[QUOTE=Flixy;169620]Fair enough. Though losing a primary doesn't mean you don't have a better shot in a general election (if the center doesn't vote as much in the primary).

Running without the formal support of the party pretty much does mean that though. You'd need to build your own nation-spanning GOTV effort, for instance, and in not all that much time. There are a whole lot of obstacles. In many respects someone who didn't participate in the primary stands a better chance because they wouldn't have been expecting to have this established support system from the party to draw on for the general election. Anyone who decides to continue campaigning despite losing the primary would be a lot further behind, trying to expand and prolong the network built from their primary bid in ways they hadn't anticipated. And no one in the GOP primary now is exactly a screaming centrist either. "At least I'm not Trump" is not the best motivational message to get a large moderate bloc to participate rather than just stay home.

On a side note, if a party's nominee is someone the party doesn't want.. what are that candidate and those who voted for him doing in that party in the first place. A two party system never ceases to amaze me
The parties aren't exactly centralized monoliths. They're aggregations of state parties and even many of those are more collections of county lists than a central organization. US political parties are coordinators and facilitators. The candidate is in that party because they can use it. And the party would have no problem with Trump or anyone else out there just being members, people making donations, proferring their vote, etc. which means they don't have much of a leg to stand on for objecting when the person turns things around and uses them in turn.

Quote Originally Posted by RandBlade View Post
A lot of states also have laws banning those who stood in primaries from standing or appearing on ballot papers as independents I believe. So good look winning a campaign without your party backing and not even being on every ballot paper.
I'm not aware of any state that has such a law and I can't see it being enforceable if they do. The parties have ZERO official standing and cannot restrict who may run for general election. You can maybe have a law that FORCES them to run as an Independent and without any label indicating they're in the party whose primary they ran in, but that's as far as I think it can go.