The silent stampede away from Trump is about to begin

By Paul Waldman October 20 at 1:30 PM

The final debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump wasn’t exactly the end of the 2016 presidential race, but it was awfully close. Now that there are no more major events before the election, just the daily slog of rallies and organizing and charges and countercharges, you’re going to be less and less able to find Republicans not in Trump’s direct employ who will pretend that they think he’s going to win.

The result will be a kind of silent stampede away from him. Without drawing too much attention to what they’re doing, Republicans everywhere are now going to accept that Hillary Clinton is going to be the next president of the United States, and reposition themselves accordingly.

It wasn’t just the debate itself, at which Trump not only refused to say that he’ll respect the results of the election but effectively sealed his fate with women voters (“such a nasty woman,” he said about Clinton). And it isn’t just the fact that he’s trailing in the polls by a margin from which no candidate has recovered at this stage of the race. It’s also that Republicans look at the candidate himself and the bumbling incompetents with whom he’s surrounded himself, and rightly conclude that the chances that they could come up with a stratagem so brilliant it would reverse the trajectory of this race are rapidly approaching zero. If anything, Clinton’s margin is likely to grow as Trump shoots himself in the foot a few more times and her formidable ground operation keeps banking early votes; meanwhile the Trump campaign thinks it doesn’t need much more than rallies to get its supporters to the polls.

So if you’re a Republican, what do you do now? You save your own skin, and begin thinking about how to deal with a second President Clinton.

Republicans are already hearing that advice from their allies. Today at the National Review, John Fund tells them to begin laying the groundwork for all the investigations they plan to do of Clinton’s administration, which might help them stay in Congress. “It shouldn’t be too hard to make a case to independent and even some Democratic voters that handing Hillary Clinton ‘blank check’ control of Congress would be imprudent and even reckless.” Karl Rove writes much the same thing, saying that holding Congress “may be the best Republicans can hope for.” Fund’s colleague Kevin Williamson writes an article about the future of gun policy entitled “Some Advice for President Clinton.”

-snip-

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/10/20/the-silent-stampede-away-from-trump-is-about-to-begin/?utm_term=.1862c42cb5b4&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1