Posted on 08/12/2015 6:14:45 PM PDT by markomalley
Outsiders who have never before held political office are dominating the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
Donald Trump is the GOP front-runner, while businesswoman Carly Fiorina is surging after a strong performance in last week’s debate.
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson is also showing strength, and is a candidate to watch in the Iowa caucuses, where he is outperforming former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
Conservatives are thrilled with the developments.
“This is a paradigm shift,” conservative Iowa radio host Steve Deace told The Hill. “The base of the party is in open revolt. We’re watching a political party dissolve. It’s a civil war and the GOP as it’s constructed may not survive.”
Others think Republican voters will eventually coalesce around a more traditional GOP candidate — perhaps Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker or Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
They believe Trump’s rise is a product of his celebrity and a media frenzy that will ultimately fizzle. They doubt that Carson and Fiorina will be able to compete in the fundraising fight, or pull together the political operation to make a deep run through the primaries.
But for now, the anti-establishment wing of the GOP is on the upswing.
Fiorina is rising in polls, moving into the top tier of candidates in Iowa and New Hamshire, according to two surveys released this week.
A new survey from Public Policy Polling showed Carson has pulled into a second-place tie in Iowa with Walker, who for months held a big lead over the field in the Hawkeye State. A Suffolk University poll released this week showed voters in Iowa believe Carson matched Rubio as one of the winners in prime-time debate.
Both are embracing their outsider status.
“Change was promised, but people don’t see that change ... if Congressional leaders can’t produce results, they need to step aside,” Fiorina, a former Hewlett-Packard CEO, told Breitbart News in a post-debate interview.
The comments aligned Fiorina with grassroots critics of Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Carson was similarly blunt in his criticism of the political establishment.
“The political class has weaved an imaginary tale that they’re the only ones who can solve our problems,” he said this week on "CBS This Morning." “But the fact of the matter is if you take the collective political experience of everyone in Congress, which is just under 9,000 years, you’ll see that it really has not solved our problems.”
The rise of Trump, Carson and Fiorina is welcome news to conservatives such as Laura Ingraham, who has been critical of Bush, presumed to have been the GOP front-runner.
“If we don’t come to terms with what is happening in the Republican Party, this is going to be a very ugly 2016,” the radio host said in a testy exchange on Fox News with conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer, who has been critical of Trump.
“There is a coming crack-up in the Republican Party if Republicans don’t let this play out,” Ingraham said.
Many conservatives believe GOP leaders oversold on promises they made heading in to the 2014 election cycle, when Republicans won an historically large majority in the House and wrested control of the Senate from Democrats.
“There was no point in the last election,” said Deace. “Republican leaders nullified the results. Nothing has happened that wouldn’t have happened if [Senate Democratic leader Harry] Reid weren’t the leader.”
Even conservative critics of Trump’s policies believe his popularity is linked not just to his celebrity status, but to the fact that he doesn’t sound like a politician.
“Donald Trump is not taking off because Republican voters agree with his liberal policy positions,” Heritage Action CEO Michael Needham wrote in an op-ed on Red State. “He has supported socialized medicine, abortion, and amnesty in the past. He is taking off because voters feel unheard, they feel like both political parties are paid off by the well-connected, and they feel like the political process has become a game disconnected from addressing their concerns.”
Texas-based Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak estimated that those in open revolt with the party constitute about a quarter of Republican primary voters.
He said the outsiders will have an impact on the race by forcing candidates with establishment appeal to find new ways of addressing the growing sense of frustration among the base.
One beneficiary could be Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
The Texas Republican, who since arriving in Washington has relished every opportunity to frustrate party leadership in the Senate, surged into second place in a NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll released shortly after the debate.
He’s raised more hard campaign dollars than any other candidate, hauling in $1 million in the 100 hours after the debate, and attracted a crowd of more than 1,000 at a rally in Alabama this week.
Mackowiak says GOP candidates need to realize how angry the base is with its elected GOP leadership.
“The establishment side of the party has to show that they get it, and we haven’t seen that yet,” he said. “They’re saying that Obama has failed, they’re not saying that GOP leadership has failed. That’s not the message the base is sending.”
It happens once a generation(between 30 and 40 years apart). The elites seek a point of equilibrium where they work together against their people. This happens when there is not a real difference between them(think Bush and Clinton). This is an “era of good feeling”. The original era of good feeling occurred during the Monroe administration. The resulting rebellion was the Jacksonian one. It was a complete shift against the apparatus put into place by the founding fathers. Whigs and Democrats became hard to separate in the 1850’s so the entire system blew up again. The next era of good feeling came in the 1990’s when the elites again were blown away by the populists and the progressives. Then again Hoover and Smith seemed to agree to much in 1928 and e resulting upheaval changed the guards in both parties with the “Catholic Bosses” and the Dewey, Warren, Brownell wing taking over the GOP. By the time of Kennedy and Nixon there was again little differences an we “heard a choice not an echo” The Goldwater revolt took the establishment out again and the Dem “Catholic bosses” fell to lib gentries later. Now we have the Bush and Clinton era where there is little differences and the elites have learned to work together again. And what happens? The lib gentries were blown away by the radical left and the Republican establishment is being blown away by Trump , Cruz, Paul etc.
