WASHINGTON (AP) – Republican leaders in Washington have spent years casting tea party allies and hardliners in Congress as merely a restive minority, a fringe element to be tolerated.
Now, with Donald Trump and Ted Cruz rising to the top of the 2016 GOP presidential primary, those party leaders are confronting the possibility that they may be the outliers.
One by one, Washington’s favored candidates have dropped out of the White House race. Those who are left – Marco Rubio and John Kasich – face long odds and sudden-death primaries in their home states next week. In private conversations and public newspaper editorials, talk of a historic splintering of the GOP centers on the prospect of the establishment, not the insurgents, dissolving or breaking away.
“Something important is ending. It is hard to believe what replaces it will be better,” Peggy Noonan, a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, wrote in a Wall Street Journal column.
Republicans have long grappled with a divide between party leaders and grass-roots supporters. Recent presidential elections papered over the fissures rather than resolved them, with Republicans sending centrist candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney into the general election even as the GOP electorate became more conservative.