Via Billy
After winning three of the first four nominating contests, Donald
Trump hasn’t just hijacked the Republican Party but fractured it newly
into three.
The populist billionaire’s rise to the pinnacle of Republican
politics has upended what had been decades of relative GOP stability, a
40-year span in which most Republican presidential contests since 1976
neatly narrowed to an establishment-embraced front-runner and a
conservative insurgent alternative.
No more.
Suddenly, there are three strands of Republicanism, each entrenched
and vying for supremacy in 2016. Ted Cruz is the leader of the
traditional conservative purists. Marco Rubio is emerging from the mud
of a multicandidate brawl to lead the once-dominant, now diminished,
mainstream lane of the GOP.
But it is Trump’s new alliance of angry populists that is ascendant — and on the precipice of dominance.