Don't Blame #NeverTrump

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

No one can accuse Kellyanne Conway of complacency. She has already prepared the ground for the recriminations phase of the campaign, which usually doesn't begin in earnest until a candidate has actually lost.

In recent interviews, Donald Trump's campaign manager has cited Hillary Clinton's financial advantage, media bias and President Barack Obama's popularity as reasons Trump should be losing to Hillary Clinton even more badly than he is now. She also floated the stabbed-in-the-back thesis: "We have the Never Trumpers," she said in a MSNBC interview, "who are costing us 4 or 5 percent in places."

No one can doubt that Trump is at a severe financial disadvantage (which is why he either should have spent more of his purported $10 billion on his campaign, or built a serious fundraising operation, or both); that the media hate Trump (it also hated Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who won four presidential elections between them); or that Obama is popular (alas).

It is the last claim about Never Trump that is risible, and will set the stage for the initial hostilities in the post-election Republican Civil War over whether Trump was a historic mistake for the party, or a winning candidate who was undone by a handful of disloyal conservative intellectuals (et tu, George F. Will?).

The Trump forces have never gotten their story straight about Never Trump. At times, the GOP's internal opposition is supposed to be wholly irrelevant and crushed under the iron heel of the will of the people; at other times, it is invested with more sinister significance than the Doctor's Plot at the height of Stalin's paranoia. So, Trump himself pronounced Never Trump "never more" in July at the GOP convention, several months before Kellyanne Conway suggested it is costing Trump the election. Which is it?

It was never right to call Never Trump a movement; it is a motley collection of conservative commentators, political professionals, policy experts and a handful of politicians who had the (not particularly stunning) foresight to see that Trump would be the weakest and most vulnerable of the Republican general-election candidates and the (not particularly acute) discernment to recognize in him qualities unsuited to the presidency.

(I didn't adopt the "Never Trump" label myself, holding out the chance that Trump would give me reason to look at him differently during the course of the campaign. As for the issue of National Review opposing Trump in the primaries, it is sometimes referred to as our "Never Trump" issue, although the cover said "Against Trump" and some of the contributors eventually went on to support him.)

The arguments back and forth between Never Trump and its critics are fascinating and important in all sort of ways (in setting down markers, in creating a certain climate of opinion, etc.), but it is fantastical to consider them electorally decisive in a presidential contest with some 130 million voters.

Among other things, the timeline doesn't work. When Trump began his upswing from the depths of mid-August, it wasn't because a Jonah Goldberg, Erick Erickson or Ben Shapiro was endorsing him every other day; it was because he ran a more competent campaign.

Likewise, when Trump began to lose his footing at the end of September, it wasn't because he lost media figures and politicians to Never Trump (radio talk show host Mark Levin and Ted Cruz, holdouts against Trump, came on board in September); it was because he had a dreadful first debate and then proceeded to immolate himself afterward.

Prior to the first debate, the Washington Post/ABC poll had Trump with more uniform party support than Hillary Clinton (90 percent to 88 percent), and so did Public Policy Polling (89 percent to 85 percent). Gallup shows Trump's favorability ratings among Republicans have been steadily falling since then. He was at 72 percent favorable and 26 percent unfavorable in late September. Now, he's at 63-34.

This is about what you'd expect, given his jaw-droppingly self-destructive past month. I'm an admirer of Conway, who is doing the best she can in an impossible job, but the fact is that if she had been able to manage her candidate better, she wouldn't be trying to find excuses for why he's doing so poorly in mid-October. (She does say he's still going to win, by the way.)

Never Trumpers didn't advise Trump not to prepare for the first debate, or to lash out wildly at Clinton during the course of it; they didn't tell him to attack Alicia Machado and tweet foolish things in the middle of the night; they didn't sanction him saying lewd things on tape years ago, or allegedly groping women, or attacking the looks of his accusers; they didn't recommend subsuming his entire message in a long plaint about the election being "rigged."

All of that is on the campaign, and especially the candidate. For more than a year now, Trump has had the biggest megaphone on the planet. His performance has mattered more than what any columnist or blogger says about him. It isn't Bill Kristol who gets to stand for an hour-and-a-half before 80 million people and shape their perceptions of Trump; only Donald Trump—and Hillary Clinton—gets to do that.

And Trump has used the opportunity to damage himself, especially among those voters in the suburbs who have always been most leery of him. Data from NBC News has Clinton leading by 26 points in urban suburbs, 10 points better than Obama's margin over Romney in these areas.

Is this the work of Never Trump? To believe it is, you have to imagine moderate suburban women intensely following the intraconservative debate over Trump, balanced on a knife's edge between, say, David French (anti-Trump) and blogger Ace of Spades (pro-), and changing their allegiances based on the latest Twitter flame war. Anyone who believes this is what is really happening has probably never been to a kid's soccer practice.

Another common blame-shifting argument of Trump supporters over the past couple of weeks is that he is being done in by the GOP establishment. This, too, is unconvincing.

Enemy #1 is House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose dire offense was to say that he won't be talking about Trump anymore and refusing to campaign with him (when he had never campaigned with him anyway). Over in the other chamber, Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is shrewdly keeping his head down but can't reasonably be accused of undermining Trump. As for Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, whose job it is to be the Republican establishment, he has embraced Trump with all the star-struck fervor of a fan who occasionally gets to travel on his favorite boy band's plane.

If Trump thought he needed any of his conservative critics or reluctant endorsers, he could have actively sought to allay their concerns and conduct himself and his campaign more rationally. But the fundamental conceit of his campaign was that he could do it his own way, and win. With the exception of the month prior to the first debate, he has indeed done it his own way, and is losing.

If Trump comes up short against a desperately flawed Hillary Clinton, it will be his failure and his alone. So if Kellyanne Conway is preparing for the blame game, she needs to go about it differently. The first thing she should do is direct the candidate's attention to what is surely one of his favorite household accoutrements : the mirror.