Like most liberal Democrats, Mario Juarez finds Donald Trump repulsive. But he can’t help but hope the real estate tycoon will deliver a knockout blow to his rivals in Tuesday’s crucial primaries.
“He’s so racist, but he would be so easy to beat,” said Juarez, an Alameda County Democratic Central Committee member. “No one who offends that many people can be president.”
Or can he?
As the Republican primary season approaches a watershed mark Tuesday — with five contests that could either halt Trump’s march to the nomination or possibly seal it — many Bay Area Democrats are facing a quandary of their own.
Should they welcome the rise of a man who polls show would be the easiest Republican to beat in November, even if they despise everything he stands for.
That question became more pressing Friday as thousands of anti-Trump activists converged on a Chicago auditorium to prevent the candidate from holding a scheduled rally. Fights broke out between the demonstrators and Trump supporters inside the building and in surrounding streets.
“I’m glad that people in Chicago said they’re not going let him have his racist rally,” Oakland Democrat Pam Drake said.
But that doesn’t mean she would shed a tear if Trump became the Republican standard-bearer.
“It’s scary,” she said. “Part of me really wants to see it because you’d think he’d get trounced like (Barry) Goldwater,” who in 1964 lost to President Lyndon Baines Johnson. “But there is another part of me that worries that he’s so adaptable he could win.”
The trajectory of Trump’s campaign will likely be set on Tuesday when voters go to the polls in North Carolina, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio and Florida.
The last two states are pivotal because they are the first that award all of their delegates to the top vote-getter. If Trump defeats native son candidates Gov. John Kasich in Ohio and Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida, analysts say he will be hard to stop from racking up the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the Republican nomination.
“You’re reaching a tipping point about whether traditional Republicans can make a last stand against Donald Trump,” said Matthew Cunningham, an Orange County-based Republican strategist.
Republicans have picked a bad year to come apart at the seams and risk handing the Democrats a deeply flawed opponent, said Jack Pitney, a former GOP official who now teaches political science at Claremont McKenna College.
Overall dissatisfaction with the state of the country and the energized base should give the Republicans a good shot at retaking the White House, he said. History is also on their side: It’s been 160 years since voters last replaced a sitting Democratic president with another Democrat.
“If Republicans nominated someone like Rubio or Kasich, they would have a real chance of winning,” Pitney said. “But Trump would throw all of that away. He would be a disaster for Republicans.”
Recent polls show Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton handily beating Trump in the general election, but stuck in a tight contest with his biggest Republican rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. And previous polls showed her trailing both Rubio and Kasich. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s left-leaning rival, has polled better against potential Republican opponents.
It’s hard to find any political analysts who think Trump could beat Clinton. But Cruz — the most conservative candidate in the race — could actually turn out to be the easier opponent, said Dan Schnur, a former GOP strategist who now directs the University of Southern California’s Unruh Institute of Politics.
“Anything that includes Donald Trump is by definition not easily predictable,” he said. “It’s easy to see him losing in a wipeout. But he is such a wild card that it’s far from a sure thing.”
Even if it’s likely that Trump will lose the general election, there are plenty of Democrats who would rather see him fall on his face right away.
“I despise the man,” Fremont resident Doug Tinney said. “I want him to lose because I don’t want to see him anymore. Just get him out of here.”
Democrat Gabriela Lorenzo, a college student from San Jose, said a Trump nomination would be a triumph for prejudice. She praised protesters for revealing the dark side of his campaign. “When you see peaceful protesters at his rallies being punched or shoved … it shows what kind of person Trump is and the kind of supporters he brings out,” she said.
Last week, protesters became more numerous at Trump events, calling him out for disparaging immigrants and Muslims and for initially refusing to disavow an endorsement from David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
On Wednesday, a 78-year-old white man at a Trump rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, sucker-punched a black demonstrator. John McGraw was charged with assault the next day.
Drake said when she saw TV footage from recent protests, it made her want to join in. “Seeing how people are treated makes me want to be in the crowd and have something to fight back with,” she said. “And I’m a Quaker.”
But David Erlich, a Trump supporter from San Leandro, defended the protesters’ right to heckle his candidate, but dismissed their accusations of bigotry.
“He’s saying stuff that a lot of people have held back on for a long time,” Erlich said. “Illegal immigration has been a problem, and it’s not a racist thing to acknowledge it.”
Juarez, the Alameda County Democratic official, is an immigrant from Honduras. So, Juarez said, he takes personally everything he hears from Trump and sees at his rallies. But the pragmatist in him wishes the protesters would just back off for a couple months.
“We don’t want to stop him now,” Juarez said. “We’ll stop him later. For now, it’s ‘Go, Donald, Go!'”
Contact Matthew Artz at 510-208-6435. Follow him on Twitter at Matthew_Artz.
