Excerpts from "The Republican Party May Be Failing" by Nate Silver

In a FiveThirtyEight article published a few days ago, Nate Silver offers his own analysis the 2008 book "The Party Decides" and its application to the 2016 election. He discusses how the Republican Party has responded to Trump's candidacy, what party elites can do to influence the invisible primary, and why the GOP hasn't stopped Trump. The link to the full article is here.

Here are some interesting excerpts from the article:

What power does the party really have?
In the context of presidential nominations, the analogy to “hard power” is rule-setting authority plus control over scarce resources. Modern political parties do have some of this. They control the rules by which delegates are chosen, for example, though attempts to rig the rules in favor of the elites’ preferred candidate can backfire. They would have quite a bit of power in the (unlikely) event of a contested convention. Party elites also have access to financial resources, though not a monopoly on them. The party may own quite a bit of data, an increasingly important resource.

For the most part, however, “The Party Decides” seems to think that party elites possess “soft power”: the power of persuasion. It assumes that party elites have largely the same goals as rank-and-file voters, but are more informed about which candidates to support, leaving the electorate “open to suggestion”:

All of which leads us to reason as follows: An electorate that is usually not very interested, not very well informed, and attracted to candidates in significant part because they are doing well is probably an electorate open to suggestion about whom to support. If, as we know to be the case, many primary and caucus voters are also strong partisans, what they want in a candidate may be exactly what party insiders want: someone who can unite the party and win in November.

This is a plausible story in some respects. In particular, it coincides with the finding that polls are not very predictive until quite late in the nomination race and even then can undergo dramatic shifts in the span of weeks or days. Voters usually like several of their party’s candidates; it may not take all that much to nudge them from one candidate to another. There are also reasons to be skeptical, however. For example — perhaps especially in the Republican Party — there has been an erosion of trust between party elites and rank-and-file voters.

Party elites haven’t been doing much to stop Trump
One explanation could be that party elites are misinformed or confused about Trump. “The Party Decides” tends to assume that party elites are highly sophisticated — able to see past the spin, the non-predictive early polls and the media talking points of the day. But perhaps this isn’t the case. Party elites often have relatively little communication with rank-and-file voters and may not understand the reasons for Trump’s popularity because they don’t encounter very many Trump supporters. At the same time, they exist within the political echo chamber and are inundated with constant media chatter about Trump’s polls and momentum. The party elites may even be engaged in a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts: Because everyone thinks that Trump is impervious to attack, no one is bothering to attack him.