It’s rather intriguing that the national media has largely ignored the infamous Republican Party “autopsy” report issued by GOP insiders following the presidential election loss of 2012.
That Republican National Committee report, brutally blunt in its assessment of the party’s future, called for a kinder, gentler GOP. The authors concluded, after considerable research and study of Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss, that the party must become more inclusive by supporting comprehensive immigration reform and courting minority voters, especially Hispanics.
But shortly after the autopsy was released in 2013, it became clear that key figures in the emerging presidential jockeying contest at the time, such as Sen. Ted Cruz or Gov. Scott Walker, had no intentions of following the blueprint. But the much bigger story that has emerged in Election 2016 is that Donald Trump has shredded the plan with glee – and has enjoyed incredible success in doing so.
The snarky reception Romney received on Thursday after trying to convince GOP voters that Trump is a “fraud” and a disastrous potential nominee shows just how far the Republican base has moved in four years. That movement is in a direction opposite of what RNC Chairman Reince Priebus had hoped for just a couple of years ago.
Politico went back and interviewed the RNC report’s five authors and found that they were nearly despondent in witnessing Trump’s trashing of their campaign advice. Attempts by party elders to moderate Trump’s message have failed and these same insiders now believe the buffoonish billionaire is headed for a monumental defeat in November if he wins the nomination.
Here’s a bit of what Politico reported:
… members of the GOP establishment concede that they have little influence over Trump, and have thus far been unable to exert much leverage in their party’s primary: “The party itself is less consequential than ever before, and since our shellacking in 2012, the tribal differences are increasingly irreconcilable,” said former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. “If Trump prevails, he will have single-handedly upended the old Republican order and built a new movement in its place. The question then will be, is it sustainable?”
For GOP leaders, what’s so vexing about Trump’s campaign is that it’s a photo-negative of everything the autopsy said was needed to win a general election.
The report — the product of 2,600 interviews with voters, experts, party officials and business leaders, as well as a poll of Hispanic Republicans and an online survey of 36,000 stakeholders — was remarkable for its blunt criticism of Republican politics. The party, the report’s five authors argued, had become the realm of “stuffy old men” and spent too much time “talking to itself” rather than engaging new voters. Backing immigration reform, the authors concluded, would be necessary to shed that image. “If we do not, our party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only,” the authors wrote.
