I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Hillary Clinton, who Ladra has absolutely no love for, is going to go down in the books as the Democratic Party nominee elected president with the most Republican votes in U.S. history.
Not because of people like me. Yeah, the self-admitted Marco Rubio fangirl is going to have to swallow hard and vote for this lying weasel in November, but I’m an independent voter with no party affiliation. So that means people think I’m a Democrat already.
No, it will be because of people like my mother and father and their friends. These are staunch Republicans, ultra conservative Cuban-American GOP loyalists who remember the good old Ronald Reagan days with longing and voted for Sen. Marco Rubio, who came in a distant embarrassing second in his home state of Florida. My godmother has never voted for a Democrat in her life. But they say they will vote for Hillary precisely because of Donald Trump.
They are the poster children of the #NeverTrump movement.
Ted Cruz might not get their vote either, but they can ignore him. They won’t bother to vote for anyone in that hypothetical matchup. They cannot, however, ignore Trump. If The Donald ends up on the ballot in November, they’re going with Hillary.
My mom! With Hillary! Only someone like Trump could do that! Shoot, dare I say they could vote for Obama if they had to, against Trump?
Okay, it’s a really unscientific poll. Or not even a poll, actually. But they are not alone. On Facebook, on twitter and on the radio shows, Republicans are saying they would rather vote for the state department liar than the business liar.
Exit polls show that 9 percent of GOP-registered voters in Michigan said they would vote for Hillary over Trump. The number grew to 10 percent of the Republicans in Ohio. Not that it should come as a surprise, but more Republican women view Trump more negatively than positively, according to Gallup. And in a Washington Post/ABC News poll this month, Trump loses the women’s vote by 21 points.
Megan McArdle, a columnist at BloombergView.com, tried an interesting experiment. She asked die-hard Republicans to hit her up on Twitter if they were #NeverTrump and would vote for Hillary or Bernie Sanders — and to tell her why. She got a barrage of emails from everyone, from young and old, from Southern Baptists and evangelicals, from nurses and school teachers to soldiers in the military and people who worked in Republican administrations. And she shared them with us.
Some excerpts:
“I personally am not willing to sacrifice my country and more specifically the dignity of the office that represents it, just to make a point.”
“It’s not just that I don’t think he’s conservative. It’s that as president I think he’d be quite capable of doing anything, except governing reasonably well.”
“It may be true that the country I love and fought for has gone over the cliff and is willing to elect a narcissistic con-man as president, but I will never, under any circumstances, put my name to its death warrant.”
And those are some of the more mild ones.
So maybe Trump has divided the Republican Party, but he seems to have united the nation. Because I predict the biggest margin and largest crossover ever in 2016 for Hillary Clinton.
God help us.