‘I will work to push through any rule necessary to deny Trump the nomination…the only way to save the GOP is to have this fight,’ said one delegate.

After a rocky start to his general-election campaign, a sizable number of GOP insiders want the party to change the rules to short-circuit Donald Trump’s nomination at the July national convention.

Nearly four-in-10 Republican members of The POLITICO Caucus — a panel of activists, operatives and strategists in 10 key states — would like to see changes that could deny Trump the party’s nod after the presumptive nominee began the November campaign without a credible campaign structure, in addition to making a series of erratic and inflammatory comments. Among the comments was a recent suggestion that an American-born judge presiding over a civil suit in which he is a defendant can’t be impartial because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.

The majority of GOP insiders, a little more than 60 percent, expressed either hesitance or disdain for such an effort. Many warned against overturning the will of the GOP electorate: Trump has won 1,447 bound delegates and has commitments from another 95 unbound delegates — putting him well over the 1,237 needed to clinch the nomination.

But with just six weeks to go until the GOP convention, more than a third want to see the party throw out those rules, unbind the delegates and allow them to choose a different candidate. For many of them, it isn’t as much about winning this year’s election: Trump as the nominee, they believe, represents an existential threat to the party.

“Trump’s continued descent into madness is dragging the GOP down with him,” said a Florida Republican, who like all respondents, completed the survey anonymously. “A convention switchup would be great politics and save the GOP.”

“If the GOP wants to survive, it must find some way to open the rules for abstention, or some other unbinding process so that delegates can save the party from the historic defeat it faces under the banner of Donald Trump,” an Iowa Republican added. “One average teleprompter speech, given this past Tuesday, isn’t going to suddenly change Donald Trump into an aspirational, magnanimous leader. He is what he is: a bully through and through, one that takes the low road at every opportunity. Someone who doesn’t understand or care about policy. And lest we forget, a racist.”

A number of GOP insiders pointed to Trump’s drag on Republicans down the ballot as evidence of the necessity of replacing him with another candidate. Republicans have a four-seat majority in the Senate that would be in jeopardy if the party loses the White House, and the party is looking to maintain most of its larger, more durable majority in the House.

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