Why the NeverTrump movement failed

Nolte gives 8 good reasons, here at two:

Because my aim here is to present analysis, I'm going to try and keep my personal feelings out of this. But as a proud former-member of the Working Class who comes from a Working Class family, and still lives among the Working Class (my neighbors are made up of Marines, electricians, and construction workers), I think it is fair to assume that I speak for many when I say that the unforgivable assaults on the decency, integrity, intelligence (and even the right to exist), of Trump's working class supporters only served to further breed an already-exploding resentment against the Republican Establishment, and by extension their preferred candidates.

In my 35 years of watching politics, I have never seen a political party's elites attack and demean millions of their own voters.

...

Even Bill Kristol's hand-picked third party savior is guilty of this.

Not only is this class supremacism morally illiterate, un-American, and wildly hypocritical (especially when you are accusing others of bigotry), tactically it is a suicide mission.

AND

Once #NeverTrump became an official hashtag and movement, all the principled criticisms of Trump (many of which are valid), were lost beneath what was #NeverTrump's oft-stated goal: to game the convention rules in order to disenfranchise The People's Choice.

Hey, I've heard all the arguments… The fuzzy math (which I'll get to) of Trump failing to achieve 50% support; the hale and hearty "delegate rules are delegate rules" pronouncements; the argument that we are not a direct democracy…

Sorry, no.

The Smart People laughing like Thurston Howell III at Trump for failing to grasp at why it was "perfectly valid" that he would win a state's primary and then lose that state's delegates, were also laughing at me and millions of other voters equally infuriated.

I've been following presidential politics since I was 14 years old. I'm no dummy. And I had no idea the GOP primary game was rigged in this way.

Rationalize all you want, the bottom line is that you cannot as a political party present and promote what looks like a public election for a nominee and then pull the rug out from under your own voters when it doesn't go your way.

"Ha ha! You didn't read the fine print," is not an argument.

It's a con.