Trump's 'hostile takeover' of the Republican Party is going to lead to a 2020 election wipeout: conservative

In a column for the Daily Beast, former Republican -- but still conservative -- Matt Lewis took a look at the most recent presidential and Senate election polling and predicted that Donald Trump is leading the GOP to a November wipeout that will see them lose the Senate and the White House.

With a Fox News poll coming out this week showing the president trailing presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden badly, Lewis said things likely won't get better for Trump and that could lead to the collapse of the entire party.

Posing the question, "A Democratic wave is slowly gaining energy. Could a Republican wipe-out ensue?" Lewis added, "Consider this: Donald Trump is getting trounced by 11 points in the recent Quinnipiac poll. That one may be an outlier, but Biden is also up by 8 in the latest Fox News poll. More importantly, he continues to expand the electoral map, consistently besting Trump in Arizona, a state that wasn’t considered vital to his path to victory. He’s also winning in Florida and (albeit narrowly) Georgia (!)."

Acknowledging it is still early, Lewis said Republicans should be very concerned about what the future holds not only for the November election but beyond.

"The U.S. Senate map is experiencing a similar blue-ish expansion. Democrats need three seats to take control (four, if you assume that Democrat Doug Jones will lose in Alabama), a hurdle that looks increasingly doable," he wrote. " Should this trend continue, Republicans will have, in four short years, gone from controlling all the levers of power to losing them all. Did I mention that Democrats will retain the House of Representatives, which Republicans lost in year two of Trump’s presidency?"

"Even before Trump completed his hostile takeover of the GOP, the future looked tenuous for a party that had grown increasingly reliant on old, white, married, rural, and non-college-educated voters, even as demographic trends seem to be shifting in an opposite direction," the Daily Beast columnist explained. "Some speculated that Trump’s 2016 victory might constitute one last, desperate, gasp for this demographic coalition. If that were the case, the trade-off might be worth it—especially if it bought time for the GOP to adapt."

"He [Trump] didn’t just burn the village, he sowed salt in the ground, too. He emasculated and destroyed the reputations of a rising generation of Republican leaders, who, depending on their story, will now be viewed as weaklings, co-conspirators, appeasers, racists, phonies, losers, or apostates," he added, before suggesting, "Let’s assume 2020 is a total wipeout for Republicans. Do these Republicans kick Trump to the curb and adapt to reality?"

That, he explained, could be equally disastrous and lead to an internal civil war that would rip the party apart.

"That would be the smart move. But the intra-party civil war will probably be like none we've ever seen. And, of course, Trump isn't going away. He'll probably still hold rallies. Fox News will have to decide whether to continue to promote/support him or dump him. There might be a schism on that decision, even within Fox," Lewis wrote. "What this means is that it’s possible a Trump loss could have even greater ramifications than simply losing the White House. A post-Trump hangover could last for years."

"But after three years of chaos and botching a major pandemic, Republicans are facing some stiff headwinds. There is increasing danger that these winds could blow ashore this November. The possibility of a sort of dark ages looms on the political horizon," he wrote before sarcastically adding, "Tired of winning yet?"

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