But when it comes to the future of the Republican Party, this doesn’t much matter — because we now know that roughly one-third of the party has gone rogue. In the short term, this raises the question of what these rogue voters will do in November if Trump isn’t the nominee. Is it likely they will show up to vote for Rubio, the candidate ideologically closest to George W. Bush? I think that’s highly unlikely, and that it could doom the non-Trump Republican nominee this year, no matter who it ends up being…

How can the GOP continue to push the same agenda when one-third of the party wants it to make a radical break from its past and stand for something fundamentally different? Trump outflanks the party from the right on immigration and terrorism, outflanks it from the left on taxes, benefits, and a range of other domestic policy issues, and ridicules just about everyone else in the party for their rank stupidity and for contributing to a decline in the country that he alone can reverse.

A third of Republican voters endorse this profoundly anti-Republican message.
As I’ve argued before, that appears to leave two possible paths forward for the GOP. One is for the party as a whole to shift ideological direction to appeal explicitly to the rogue third of the party — though that could easily alienate a good portion of the party’s other two-thirds. And that leaves the second option, which is for the party to break apart, with the rogue Republicans forming the base of some new party.