An underlying theory states that the nominee still changes his party whether he wins or suffers a major defeat. This happened with Goldwater, Nixon, Dole, and others. So how will Trump change this party?

I'll tell you one thing, if the Republican Party survives at all, you can bet they'll have super delegates next time around.

Maybe.

But the rules committee could have written Trump out at any time. My take on this is actually quite close to what we've heard from President Obama this week. This is the candidate you reap when you sow what you've sown. Seriously. Anti intellectualism, fearmongering, etc. They've got their gerrymandering game *down*, but Trump bypassed all that and used his talents with TV and spoke directly to the people. Sold himself to the people. The republicans were swindled. Trump is no republican, he's a Trumpist.

How could the rules committee have written him out? I'm not sure what you mean.

He's actually a Democrat.

No, he's a Trumpist. He was a Democrat when it was convenient, now he's a Republican, but he doesn't know what their policies are, let alone subscribe to them.

to clarify: "their" = either party.

Trump knows exactly what you need, 76 trombones lead the big parade....

Wouldn't it be amazing to find out that Hillary's team had stuffed the ballot box from the very beginning for Trump, ensuring that she'd have a complete dildo to run against in the general? Swing a few early primaries and momentum does the rest.

Well Wikileaks does say she was pimping the media to cover him more to make him the top dog... Ever wonder why Saturday Night Live handed their stage over to him the last time you watched that show?

Here's a link to just one of the stories in the run up to the nomination.

The upshot is this, that when it became clear that Trump would garner enough delegates via the primary season to become the Republican nominee (under normal circumstances), the urgency to resort to other measures to deny him the nomination increased. One of those attempts/plots was to use one of the rules of the convention that basically said if a certain number of states asked for a voice vote. The RNC leadership was not fully down with this effort led by some non-Trump firebrands among the delegates and discounted the number of states that had signed the petition and thus sidestepped the issue of a floor vote.

Even earlier in the season, the rules committee had meetings where they discussed the rules (duh). And there was discussion as to whether or not change the rules to make things harder for Trump, and they didn't.
That's the one about rule 39 that I remember, but... I couldn't easily find a citation.

Since then: the "populist message" Republican hijacker succeeded in winning the White House, but not much else, due to lack of experience. The "populist message" Democrat hijacker was squashed by the Democrats, who used brute force politics to prolong their positions of power.

Since then: both parties are still quite fractured between reasonable members (called "moderates" on the right, "progressives" on the left) who want to get elected/re-elected by actually serving the public, and ideologues who cater to consumers of opinion-based "news" sources (conservative-flavored on the right, identity-flavored on the left).

This is where we're at: the great enemy of the political change that people are literally taking to the streets to demand, is party loyalty driven by customized news feeds, driven by "big data" analytics.

The great enemy is that facts don't exist anymore. There's no common ground on which to debate, as everyone is in a different flavor of reality.

And if the oligarchs get control of the free internet, the fight is over.

I don't think the moderates stand a chance without campaign finance reform. Lock out the oligarchs and PACS, maybe even public financing. Big money has been working at the state level getting governors and state politicians elected, primarily knocking out moderates in the primaries where nobody bothers to vote.

Robert Reich had a good article, somewhere, about how nothing else can be fixed--nothing--without first addressing money in politics. A lot of people listened to Bernie Sanders this time around, maybe we'll get some traction. Of course, the Democrats will try to squash their own progressives by continuing to take big money, and trying to win elections by appearing 'diverse' (while not really addressing the common problems that we all face).

Represent.us is bringing an executive order to the White House on Wednesday that would end lobbyist money. In case you were thinking Trump might sign something worthwhile for once...

I'll believe it when I see it. But even if it happened wouldn't that just drive it underground and give the lobbyists more leverage to blackmail? :eyebrow: