“Salvaging Some Of Their Power”: Why Republicans Won’t Even Try To Nominate The Next President At Their Convention
Let me be the first to say this: The 2016 Republican National Convention is not, and will not be, about whether the Republicans nominate a candidate who can win the presidency.
I’ll say it again: The GOP convention is not about selecting the next would-be, could-be president.
In normal years, of course. This year, it won’t be.
The question on which the convention will turn, most likely, assumes that the presidency is lost. It also assumes, for the sake of preserving their own sanity, that everything else isn’t — that there’s a chance that the GOP can still salvage some of their power.
So when Republicans ask, can we win in November if Donald Trump is our nominee, what they’re really asking is: Well, it may be too late to save the presidency, but can Republicans retain the Senate with Trump at the top of the ticket? Can they keep Democrats from whipping up enough anti-Trump sentiment in marginal House districts to make that chamber competitive?
If the answer is no, then they will nominate someone else.
Republicans will consider this question twice in July. The first time it will be debated internally is before the convention begins. The RNC’s rules committee will determine whether to expand the number of candidates who are eligible for the nomination. They can decide whether to scrap Rule 40, which requires presidential nominees to have won five contests, and replace it with something else. There will be no reason for either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz’s hand-chosen rules committee members to vote in favor of any change, so if the rest of the rules committee does, it means they think that the party’s control of everything is in serious jeopardy with either man as their nominee.
Then the delegates will decide. They’ll look at the polls: If both Trump and Cruz are not competitive with the likely Democratic nominee, they will nominate someone else — or nominate the person who is most likely to do the least amount of damage.
As a long-time watcher of how the cognoscenti makes up their collective mind, I get the feeling that a number of Beltway Republicans are resigned to the notion that running with Trump might actually help save their own candidates down the line. Most of them will have financial stakes in some of the races, and so they’re thinking now: Who’s easy to throw under the bus? And who is likely to gin up turnout in some of the places we care about? The answer to both of those questions is Donald Trump.
By: Marc Ambinder, The Week, April 20, 2016
“Woe Betide The GOP If You Do”: The GOP Can’t Legitimately Deny Trump The Nomination
No matter how the Republican presidential primary unfolds from here, all the factions of the #NeverTrump movement—the party operatives attacking him; the conservative opinion leaders holding the line against him; the Republican delegates loyal to Ted Cruz after the first ballot at the party’s July convention—face severe conundrums.
Since March, Trump has been the only candidate with a traditional path to winning an outright majority of 1,237 pledged delegates before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. More recently, it became mathematically impossible for John Kasich to win a delegate majority, and Ted Cruz would now probably have to rely on unpledged delegates to clear the victory threshold. But that already forbidding situation became even more challenging Tuesday night after Donald Trump won the New York primary in dominating fashion.
In the aftermath of Cruz’s victory in the Wisconsin primary, when the Trump campaign seemed to be floundering, it was tempting to imagine that Republicans could keep Trump far enough from 1,237 to justify denying him the nomination: Yes, Trump won vote and delegate pluralities, they could say. But he also has relatively high unfavorables within the GOP, and Republican voters are more supportive, in sum, of a Cruz-Kasich ticket, or a Cruz-Marco Rubio ticket, than they are of Trump winning the nomination.
Now that it looks like he’ll be at least close to an outright delegate majority, it’s difficult to see how anti-Trump conservatives can deny him the nomination and avoid accusations that they have rejected the discernible will of the Republican electorate.
No matter how short of 1,237 Trump falls, his argument at the convention will be simple, and completely intuitive: I might not have won in a way that requires the Republican Party to give me the nomination—but I won a moral victory. It’s in your power to deny me the nomination, but woe betide the GOP if you do. This will ring true both to his own supporters, and to GOP voters who perhaps supported a different candidate but are amenable to Trump and believe instinctually that in an election, the person with the most votes should win.
It’s difficult to see how anti-Trump conservatives can deny him the nomination and avoid accusations that they have rejected the discernible will of the Republican electorate.
At 1,000 delegates or even 1,100 delegates, anti-Trump conservatives would have a not-quite-as-intuitive, but still-easy-to-grasp counterargument: Your plurality is real, but it is small, and we can create a ticket that better reflects the party’s preference than any ticket with you at the top. It would be dangerous and debatable, but not facially illegitimate. And there’s a meaningful distinction between the two.
After New York, anti-Trump conservatives are facing a worst-case scenario in which Trump reaches 1,237 in early June, becoming the nominee in Cleveland by acclamation, and a best-case scenario in which Trump arrives in Cleveland with somewhere near 1,200 delegates, and the Republican Party denies him the nomination solely on the basis of elite disdain.
