Sixty, to be exact. By my count, that is the number of Republican governors, U.S. senators and U.S. representatives whose public position is that they outright oppose Trump or that they are not yet ready to commit one way or the other. Thirteen are in the #NeverTrump club (four senators, one governor and eight House members), and 47 are in the “maybe later/maybe never” camp, spearheaded by Sen. Ted Cruz and, until recently, Ryan. [...]
This analysis provides some support for the hypothesis that Republicans who are not currently in office or are not looking to get elected have an easier time resisting the pressure to unite around their party’s presumptive nominee. Republicans who are facing voters this year are more likely to be supporting Trump. Within that group, 83 percent have fallen in line behind their party’s presumptive nominee, compared with 76 percent of those who are retiring or who are not up for re-election until 2018 or 2020. In fact, three of the 20 House Republicans who are retiring from Congress are outright opposing Trump (Reps. Reid Ribble, Scott Rigell and Richard Hanna), compared with five among all other 226 House Republicans. And after all, the highest-profile Republicans to oppose Trump for now — George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, Romney — get to watch from the sidelines. [....]
That speaks to the difficulty of capturing what motivates opposition to Trump through a conventional centrism/conservatism binary. Among openly anti-Trump Republicans are some with the lowest DW-Nominate scores, such as Rep. Bob Dold of Illinois, and some with the highest, such as Huelskamp and Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan.
No comments:
Post a Comment