Terry Sullivan, former campaign manager for Marco Rubio:
Donald Trump is an overcorrection by the base of our party from feeling misled by the elites of the party. We took back Congress—the base, the Tea Party, took back Congress in 2010, and John Boehner became speaker of the House. Not exactly a Tea Party movement conservative. Then the argument became to the base, look, we need to take back the Senate because then we really can repeal Obamacare. Look, we haven’t done anything to repeal Obamacare in the Senate.
And so finally it got to the point where the party elite, a lot of the, I guess, more thoughtful, big-picture movement conservatives, National Review, places like that, said, “Hey, watch out for this guy. This guy’s bad. He’s not one of us.” And the base of the party said, “Screw you. You’ve been lying to us for the last, you know, how many election cycles? We’re going to try something different, and this guy’s really different.”
I think the interesting thing on why he’ll be an outlier, an exception and not the rule, is from a very smart national operative based out of Minnesota. Going into the Minnesota caucuses, he said, “Look, you know, Trump’s not going to win there.” Why do you think that? And he said, “Hands down, because they’ve lived through Jesse Ventura. And living through Jesse Venture is enough to know you can’t do this crap again.”
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