The Republicans Have Two Weeks to Stop Trump
On March 15, five states vote. Florida and Ohio hold winner-take-all primaries. Illinois and Missouri give part of their delegates to whomever wins the statewide vote, and the rest to the winner of each Congressional district. North Carolina has a primary where the delegates are allocated in proportion to the vote. If Donald Trump sweeps the four sweepable states and 60% of North Carolina, he will have at least 630 delegates, plus what he picks up this Saturday (four states), next Tuesday (four more states) and Puerto Rico, Guam, and D.C. At that point he will be unstoppable. For the Republican leadership, which desperately wants to make Trump magically vanish, it is now or never. Ben Carson's sort of dropping out helps, but there are still three non-Trump candidates left: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Gov. John Kasich (R-OH). The party needs two of them to fall on their swords, and right now (well, after tomorrow's debate would also be OK).
None of those three look at all strong. Rubio had a disappointing night on Tuesday, winning only the Minnesota caucuses. Cruz won three states, but he put so much time, effort, and resources into the South, that only three states is a huge disappointment. Kasich has yet to win a state. If Rubio and Kasich win their home states on March 15, that could breathe new life into the effort to stop Trump, but only barely. Radio host Glenn Beck has proposed a Cruz/Rubio ticket to end the bickering between the candidates.
At this point there are probably two outcomes to the Republican race: (1) Trump wins a majority of the delegates or (2) Trump wins a plurality but not a majority. From the numbers above, you can see that Trump doesn't quite have half the delegates. If that situation continues and Trump ends up with, say, 48%, Rubio and Cruz each end up with 25% and Kasich has the rest, there could be a brokered convention and the Republican Party could still stop Trump. But that is still a longshot.
In a very real sense, 2016 is the mirror image of 2012. Then, a whole squadron of conservative insurgent candidates went up against the unpopular Mitt Romney, but the conservative vote was so badly fragmented that the establishment candidate, Romney, won. This time we have multiple establishment candidates splitting the vote and letting the one insurgent win. The Republican leaders are no doubt thinking: "Clever, those Democrats. They have 717 superdelegates the party can control. We have only 168. Damn. Next time we'll have more." (V)
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