Nate Silver, the statistics whiz who founded FiveThirtyEight, tweeted this ominous warning this morning:
Anyway, Trump will probably be the GOP nominee and possibly become President. No joke. If you care either way about this, you should vote.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 29, 2016
Silver explains why, in this piece he wrote earlier today:
On Twitter this weekend, there was a lot of activity behind the hashtag #NeverTrump, with various conservative intellectuals and operatives pledging that they’d refuse to support Trump in November. Rubio’s Twitter account employed the hashtag also, although Rubio himself has been ambiguous about whether he’d back Trump.
It’s reasonably safe to say that some of the people in the #NeverTrump movement will, in fact, wind up supporting Trump. Clinton, very likely the Democratic nominee, is a divisive figure, and some anti-Trump conservatives will conclude that Trump is the lesser of two evils. Others will get caught up in the esprit de corps of the election. Some of them might be reassured by how Trump conducts himself during the general election campaign or whom he picks as his running mate.