Ramesh Ponnuru:
Recriminations began unusually early for Republicans this year. Usually political parties wait until they have lost general elections before their members start blaming one another for the defeats. Sometimes the finger-pointing begins a few weeks ahead of schedule, as the polls foretell doom. This year, many Republicans saw doom for their party foretold in the polls half a year before the election, thanks to Donald Trump.
Trump’s supporters have responded by doubting the polls’ accuracy, or denying their predictive power, or calling attention to the minority of favorable or close polls — which became more numerous in the immediate aftermath of his clinching the nomination. A few Republicans have, however, already devised a preemptive explanation for why neither Trump nor his supporters in the primary will be responsible if he should lose in November. According to this theory, it will be anti-Trump Republicans who have caused a Trump defeat. They will be to blame for not voting for him, or for validating some of Hillary Clinton’s criticisms of him, or for refusing to give him their wholehearted backing.
This theory may turn out to be right — if Clinton defeats Trump narrowly, and especially if a third-party campaign by anti-Trump conservatives exceeds the margin between them. If, on the other hand, Clinton beats Trump by a mile, as some polls suggest she will, then the theory will not explain the result. It will instead be clear, at least for those with eyes to see, that Trump supporters gave an extremely weak general-election candidate the nomination.
How that happened is the subject of another category of precriminations, this time dividing his opponents. The question these precriminations seek to answer is who, besides Trump himself and his supporters, paved the way for his nomination. Four groups are in the dock: Trump’s primary rivals, Republican officials, the media, and conservatives.
Trump’s primary rivals are all at fault, in a sense, for not winning more votes than he did. But Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich have attracted particular blame for supposedly staying in the race after it became clear they could not win. Bush should probably have never entered in the first place. For all the talk about 2016 “not being his year” because of the Republican electorate’s sour mood, it is hard to picture a candidate so diffident and introverted winning in any year. He also served as a useful foil for Trump at the start of the campaign, letting him win credit from conservatives who consider themselves hostile to the “Republican establishment.”
But the dynamics of the campaign were too unpredictable to make these indictments stick. If Bush had dropped out after coming in fourth in New Hampshire, Rubio might have won South Carolina and altered the course of the race. But then again, he might not have: Adding all of Bush’s votes to his would have gotten him to second place. And it was hard to make the case that the fourth-place finisher in New Hampshire should step aside for the guy who took fifth. An earlier departure from the race by Rubio, meanwhile, would not have solved Ted Cruz’s ultimately fatal weakness among the “somewhat conservative” voters in the middle of the party.
Some of Kasich’s behavior, on the other hand, is harder to explain, let alone defend. Cruz offered to debate Kasich even if Trump refused to participate, allowing the two to make a point of the front-runner’s cowardice. In declining this, Kasich also turned down an opportunity to make himself and his views better known nationally.
Most of Trump’s rivals collectively refused to take him on — and devote ad money to attacking him — in the early stages of the race. Early ads would have had to persuade Republican voters not to choose Trump. They might not have worked; but later ads had the harder task of persuading Republicans to stop someone already on the path to the nomination.
