Palin’s re-emergence underscores GOP split

Associated Press

DES MOINES, Iowa

If the Republican Party is on the verge of an implosion, Sarah Palin may have been the one who lit the fuse.

Palin’s complicated relationship with GOP leaders over the past eight years is a microcosm of the party’s broader struggles with its most-restive members. What started with an embrace by party leaders evolved into wary tolerance, followed by a potentially irreparable split.

So it’s perhaps little surprise that Palin is re-emerging on the national political scene at this moment of reckoning for Republicans. While she’s hardly the conservative kingmaker she once was, Palin remains a favorite of the tea-party insurgency, and her endorsement of Donald Trump for the 2016 GOP nomination gives him an added boost of conservative, anti-establishment credibility.

Mainstream Republicans have tried for the past several years to keep their system together by bringing lawmakers elected as disrupters into the fold rather than pushing them aside. It’s a strategy that succeeded in winning the party the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, but it did little to achieve such conservative goals as overturning President Barack Obama’s health care law or blocking increases in the nation’s debt ceiling.

Now, the GOP system is cracking, leaving some in the establishment feeling they would be the outsiders in a party helmed by Trump – or by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a frequent tormentor of Republican leaders who is a strong contender for the nomination.