William McGurn writes in the Wall Street Journal:
It should be noted that his critics on the right are also invested in a big GOP defeat. If Mr. Trump loses by two or three points, they will be blamed for contributing to that defeat. If, by contrast, Mr. Trump loses by a landslide, they will look like prophets.
For the larger Republican Party, however, there’s a catch. If it turns out Mr. Trump loses by a narrow margin, Republican senators and congressmen still have a chance of keeping their seats. A blowout defeat for Mr. Trump, on the other hand, would likely translate into massive Republican losses in both the Senate and House. Even so, it’s a price the NeverTrump movement appears more than willing to pay to make their point.
Maybe some anti-Trump conservatives would indeed be willing to see Republicans lose big in order to prove that Trump was as disastrous a nominee as they always said he was. But so what? How are Erick Erickson, Jonah Goldberg, and Ben Sasse going to cause Trump to lose in a blowout? They’re not. (What’s more likely to lead to a big Trump defeat is the kind of dumb and indecent moves by Trump that McGurn spends the bulk of his column excusing.) If nominating Trump leads to big losses, then the anti-Trumpers will have “made their point” because their point about the price of nominating Trump will have been proven right. How they will feel about it, and how they feel prospectively about it now, are not very important.
Exaggerating the Power of ‘Never Trump’