During the chaotic 2016 Republican presidential primary, it was something of an open secret that many Democrats were rooting for Donald Trump to emerge as the GOP nominee. Trump, the story went, would be a complete disaster as a general election candidate and would make Hillary Clinton's inevitable ascent to the presidency even more of a sure bet.
"Trump is so unpopular, so unpredictable, such anathema to how politics is run that he surely would be a terrible general election electorate, they argue," Dara Lind wrote for Vox in March 2016, summing up the sentiment among some Democratic activists and voters.
