New York Times: “It has been 32 years since a president won the popular vote by a double-digit percentage. That was when Mr. Mondale suffered an 18-point defeat to Ronald Reagan in 1984. It was also the last time there was a landslide among states, with Mr. Mondale winning only Minnesota and the District of Columbia.”

“There are a variety of factors that are likely to prevent a candidate today from rallying the huge, 60-plus-point majorities that swept Franklin D. Roosevelt into office in 1936, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and Richard M. Nixon in 1972.”

“The country is too fragmented and its political temperature too overheated for any single person to emerge as a consensus choice for anything nearing two-thirds of the electorate. And that climate has led the political parties to become far more ideologically uniform than they used to be.”

For members: How Newt Gingrich Changed Presidential Politics

This is a rather remarkable mash up of questions asked of Hillary Clinton over the years.

Bill Kristol: “I’ve been attending Republican conventions since 1988. As of the Wednesday morning of these conventions, none has ever seemed more messed-up, more poorly managed, and more generally headed to disaster than that 1988 one, my first, in New Orleans. The Reagan-Bush handoff on Monday had been awkward. The rollout of the Dan Quayle vice presidential pick on Tuesday had been disastrous. Vice President Bush had entered the convention trailing Mike Dukakis in the polls. On Wednesday it seemed to almost everyone that he was very unlikely to get the bounce from the convention he needed.”

“He got it. Why? Because Dan Quayle gave a good speech Wednesday night, and, far more important, Bush gave a very good one Thursday night. The fact is that the presidential nominee’s speech dwarfs everything else at the convention in impact. It’s almost always the main thing, often the only thing, people remember. It’s what makes a difference, if anything does.”

“And this is why, much as it pains me to say it, and much as the convention wisdom that the convention has been a clown show so far is correct, Donald Trump could end up with a successful week in Cleveland.”

Historian David McCullough, “raised in a Republican home and now aligned with no party,” told the New York Times that “the prospect of a Trump presidency so distressed him that he felt he could not remain publicly detached.”

Said McCullough: “When you think of how far we have come, and at what cost, and with what faith, to just turn it all over to this monstrous clown with a monstrous ego, with no experience, never served his country in any way — it’s just crazy. We can’t stand by and let it happen. The Republican Party shouldn’t stand by and let it happen.”

For more, see Historians on Donald Trump.