posted November 06, 2016 08:19 AM            

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If Donald Trump falls short of winning the presidency, Republicans anticipate a spirited, urgent debate over the direction the party should take in the aftermath.

Indeed, that discussion has already begun.

On Oct. 11, a group of three dozen prominent conservative thinkers, whose brand of Republicanism has been in exile during Trump’s candidacy, met one block from the White House at Old Ebbitt Grill in downtown Washington, D.C.

They convened to discuss privately some of the questions that have regularly bubbled up into the public sphere this year: Would Trump’s brand of Republicanism end with his candidacy, or would its effects come to bear on the party long after Election Day? Could the Republican Party be reformed, or would anti-Trump conservatives be better off starting from scratch? The group sought to make sense of Trump’s rise and to come to grips with the party that enabled it.

Attendees included Evan McMullin, the former House Republican staffer whose upstart campaign for president has put deep-red Utah in play, and Mindy Finn, his running mate. McMullin spoke about the meeting with RealClearPolitics, and another source confirmed details about where and when it took place.

“Some people in the room were thinking more traditionally: We need to reform the Republican Party. Others were thinking we’ve got to build something new,” McMullin said. “And then there were some people ... who argued that it was too hard to build something new, and we just need to reform the Republican Party, and they were making the argument that it could happen.”

A PowerPoint presentation by the latter faction included a slide that read, simply, “47 percent,” a figure well known to those in the room as the share of Republican primary votes won by Trump.

“They thought that was evidence of, it’s not a majority who are supporting Trump, therefore we can reform this thing,” McMullin said. “But the reality is, having been on the inside of this, I know that even if the support for Donald Trump was 30 percent or 25 percent, that’s enough to control who’s the speaker of the House, it’s enough to create major havoc in policymaking. It’s a big deal.”

“Forty-seven percent means you can’t make change,” McMullin added. “It means you can’t reform the party while keeping the party together.”

Polling suggests the GOP has remained divided on Trump even as most Republicans have backed him during the general election. In a New York Times/CBS News poll released Thursday, 39 percent of Republicans said Trump’s candidacy has been “good for the party,” while 41 percent judged that it has had a negative impact.

In challenging Trump and Clinton for the presidency, McMullin hoped to seize on that Republican angst and act as an outlet for it. He has successfully done so in Utah, where polling suggests roughly one-third of the state’s voters support him — an enormous share for a third-party candidate.

That surge of voters rejecting Trump, and to a lesser extent Clinton, has heartened some Republicans searching for a glimmer of hope for the party’s future, a small signal though it may be.

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posted November 06, 2016 05:56 PM            

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Originally posted by Randall:
When the Democrats lose, they will have to restructure their party and stop being mired so deeply in corruption.

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posted November 06, 2016 07:08 PM            

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Originally posted by Randall:
Really? Trump isn't under investigation by the FBI for public corruption.

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Not yet anyhow.

BTW swami juni told you those emails were moot.