Analysis: Could Trump broaden his appeal?

CLEVELAND — A flammable brew of populist anger, a candidate's provocative remarks and disruptive protesters found fuse and the result at what was to be a Donald Trump event in Chicago on Friday night. Instead, it became an explosion that reverberated through the presidential campaign all weekend.

In a contest that has bubbled over with drama, the question is: What happens next?

Trump's Republican opponents rushed to denounce him over the chaotic turn Friday night, and there was an urgency to their positions. Primaries will be held Tuesday in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Illinois and Missouri — and the campaigns of Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will probably end if they fail to win their home states. A substantial series of victories Tuesday by Trump would move him a major step closer to a nomination that so many in his party want to block.

As Trump himself suggested, the latest controversy probably will cement support for him among his backers, who have been unfazed if not emboldened by disputes over his caustic criticisms of ethnic groups, women, the disabled and the pope, to mention a few. Their allegiance is apt only to harden if their leader, and they by extension, are more widely attacked.

That is why, on Saturday, Trump maintained the political persona that got him to front-runner status. In three rallies in Ohio and Missouri, he was as unrepentant and defiant as ever. He blamed protesters, Democrats and President Barack Obama for the divisions that pushed the campaign to the breaking point Friday night.

But two longer-term issues now threaten him, and those become more difficult as time goes on without a change in strategy.

Reading the political moment with far more dexterity than anyone else running for president this year, Trump has succeeded so far on the strength of his many loyalists and a fractured opposition.

He has excelled in playing competitors against one another and has benefited as his underlings fought among themselves for the role of prime competitor. A fight against just one of them — say Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, if Kasich and Rubio falter — focuses the race in a different way. It risks all of the anti-Trump vote coalescing around one person. Trump's opponents have hoped that since his support in primaries so far has rarely risen above the low 40 percent range, a one-on-one race might allow victory for the anti-Trump candidacy.

That could be a long shot. But if Trump does win the nomination, he faces a much bigger problem, one that the escalation of protests around his events highlights: Having risen to the role of front-runner by playing to the emotions of a vocal, aggrieved minority of his party, how does he pivot toward a broader constituency that is less taken with his brand?

That broad constituency is becoming increasingly difficult for any politician to command as each party's voters go to their partisan corners in growing numbers. In a 2014 study, the Pew Research Center found that 27 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents and 36 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents felt that the other party's positions 'are so misguided that they threaten the nation's well-being.' And voters who felt that way were more likely than others to take part in the primaries.

Appealing more widely is particularly difficult for candidates such as Trump, one of a long line of political figures who have played on the emotions of the crowd, often by using racial cues or outright statements of racial antagonism to enrage their followers and outrage their opponents.

This is a particularly fraught period: Economic displacement has left many fearful and upset, at the same time tensions are rising over cultural shifts wrought by changes in the nation's demography. Economic and cultural insecurities have combined to provide a receptive audience for Trump's surprisingly strong candidacy, but the tactics he has used to appeal to that audience have also alienated huge numbers of voters.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll last week found that two-thirds of voters overall — anti-Trump Republicans and Democrats — couldn't see a circumstance under which they'd vote for Trump in November. A separate NBC News/SurveyMonkey tracking poll found a huge percentage of non-white voters, the growing chunk of the electorate, are viscerally anti-Trump.

According to the survey, 86 percent of black voters and 75 percent of Latino voters had an unfavorable view of Trump. All told, 7 in 10 non-white voters said they had a 'very' unfavorable view of the man who, as of Saturday, had won 14 of the 22 Republican contests.

Not surprisingly, black, Latino and Muslim young people were at the core of Friday's protests that led to Trump canceling a rally that he had scheduled at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

The visceral opposition that Trump has stirred among minority Americans belies his self-description as a 'uniter' — he accuses Obama of being 'the great divider' — and raises the question of whether he is able, or even wants, to make the kind of sharp turn in his strategy that might assuage the anger that surrounds his campaign.

So far, Trump has not backed down from any of the incendiary comments he has made during this campaign about Mexicans, Muslims and people in China and Japan who he says are taking American jobs.

Those comments, and his emphasis on building a wall on the Mexican border, have done potentially irreparable damage to any effort to broaden beyond his mostly white base.

Part of the horror felt by Republicans watching the spectacle over the weekend was that its imagery kicked the party back to a period it has long wanted to escape.

At the end of the last presidential campaign, party leaders drew up a report asserting that the next nominee had to have strong appeal to the young, to minority voters — particularly Latinos — and to women, three groups with whom 2012 nominee Mitt Romney did poorly. Trump's candidacy has been the antithesis of that, as women and Latinos have not just been ignored by Trump but targeted by him for insults.

Trump protesters, having gotten the candidate to cancel one event, are unlikely to stop trying to disrupt him. At all three rallies he held Saturday, Trump was interrupted repeatedly by catcalling and shouting from opponents.

The candidate ended up shouting some version of 'Get out!' dozens of times. Those shouts stirred Trump's supporters, who cheered him on. But to the rest of the country, they broadcast the image of an angry white man yelling at members of the same young, minority and women voter blocs that Republicans said they wanted to attract. If Trump ends up as the GOP nominee, that image probably will prove a heavy burden.