Dear Washington State Republican Party Chairwoman Susan Hutchison, National Committeeman Jeff Kent, National Committeewoman Fredi Simpson, and Washington delegates (and by extension all delegates to the Republican National Convention),

I am writing in advance of the Convention to implore you to do your duty to the Party and to do everything within your power to preserve it. Donald Trump must not be the nominee!

For over the past decade I have volunteered my time and money supporting the Republican Party and its candidates on a local, state and national level, because I understood that the Republican Party is the only way to promote conservativism in American governance. But now I am alarmed that nominating Donald Trump risks closing this last avenue for conservatives.

I am not asking that Trump be blocked from getting the nomination just because I consider him to be a despicable person. Or his long history of misogyny, shady business deals, racist statements and questionable behavior. Or because the media that gave him an overwhelming share of fawning coverage in the primary is poised to do its best to destroy him from now until November. Or because he polled the weakest of all our primary candidates, has no proficiency in campaign fundraising or establishing a ground operation or running a campaign, has the highest unfavorable ratings in history, and will almost surely lose in a landslide. Or because that landslide loss will cost us control of the Senate, perhaps the House and many other offices down ballot. Or because he is not a conservative, having shown during the debates that he literally does not know the meaning of the word! Or because he has had so little involvement with the Republican Party (and much more so with the Democrat Party) before asking for its highest nomination.

The main reason why a Trump nomination would be so disastrous and so poisonous to the continued existence of the Republican Party is this: The core message of his campaign is that our Republicans in Congress have all been bought out by the “special interests”, and are not capable of making “good” deals with the Democrats. How exactly do we campaign for other Republicans when the top of the tickets maintains that Republicans are corrupt and incompetent and is actively running against the Republican brand?

It’s not news to anyone that a sizable portion of America is deeply unhappy with the state of affairs in Washington DC. They are angry and blame Republican majorities in Congress as unwilling and unable to stop President Obama’s liberal agenda and unconstitutional executive orders (even more so than they blame Democrats for supporting them). They are not interested in hearing explanations about the separation of power and the messy business of compromise legislation in a divided government. Educating them on how American democracy works and the Republican Party’s role in it is a difficult task, one we need to improve at. But the solution is not to give up all efforts to inform them and instead agree with them that the Republican Party is the problem!

As the presumptive nominee, Donald Trump has already made statements indicating his willingness to “negotiate” away from Republican positions on taxes and minimum wage. Once the Republican Party has irreversibly committed to make him our nominee, he will be free to moderate his positions in a rush to the center for the general election. Can you name a single plank in our party platform that you are sure Trump won’t suggest breaking in the name of being “flexible”? And what if our nominee insists on selecting a Democrat as his Vice President in the name of bipartisanship? Once nominated, we are chained to a man who has exhibited no particular loyalty or affection to the Republican Party or its principles, and are bound to support whatever he says or does.

Yes, the Presidency is just one office. But we have seen in the past five years how a non-conservative President can not only block all reforms from a conservative Congress, but advance liberalism and the power of the state through the use of executive orders and the Federal bureaucracy. A President Clinton would be no different than Obama. But if by some miracle Donald Trump actually wins in November, how can we have any confidence that he will be any less of a liberal than Hillary Clinton? When Democrats oppose his judicial nominee, or building the border wall, or repealing Obamacare, what makes you believe he won’t simply cave in to them, twist a minority of Republican arms for support, and declare it “the best deal ever”? Trump is not a conservative, he is a populist, and a President Trump would do whatever he thought would make him popular. I have no faith that he would undertake the difficult conservative reforms so needed by this country, and every reason to believe he would continue the liberal practice of buying popularity with public funds.

And yes, Donald Trump is just one man, and he will be gone and forgotten in a cycle or two. But the image of the Republican Party casting aside its core values and endorsing a media-created populist will haunt us for decades. Trump is the embodiment and confirmation of all the standard liberal libels against the Republican Party. He is a rich, old white guy whose sole motivation is to make himself lots of money and pay less taxes. He’s a corporate CEO that will sell out American workers by using cheap legal and illegal alien labor, and by outsourcing jobs to Mexico and China. He’s a chauvinist who views women as little more than sexual objects. His statements on keeping Latinos and Muslims out of the country reveals his bigotry. And, as Trump himself has claimed, Republican politicians are bought and paid for by the moneyed “Establishment” with campaign contributions – which includes himself now that he has dropped the pretense of “self-funding”.

And what will we have achieved by catering to the whims of primary voters who have lost faith in both the Republican Party and American democracy? After four disappointing years of Trump or Clinton, will they be any more likely to vote for Republican Party candidates in 2020? Will they vote again at all? Will we be left with selecting another rich liberal celebrity know-it-all saying populist and vaguely conservative things long enough to win the primary (Maybe Mark Cuban or Kanye West)?

The first and only obligation of delegates to the National Convention is to select a nominee that can be supported by a majority of Republicans. While Donald Trump has won a small majority of bound delegates in the primary, he has only received about 40% of the vote, even less if you exclude the vote of those who do not have the best interests of  the Republican Party in mind. His support among delegates like you, made up of those with a history and a loyalty to the Party, is even lower. While it is possible to get a majority of the Republican Party to coalesce around Donald Trump in the name of unity, the same is true of any of the other 16 primary candidates. The difference is that, while conservative Republicans were able to fully support less conservative candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney, we cannot support a nominee that is not a conservative at all.

Pressuring Republicans to support a candidate opposed by a majority of the Party in order to “stop Hillary” will only fracture the Party. A sizable number of good Republicans like myself will conclude that a Republican Party that has given up on advancing conservative principles and instead stands only for being “Not a Democrat”, is no longer worth supporting. Whether that number ends up being 1 million, or 5 million or 10 million I can’t say – and I don’t know if those millions of missing votes will make a difference in the likely Trump defeat. The real damage will be the long term loss of untold hundreds of millions of dollars and hours volunteered by those formerly reliable Republicans, and it is foolish to believe that they will be replaced by Trump supporters who are largely apathetic to the political process.

The current path we are on is clear: nominate Trump, and Republicans will be humiliated by his actions in the campaign, and crushed by his loss in the election. The Party will lose millions of its most faithful supporters, and gain nothing from the Trump supporters, who by and large already dislike the Party. The Party will have missed an opportunity against a historically weak Democrat opponent, and four more years of liberal policies may forever close the window on winning the Presidency.

There exists a different path, though. Convention delegates are not bound to the candidate picked by the MSM, nor are they bound by the rules written four years ago at the last convention; they are obligated to select a nominee that a majority feels would be best for the Party. When they adopt the rules for the 2016 Convention, a simple majority can vote for a rule (such as requiring a super-majority on the first ballot) to prevent Trump from winning on the first ballot. Then we will find out which candidate is truly acceptable to a majority of Republicans. It might be Ted Cruz, or John Kasich, or Marco Rubio, or one of the other candidates that dropped out earlier, or even a non-candidate. It may be long, it may be messy, but in the end we will have a nominee that the Party can in good conscious support and who has a chance of victory in November. Even in the best of election years, a Republican faces a narrow path to a White House victory, but we simply could not do worse than the current “presumptive nominee”: an unprincipled, unethical, unreliable, uncouth, un-conservative, un-Republican, unpopular populist.

-Brett Malin