Corpse Party Rebuilt Help

Do you agree with Jeff Flake that the GOP party is a frog slowly boiling in water?

Reports of [the republican party’s] death are highly exaggerated.It’s really easy to look at the results of any election and jump to conclusions.I mean look at this article: The Republican Party Is in Shambles.[Spoilers, this was from 2015, guess what happened after that?]There’s signs they’re losing public confidence, but the way that our government is set up, it’ll probably be at least 4 years before the Democrats can take the senate majority: The Senate Is Drifting Away From Democrats Indefinitely. And the way that voting occurs, unless they can find a way to actually appeal to the Republicans in red states (or change the demographics around the country) it doesn’t matter what the majority of the country votes for, they will lose.Couple that with the possibility that the GOP is packing the courts now with conservatives that might just rule in their favor in upcoming election challenges over the next 4 years, the GOP is entrenched."Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."The most troubling part of it is that the entrenched party isn’t what the Democrats would call rational people with disagreements, they’re rabid dogs with a radically different take on what the government should be and are taking steps to make sure that it happens.If Flake means that the old school conservatives are toast, then yes, I agree with him. The Tea Party has come and gone. What now exists is a group of reactionary populists acting like a bunch of kids that got locked in the candy shop for the night.The GOP is far from dead. If the Democrats fail to capitalize on their house majority and demonstrate what the GOP is while presenting their case for why people should be hopeful with them in charge, the Democrats could lose everything and more in 2 years.The people need to stay engaged and they need to get out the vote. Or *poof* the Republicans will be back.I’m encouraged though in recent days. Even Fox News is speaking out against the President. When the foundational information source of your party starts talking bad about the authority then it could keep those Republican voters in their homes come November.Don’t write obituaries before the body’s been to the morgue.If they brought the Republicans to Miracle Max, they’d actually be saying “to blave”

What would happen if Paul Ryan is chosen to be the Republican nominee in a contested convention, and is that even possible?

Anything is possible if nobody goes into the convention with the majority of delegates. After each ballot, increasing percentages of delegates can switch their pledges to, more or less, anyone they choose. With a few small rule changes -- and the rules are always changed before the convention according to whatever the party decides needs to happen -- that could very well be Paul Ryan. If he wants that job, that is; he's already been talked into one thankless position by his party recently.The thing is, even if he doesn't have a majority going in, if Trump continues to rack up the numbers in vote after vote the party elites are going to have a VERY hard time convincing their base that they didn't "steal" the nomination from him. Trump has, repeatedly, threatened to run as a third party candidate if he is treated "unfairly"; in his mind and the minds of many of his supporters, this would pretty easily fit that bill. Don't expect him to go down without a fight, or just humbly leave the stage so Ryan can consolidate the party in time for November.The electoral math is already against the GOP on the national level -- the biggest states are almost all firmly blue, and Democrats only need to take one or two of the "swing" states to clinch the Presidency. Couple that fact with a significant portion of its party feeling disenfranchised, and a possible third-party candidate to deal with, and the GOP gets creamed.Really, there are no good options for the GOP right now. I suspect that, internally, they are mostly getting ready to lose the Presidency, however the nomination shakes out (Trump? Cruz? Ryan? ...Kasich?) and hoping to come up with a strategy that lets them not lose the Senate and local races at the same time. Nominating Trump but letting their candidates run against him might work, or nominating Ryan and just weathering the likely loss of their base might work. Who knows? We are in uncharted territory here.The Republicans, like the proverb, are cursed to live in interesting times.