For some time I thought Trump would eventually crash and burn by the many stupid things he has said again and again. But he still keeps winning primaries, always topping out at about 35%. Meanwhile, everybody else keeps firing at him to no avail. Trump keeps winning (he's a Winner!) and the rest keep doing the same things they do. Cruz and Cruz Lite keep holding steady about 22%, and don't look to grow much more than that, since they are basically the same candidate. Cruz Lite seems to be less annoying, less informed, and less serious than Cruz, but the fact that both of them still exist means that there will continue to be a logjam. With Super Tuesday coming up soon, however, their co-existence seems to indicate that Trump might well be handed the nomination with his hard 35%. I find the whole thing funny, but how is it that one of the kingmakers has not offed Cruz or Cruz Lite? A party of adults, as the Republican party used to be, would have done this. But we are long past that.
And so, unless something changes quickly, we are looking at a Trump-Hillary election. Have there ever been two people who were so roundly hated by so many Americans running on the two main tickets? How did it come to this? Could it be that this will be the lowest-attended election ever? Most of my circle is red-state in their ideology, and so I know more conservatives than others, and many people I know have said that they will sit this one out if it's these two.
Maybe, though, this election is gearing up for a third party challenge. I have long hoped that a decent third party challenger would arise from the middle, but can you imagine a Cruz/Rubio protest vote from the Tea Party? Throw in Bloomberg (Trump 2.0) and Sanders running anyway as a Socialist, and we could have a perfect storm of election chaos.
For all the hand wringing by my many Republican friends, this is exactly what they created. Years and years of hate-speech (yes, that's what it is....when your ideology is all about the things you hate, that's hate-speech) combined with Trumpian 'truth' telling, and you get a candidate that sounds little different than the Rush Limbaugh show. Personally, I'm delighted to see what will be the end of this. I can't imagine that it will destroy the Republican party, as some think will happen; the adults will eventually get back ahold of things. But things really are different this time around.