It’s hard to game this race out with any real precision, in no small part because Kasich’s impact on the race is so nebulous. By staying in, Kasich may have denied Trump some delegates in New York, but were he to drop out, he’d free Cruz up to defeat Trump handily in Indiana. Using a conservative simulation, MSNBC’s election savant Steve Kornacki sees Trump entering the convention with 1,199 delegates—nearly 49 percent. Imagine that’s correct, and the dilemmas becomes clear. If unpledged delegates oppose Trump, the question of whether to force a second ballot will be in their hands. #NeverTrump delegates who are pledged to vote Trump on the first ballot will have to ask themselves whether they’re prepared to deny Trump the nomination on the narrowest of technicalities. Anti-Trump conservative pundits will need to weigh the competing imperatives of defeating Trump and running a candidate who enjoys the presumption of legitimacy. If you’re an anti-Trump GOP operative, now’s the time to ask whether its wise to continue attacking him in ways that will damage him in the general election.
In a narrow, zero-sum sense, it doesn’t matter if Trump takes 5 or 15 or 40 percent of the party with him if he bolts the party, since even 5 percent will probably be too much for the GOP to remain competitive in November. But there’s a real difference between defeating Trump in a way that satisfies the majority of the party, and wresting the nomination from him in a way that strikes a majority of the party as underhanded. That difference will matter when it comes time for Republicans to pick up the pieces after this primary. And what they may have lost tonight is a way to convincingly argue that they beat Trump fair and square.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, April 19, 2016
“United In Our Loathing For Trump”: Why Donald Trump Is Probably Praying For An Amnesia Epidemic
There are a few unfortunate people in the world who, because they experienced a brain trauma, are unable to form new memories. They exist in a combination of the distant past and the present moment, unable to contextualize what they see right now with what happened yesterday or the day before. If Donald Trump is to become president of the United States, he needs a majority of the American electorate to experience this cruel brand of amnesia.
To understand what I mean, let’s start with where Trump is right now. While the contest for delegates is in a phase of uncertainty, it’s still likely that Trump will become the Republican nominee. And Trump is not just unpopular, but spectacularly unpopular. The latest Washington Post/ABC News poll showed 67 percent of voters have an unfavorable opinion of him. Not only has no presidential candidate with negatives that high ever won, no candidate has ever had negatives that high, period, with the sole exception of KKK leader David Duke. Trump is disliked by majorities of men and women, whites, blacks, and Latinos, young people and old people, rich people and poor people, Southerners and Northerners, liberals and conservatives. America may be a divided country, but we’re united in our loathing for Trump.
Even a candidate with the evident weaknesses of Hillary Clinton would not just beat Trump, but destroy him. Based on the polls as they are now, not only could Clinton win the states Barack Obama won four years ago — enough to give her a comfortable victory in the Electoral College — but some Republican states, as well. One poll even shows her beating him in Utah, one of the most conservative states in the country.
But not to worry. Trump promises everything is going to change, just as soon as he has pulverized Ted Cruz and John Kasich. “When I take them out, I will be so presidential you won’t believe it,” he said earlier this week. He goes on: “And then, of course, I’ll start on Hillary, and then I’ll be a little bit less presidential. But assuming I win, I will be very, very — the country will be very proud of me and we will make America great again.”
One can’t help but wonder what being “presidential” means to Trump, besides not being a jerk. He has said more than once that when it’s necessary, he’ll transform into someone completely different. And if he’s going to have any chance at all to win, he’ll have to. But once he does, will the public forget the person he is now?
Sure, every presidential candidate adapts when moving from the primaries to the general election. But most of the time, that involves a change in emphasis, highlighting a different set of issues to appeal to a broad electorate with different priorities from your party’s faithful. For instance, if Cruz becomes the nominee, he’ll probably talk less about building border fences and repealing the Affordable Care Act, and more about creating jobs and fighting terrorism. Wholesale flip-flops are exceedingly rare; instead, candidates seek to alter the ingredients of voters’ decision-making, putting their more widely popular positions nearer to the top of voters’ agendas.
The problem for Trump, however, isn’t just the positions he’s taken but the way he’s taken them. Try to imagine, for instance, that he stopped talking about his border wall and deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants, and instead made some kind of push to woo Latino voters. To succeed, he’d need one of those little memory-wiping devices from Men in Black. According to that Post-ABC poll I mentioned, only 15 percent of Latinos view him favorably, while 81 percent view him unfavorably. It’s going to take an awful lot to change their minds, given Trump’s extreme and vivid rhetoric about immigrants.
Or what about women, 75 percent of whom view Trump negatively at the moment? Are they going to forget his long history of misogyny? What could he possibly say to change their minds?
Trump is counting on Americans having not just short attention spans, but incredibly short memories. He’s planning on giving a series of policy speeches, which is presumably supposed to make voters say, “Huh, I used to think he was the biggest ignoramus ever to run for president, but I guess he’s actually pretty wonky and really knows his stuff.” I have no doubt that once the primaries are over and he’s won the nomination, Trump will alter his tone. But for such a shift to be successful, millions upon millions of voters will have to get temporary amnesia on election day.
Are our memories really that short? It looks like we’re probably going to find out.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, April 15, 2016
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