The Dems give way to a completely different group when this happens. In the Republican world the country clubbers loose control and always seem to come back in control later on. They never learn do they?
"as corrupted" would be more like it.
I will never again listen to a word spoken by the Establishment Repubs. and believe any of it. Their actions in the Miss. Senate race was below snake crap. They made promises for years what they would do once in Majority.
They spit in our faces after given that Majority
90+ Million Americans unemployed and they continue to allow an invasion of illegal parasites and low skilled workers. Fact is the true Unemployment rate in America is north of 22%.If the crying cheeto and the post turtle beat the left with those figures and tell the Public they are putting you out of work the pressure would force Action. But that won’t happen because everyone knows the RINOS are paid whores for The Chamber and big business to keep wages low
Now the little Bastard Rand Paul has accepted the roll as attack dog for the Washington Cartel.
Today he started running ads for them attacking Trump
Make no mistake this little turd is McConnell’s
Bitch. He made his bed aligning with him in the Kentucky Primary and supporting the RINO dirty tricks in Mississippi
FURP
I would add Cruz to the list of outsiders. I doubt he gets very many invitations to attend big-donor galas either.
And they did it through the ‘advisers’, where at least half of them (it seems) are gay, or unwilling to disclose their personal life, but look gay.
There’s nothing wrong with having a gay ‘adviser’ around, as they represent some voters and perhaps can protect you against stepping in it with that bunch (who knows...I’m trying to be generous here).
But when your KEY ADVISERS, at least half, out themselves and state that they flat-out support gay marriage, then WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON? And the two questions to ask are why do Republicans INSIST on keeping them around, and are they a 5th column. The second one is easy to answer - but the first one makes no sense, you’d think they want to win once in a while.
Insiders are #VichyRepublicans
They are between a rock, and a hard place on that. The way I see it for Republicans is, they have a small window to make a stand immediately following an election. They will get hammered by the press and the Democrats, but the the hysteria will subside, and give them talking points for the next election. This time they used that period to ram Cromnibus down our throats, and fully fund Obama’s amnesty. The closer it gets to the 2016 election, the less they want to take a controversial stand. I understand their concerns, but I am sick and tired of being told to keep my powder dry. Give us a conservative presidential candidate, or give us Trump 3P.
Trump/Cruz 2016
As Teddy Roosevelt said in 1910:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
“Others think Republican voters will eventually coalesce around a more traditional GOP candidate — perhaps Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker or Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).”
Not this Republican voter. I’m done with the GOPe. And I don’t even care if hillary finishes off the country, because only an outsider like Trump would POTENTIALLY make a difference anyway. We already know that the Republican branch of the Uniparty hasn’t done one damn thing to stop one damn iota of the obama/progressive/kommie agenda. in fact, if one of the GOPe insiders is the nominee, i would be DELIGHTED to see them slaughtered in the general election as the GOP “base” they are so disdainful of turns their collective backs on the GOPe SOBs.
They always win, even when they "lose". They are part of the Uni Party.
Dumb and dumber don’t have two neurons to rub together combined.
I don’t want the establishment to get it. I want them hung for the treason they’ve already committed.
“Wouldn’t it be something if Mitch and John passed something- anything- conservative: to help the RINO presidential candidates by counteracting the anger at the establishment?”
Mitch and John have passed something, things like gas and hairballs.
Outsiders take over GOPUh huh. And who got that ball rolling? Cruz, Walker, Rubio, Perry or 11 others? NO. It was Trump and Trump alone. The others, other than Carson, are just phony hangers on or establishment stooges.
Bottom line is that the Republicans either accept the fact that the game has changed and start to deliver or they go the way of the Whigs and simply cease to exist. I no longer call myself a Republican - I call myself a “conservative,”. More and more of the Republican base is simply removing themselves from the Republican label.
The hell that's not the message- Obama is an Epic Failed President, Boehner is a Epic Failed Speaker, and McConnell is an Epic Failed Senate Majority Leader. And the GOPe is worthless, and abysmally stupid.
yeah...soooo...the TEA party....
Others think Republican voters will eventually coalesce around a more traditional GOP candidate
I think this is the election where they’re going to find out many of us will not accept anymore rinos and will stay home rather than vote for one.
FURP"
AMEN!
Boehner , McConnell and all the estabs need to retire and let someone with a spine take over .
...
They have plenty of spine when it comes to fighting Conservatives.
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