G.O.P. Fears Donald Trump as Zombie Candidate: Damaged but

Quote:

G.O.P. Fears Donald Trump as Zombie Candidate: Damaged but Unstoppable


So I’m thinking slow moving Zombie Candidate Trump because of age and as the chart indicates, feasibility. In any case he’ll be looking for brains which means his supporters are safe. LOL!

Lace up your walking shoes liberals and keep your head on a swivel. Zombie Trump will not be a fast mover, but he’s wily. The following will prove...instructive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa_jB95LCBY

Election 2016
G.O.P. Fears Donald Trump as Zombie Candidate: Damaged but Unstoppable

By ALEXANDER BURNSAPRIL 1, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/02/us/politics...pable.html


Donald J. Trump, who in recent days has mocked a political opponent’s wife, defended a campaign aide arrested on a charge of battery and suggested punishing women who terminate pregnancies, may have surrendered any remaining chance to rally Republicans strongly around him before the party’s July convention in Cleveland.

At a moment when a more traditional front-runner might have sought to smooth over divisions within his party and turn his attention to the general election, Mr. Trump has only intensified his slash-and-burn, no-apologies approach to the campaign.

“He should have started uniting the party in March,” said Henry Barbour, a Republican National Committee member from Mississippi who previously supported Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, “and he is making it harder on himself.”

Republicans who once worried that Mr. Trump might gain overwhelming momentum in the primaries are now becoming preoccupied with a different grim prospect: that Mr. Trump might become a kind of zombie candidate — damaged beyond the point of repair, but too late for any of his rivals to stop him.

Should Mr. Trump lurch into the convention so fatally compromised with general election voters and a sizable faction of Republicans, it could make it easier for the party to wrest the nomination away from him. But it would also make the consequences of failing to defeat him all the more ruinous if the specter of choosing a seemingly unelectable nominee does not deter Mr. Trump’s supporters.

Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who has frequently praised Mr. Trump’s insurgent campaign, said the front-runner had made a series of bewildering and irrational mistakes. Mr. Trump’s campaign, he said, had failed to evolve beyond the “personal gunslinger, random-behavior model” characterized by the candidate.

“None of the mistakes have been forced, and nobody forced him to react negatively,” Mr. Gingrich said. “It’s almost as though he is so full of himself that he can’t slow down and recognize that being president of the United States is a team sport that requires a stable personality, that allows other people to help him.”

Polls show that Mr. Trump has struggled to attract a majority coalition even within the Republican Party, and that the distress of mainstream Republicans has grown as Mr. Trump’s general election numbers have crumbled.

In next week’s crucial Wisconsin primary, Mr. Trump now trails Senator Ted Cruz of Texas by nearly 10 points, according to a poll published Wednesday by Marquette University.

In Wisconsin and elsewhere, the strongest Republican opposition to Mr. Trump comes in suburban areas and among college-educated voters and women. His conduct over the past week is unlikely to win over those groups.

In the past few days, Mr. Trump has declined to apologize for circulating on social media an unflattering photo of Mr. Cruz’s wife, Heidi, and bitterly criticized a female reporter who accused his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, of manhandling her.

Mr. Trump has said he believes Mr. Lewandowski is innocent, and that his mockery of Mrs. Cruz was a response to lewd criticism of his own wife from a group that opposes his campaign.On Wednesday, he said that if abortion were illegal, it would be appropriate to punish women who seek out the procedure — before issuing a statement reversing himself, saying that only doctors performing abortions should be “held legally responsible” under those circumstances.

Asked to address Republican critics who said Mr. Trump’s style was fracturing the party, Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, said he was “a counterpuncher” who viewed himself as standing up for the people closest to him. “This is what he will do for the country,” she said.

In the past, Mr. Trump’s political missteps have done little to hinder his progress in the campaign.

He has built a powerful delegate lead in the race for the Republican nomination, with about three-fifths of the 1,237 delegates he needs. Mr. Cruz, his nearest competitor, is about 270 behind.

And while Mr. Trump has not yet won over a majority of Republican primary voters, he still polls well ahead of Mr. Cruz and a third candidate, Gov. John Kasich of Ohio.

A New York Times/CBS News poll released last week showed Mr. Trump with support from 46 percent of Republicans nationally, compared with 26 percent for Mr. Cruz and 20 percent for Mr. Kasich.

After Wisconsin, the primary battle moves onto decidedly favorable turf for Mr. Trump: his native New York, on April 19, followed by a series of Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, including Pennsylvania and Delaware, where he is expected to run strong.

Still, Mr. Trump has been unable to consolidate support the way a conventional front-runner would. His share of the vote in the primaries has remained relatively steady — in the high 30- to low 40-percent range — even as his opponents have dwindled to just two.

An analysis circulated in mid-March by the Republican strategist Alex Gage showed Mr. Trump’s average support in primaries to be nearly flat over the past two months, compared with a rapid climb Mitt Romney experienced in his campaign over the same period in 2012.

Thomas M. Reynolds, a former Republican congressman from New York, said he expected Mr. Trump to do well in the delegate-rich state despite his evident limitations as a candidate.

But Mr. Reynolds said the Trump method of “kind of ad-libbing” his way through the race had left him as the master of a strong plurality of Republican voters — and still short of a coalition that would make him a commanding winner.

“He has successfully been able to say whatever he wants without retribution,” Mr. Reynolds said, “but I am not seeing him grow in the Republican base at this point.”

Jim McLaughlin, a Republican pollster who has worked with Mr. Trump in the past, said Mr. Trump had plainly not yet convinced a majority of primary voters that he is prepared to hold the country’s highest office. Mr. Trump, he said, “hasn’t figured out a closing message.”

And his political position is slipping nationally, Mr. McLaughlin said: In a poll taken in late March by Mr. McLaughlin’s firm, about two-thirds of general election voters said they now had an unfavorable view of Mr. Trump, including seven in 10 women.

(An ABC News/Washington Post survey in early March had similar findings.)

“He needs to start acting more like the commander in chief,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “At some point folks ask themselves, ‘Am I comfortable in terms of wanting to give this person the nuclear codes?’ ”

Mr. Trump has periodically seemed determined to reassure voters on that front.

Starting on the night of the “Super Tuesday” primaries on March 1, he has held a string of news conferences in ornate settings, wrapping himself in presidential pomp even as he continued to engage in mockery of his rivals.

He has given two lengthy interviews focused on foreign policy, and after facing questions about the sophistication of his campaign operation, he announced the hiring of a longtime Republican strategist, Paul J. Manafort, to lead his delegate-wrangling efforts.

It may still be enough, Republicans say, for Mr. Trump to win the barest of delegate majorities before the Cleveland convention. But had he taken a more deliberate and less divisive approach in the past two weeks, Mr. Trump’s nomination might be inevitable, and he might be less wounded as a candidate in November.

“He would be miles ahead of this kind of junk,” Mr. Gingrich said, referring to Mr. Trump’s feuding over Mr. Lewandowski and Mrs. Cruz. “I don’t understand it. I don’t think it works.”

As it is, Mr. Gingrich said, “I think he has a real possibility of, having surged amazingly, to miss the golden ring.”
Correction: April 1, 2016

An earlier version of this article misstated the charge filed against Corey Lewandowski, Donald J. Trump’s campaign manager. It was a battery charge, not assault.