn’t an Ace: The media narrative that Donald Trump is winning over white working-class voters is false” at U.S. News: “That Trump performed more or less on par with his rivals in Rust Belt states suggests that his supporters were already firmly conservative or already primed to choose any Republican, populist or otherwise, according to Andrew Levison, author of “The White Working Class Today” and analyst for “The Democratic Strategist,” a journal of public opinion and strategy. Indeed, Levison observed in a March white paper, Trump performed best not with Midwestern Reagan Democrats but with white working-class Southerners. This, he argued, isn’t due to Trump’s “right-wing version of economic populism” but “the racial and xenophobic elements of his platform.”