Rather than a rally behind Ted campaign, many of those establishment guys are saying they'd vote Hillary. Those who don't say they would hold their nose and vote Trump in the general. Nary a word about Cruz is ever spoken by those guys because...Newsflash: everyone but his fanboys hate Ted Cruz! The states that he could carry will go red anyway and I don't see any real proof that he could flip Colorado, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Virginia come people really tuning in during the general. He can't even win his foolproof base despite his best efforts to dog whistle them at every turn. He just can't win...
The
politicians hate Cruz. And everyone hates the politicians. While I have no doubt that there's a large chunk of people who simply do whatever McConnell and Ryan say, your average republican--establishment or otherwise--is only going to inherit second-hand hatred characteristic of an unaccountable politic rather than a prevalent culture of dislike.
And I don't know what dog whistles you're referring to, but the people flocking to Trump don't necessarily do so out of any dislike for Cruz. Of the apparent populist tendencies between the two of them, Trump draws upon them much more flagrantly than Cruz, and therefore he attracts a larger populist vote. Were Trump not present, there's no doubt that Cruz would have snatched them up.
The only reason that Romney didn't win in 2012 is because three million republicans stayed home. This is a different ball game: Trump is winning an unprecedented combination of states in the primaries right now, and with jobs being shipped out to Mexico while H-1B workers are shipped in, he is taking advantage of a cross-party outrage with far more efficacy than any other candidate. Cruz
could do the same assuming he competes with Trump more appropriately.
The primaries themselves are getting record turnouts out the ass for republicans. The Dems, by comparison, couldn't even get fifty percent of the turnout that they received three years ago in South Carolina. One of the reasons that Cruz and Trump went for it this time around is because Democrats are in a state of super low energy. I'm not saying they're going to be easy to beat, but there has been a clear seven year long disillusionment process, the effects of which can be felt without even a single pollster. Even in California, millennials are just not giving a shit about Democrats--they're all registering Independent.
