WASHINGTON — Some of the Republican party’s most prominent members have resisted endorsing Donald Trump amid a historic, soul-searching exercise over their presidential nominee.
The party’s two living former presidents — the George Bushes — won’t endorse him. Neither will the last nominee, Mitt Romney. At least two senators are looking to back a third-party candidate.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, the top Republican in Congress, says he’s not ready yet. He has two months to decide. Because it so happens that he is also chairman of the summer convention that will formally nominate Trump.
The majority of the party establishment appears willing to support the nominee. That being said, several lawmakers have avoided mentioning his name, while insisting they’ll focus more on congressional races.
Others have said more explicitly they want no association with Trump, who is detested by Latinos, the country’s fastest-growing ethnic group, who is an advocate of banning Muslims from entering the country, and who is an occasional proponent of anti-conservative positions on everything from social issues to taxes.
“I am a conservative,” said Aaron Gardner, an army veteran and communications consultant from Colorado.
“I can no more vote for Trump than I can vote for his good friend Hillary. Both are progressives, though they may disagree on some means, their aims are the same — less individual self-control and more government control of the individual.”
He’s changing his party registration to Libertarian, or Unaffiliated.
A senior fellow at the New America Foundation has a theory that this debate is an early whisper of a historic event: the realignment of America’s political parties.
In a few years, Lee Drutman predicted, former Bernie Sanders supporters and former Donald Trump supporters will belong to the same political party — a Republican party based on nationalism and economic populism.
He expects the Clinton types will win a party struggle with the more socialist left, and eventually be joined by Bush types in a cosmopolitan, pro-business Democratic party.
“The Republicans are cracking up,” Drutman said. “And I think Democrats are also going to split as well.”
During that breakup process, there will be more co-operation between parties in Congress, with more bills passed, compared to the current gridlock, he said.
That’s what happened the last time the parties reshuffled their membership, a process accelerated by civil-rights debates but which actually took decades. Members would often have more in common with the other party than their own, and they co-operated to pass a lot more bills.
The next realignment would be the seventh in American history, he said, and the first since the Reagan era.
Meanwhile, Republicans are figuring out what to do in 2016.
The grassroots falls into three categories, one activist said, including party loyalists who’ll back Trump because he’s the nominee, and people who will reluctantly vote for Trump to avoid allowing Democrats to control Supreme Court picks.
The third category is those backing a third-party candidate — like Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico now atop the Libertarian party ticket.