WarSclerotic

By ALEXANDER BURNS

MARCH 2, 2016

Source: Anti-Trump Republicans Call for a Third-Party Option – The New York Times

They are in full blown panic

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Spurred by Donald J. Trump’s mounting victories, a small but influential — and growing — group of conservative leaders are calling for a third-party option to spare voters a wrenching general election choice between a Republican they consider completely unacceptable and Hillary Clinton.

While he has gained intense popularity on the right, Mr. Trump has alienated key blocs in the Republican coalition with his slash-and-burn campaign. For many, his initial refusal last weekend to disavow an endorsement from David Duke, the white supremacist, was a breaking point.

Two top Republicans, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, said this week that they would not vote for Mr. Trump in November.

Mr. Trump has alienated voters from several wings of the party: mainstream Christian activists, who view his angry outlook as antithetical to their faith; centrists, who see him as the most divisive politician in a generation; and national security experts, who have recoiled from his praise for autocrats like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and believe he should not control nuclear weapons.

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William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, said he would work actively to put forward an “independent Republican” ticket if Mr. Trump was the nominee, and floated Mr. Sasse as a recruit.

“That ticket would simply be a one-time, emergency adjustment to the unfortunate circumstance (if it happens) of a Trump nomination,” Mr. Kristol wrote in an email. It “would support other Republicans running for Congress and other offices, and would allow voters to correct the temporary mistake (if they make it) of nominating Trump.”

Max Boot, a foreign policy adviser to Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, said that if efforts to block Mr. Trump fell short, he would vote against a Republican nominee for the first time in his life.

“I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump,” said Mr. Boot, who expressed optimism that Mr. Trump could still be defeated. He added: “There is no way in hell I would ever vote for him. I would far more readily support Hillary Clinton, or Bloomberg if he ran.”

Among religious conservatives, too, anxiety about Mr. Trump is spreading. Russell Moore, head of the political arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, said he had been deluged by evangelicals asking his guidance on what to do in a race between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton.

A Trump-Clinton race would have no palatable choice, Mr. Moore said. He said it would be impossible for him to support any candidate “who stirs up racial animosity” or supports abortion rights.

There had been widespread discussion, Mr. Moore said, of seeking out “a conservative independent or third-party candidate.”

Defections of any scale could prove lethal to Mr. Trump. He already trails Mrs. Clinton in general election polls, and polling already shows the possibility of mass desertions from the party. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey this week found that 48 percent of Republicans who do not already back Mr. Trump said they would probably not or definitely not support him in November.

But even as Republican leaders have denounced Mr. Trump in increasingly forceful terms, few of them have suggested they would shun him. Mr. Rubio has come the closest, describing Mr. Trump as a fraudster whom the party cannot afford to embrace.

Still, when the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, rebuked Mr. Trump on Monday for his evasive response to Mr. Duke’s endorsement, Mr. Ryan added that he would support the eventual Republican nominee.

In a news conference Tuesday night, Mr. Trump dismissed the idea of a rogue Republican ticket: “They’ll just lose everything, and that would be the work of a loser.”

But for others in the party, casting a protest vote is no remote prospect. Mr. Sasse, a first-term senator, set off a public conversation by declaring on Twitter that he would favor an independent “conservative option” over Mr. Trump. Representative Scott Rigell of Virginia, a Republican from a moderate district on the Atlantic Coast, said he, too, would vote for neither Mr. Trump nor Mrs. Clinton.

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“Not only could I not vote for him, but I couldn’t sit and be silent as I watched him advance,” said Mr. Rigell, who added that many of his congressional colleagues shared his reservations. “He is the antithesis of what I would want my son and grandson to be, and I will not associate myself with him.”

There is no obvious alternative on the right to Mr. Trump, but Republicans believe that an existing minor party, like the Libertarian Party or the Constitution Party, could serve as a viable vehicle, allowing crestfallen Republicans to show up on Election Day despite their distaste for him.

Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico who ran for president in 2012 as a Libertarian, is again seeking the party’s nomination.

There is precedent for Republican Party leaders rejecting a radioactive nominee, though not at the presidential level.

In 2010, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska won a write-in re-election campaign after a primary loss to a militant conservative activist. And in 1994, when Virginia Republicans nominated the Iran-contra figure Oliver North for the Senate, a former Republican state attorney general opposed him as an independent, collecting considerable support.

Former Representative Tom Davis of Virginia said he expected many Republican candidates to flee from Mr. Trump, as he had fled Mr. North in 1994. (“When Oliver North came to Fairfax,” he said, “you couldn’t find me with a search warrant.”)

“It’s too early to see a mass exodus,” Mr. Davis said, “but a lot of this depends on Trump, and right now he’s not putting himself in a very good position.”