“Too Late To Catch Him?”: Trump’s Remorseless Delegate Math Means Rubio and Cruz Are Screwed
The story of Donald Trump’s doomed campaign has been replaced by the story of his inevitability as the Republican nominee.
It’s a sea change indicative of his constant ability to defy expectations. He placed second in the nation’s first contest in Iowa, went on to dominate in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and won Nevada’s GOP caucus on Tuesday night.
But it’s not Trump’s past wins that foretell doom for any Republican candidate trying to stop this phenomenon. It’s the fact that a week out from Super Tuesday, Trump is the overwhelming favorite to win most of the remaining voting states—and their delegates—across the country. To clinch the nomination before the Republican convention, Trump needs 1,237 committed delegates. Before Nevada, he had 67 delegates, and Ted Cruz was in second place with 11.
Here’s how the math works.
On Super Tuesday alone, the only states that Trump currently risks losing, according to Real Clear Politics averages, are Arkansas and Texas. And both of those states have Cruz leading by surmountable percentages (note, though, that polling in both states is not always frequent or entirely current).
Even if Trump comes in second in Texas, he could still win.
Texas is a state that is typically proportional in its delegate allocation but has what the website Frontloading HQ calls a “trigger,” which creates a condition in which the state becomes winner-take-all. This would happen if a candidate wins a majority of the vote. Should this overwhelming victory not happen for Cruz, and, say, Trump comes in second in a proportional setting, the senator from Texas must cede a portion of the 155 delegates in play, thereby essentially handing the contest and the nomination to Trump. If Cruz can’t win his home state, he has little chance throughout the rest of the spring.
The Republican primary contest has long had what Sam Wang, a Princeton University professor and neuroscientist, refers to as a “deadline problem.” Wang, who runs the Princeton Election Consortium, posited on Feb. 11 that the Republican field needed to get smaller in a hurry, setting two specific deadlines to try to defeat Trump.
The first deadline is Feb. 29, at which point Wang thinks there need to be only two alternatives to Trump prior to March 1 voting. The second is March 14, when Wang thinks there can be only one other option besides Trump.
The issue is that many of the states leading up to March 8 fit the model of Trump’s South Carolina victory, in which he captured about a third of the vote but still managed to get all the delegates due to proportionality rules.
Even after Jeb Bush dropped out of the race following his defeat in South Carolina, Trump still faces four opponents before March 1. Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Cruz will all try and see if they can win their respective home states (where all of them except Rubio are leading). Ben Carson has stubbornly stayed in the race despite finishing fourth at best in most states. But he could be out if his campaign contributions dry up in the coming weeks.
This means that unless everyone but Rubio and Cruz quits in the next week, Trump can’t be caught.
“Any talk of stopping Trump is highly unrealistic,” Wang told The Daily Beast. “Nearly all analysts, including data pundits, are blinded by the peculiarity of Trump’s campaign.”
Wang said he thinks Rubio has no chance of locking up the nomination anytime soon because the field is too divided for him to corral a lot of delegates by Super Tuesday. And if the senator loses his home state of Florida, which polling suggests he might, there isn’t enough time to make up the delegate difference before the Republican convention in July.
Josh Putnam, a political science professor at the University of Georgia who runs Frontloading HQ, told The Daily Beast that the only scenario that would allow a Trump defeat in the primary is a one-on-one matchup.
“If only Trump is winning, then no one can catch him in the delegate count,” Putnam said. “The only play in that scenario would be for opponents to either drop out or play to keep Trump under the 1,237 delegate majority needed to clinch the nomination on the first ballot at the national convention.”
One state that could slow Trump’s speeding train is Ohio, whose winner-take-all contest could keep him shy of the delegate count necessary to clinch the nomination. Trump sits atop the polls there, narrowly beating Buckeye Gov. Kasich.
Even in a situation in which Trump, Rubio, and Cruz are the last three standing, as conventional wisdom would suggest, the road still looks rocky for Cruz and Rubio. An Economist/YouGov poll taken last week showed Trump with 46 percent of the vote, Rubio with 28 percent, and Cruz with 26 percent. An earlier NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found Trump leading in the same circumstance.
Also, as saliently noted by Sahil Kapur in a Bloomberg Politics piece, as of January, Trump had a higher share of Republican voters who would consider voting for him than Mitt Romney had in 2012 around the same time. This suggests the mythic establishment lane has been almost entirely consumed by the singular Trump lane.
Rubio, the presumed second-place candidate at this point, cannot merely rely on absorbing Bush’s supporters either, as ideologically those supporters could just as easily go with Kasich as Rubio. In fact, the only way the Florida senator could catch the frontrunner is to siphon off some of Trump’s support, which seems unlikely. In a January NBC poll, 51 percent of Trump supporters said they were absolutely sure of their choice, while only 26 percent said the same for Rubio.
Wang says the question of Trump’s “ceiling” in terms of national polls is worthless. The real question is just how high his delegate count can go.
“Under Republican rules, it is possible to win a majority of delegates with as little as 30 percent of the vote, if conditions are right,” Wang said, using South Carolina, where Trump took all 50 delegates with only 33 percent of the vote, as an example. “That involves a split field, which is why I have been so focused on that. At Trump’s current level of support, about 35-40 percent, his delegate ceiling is above 50 percent,” meaning, according to Wang’s model, that even if Trump garners 35 percent of the popular support, he can still earn at least half of all the national delegates available.
As for Rubio, the blunt question is, what state can he win on Super Tuesday? He led by a small margin in Minnesota and could see an opening in Colorado. But otherwise his chances look bleak.
In the fantasy scenario where Rubio is viewed as a possible foil for Trump, is it possible to still be a viable contender if you don’t win a state before March 15?
As Nevada’s caucus began, Rubio was getting ready to test this hypothesis with a slew of new endorsements in hand. But in an election where facts don’t matter and Trump is drowning out the noise, it’s going to take more than an impressive posse to catch the frontrunner—as Tuesday night’s results showed.
By: Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast, February 24, 2016
“Openly Contemplating Possibility He Could Win”: Republicans Come To Terms With Their Worst Trump Nightmare
The tenor of Republican Party rhetoric has darkened. Until recently, most Republican candidates and strategists regarded Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as something ephemeral—a flash in the pan; a storm to be waited out. Now they are openly contemplating the possibility that he could win, or at least ride his steady support all the way to the Republican nominating convention next summer, leaving havoc in his wake.
Consider:
- On Tuesday, Republican presidential candidate Lindsey Graham said, “If Donald Trump is the nominee, that’s the end of the Republican Party.”
- Also on Tuesday, Graham’s home state of South Carolina—the first southern state to hold a primary—announced that it would require candidates to sign a pledge promising to support the Republican presidential nominee in the general election, and not launch an independent candidacy. Trump has thus far refused to make such a promise.
- After a Monday focus group brought Trump’s appeal to the Republican grassroots into sharp relief, GOP pollster Frank Luntz had a mini anxiety attack. “You guys understand how significant this is?” Luntz asked reporters. “This is real. I’m having trouble processing it. Like, my legs are shaking.”
As much as Trump himself is an outgrowth of the reckless way conservatives have stoked the resentment of the Republican Party base, his durability is also an outgrowth of an electoral process conservatives have shaped aggressively. Even if Trump’s ceiling of support is around 30 percent, it’s enough to ride out the primary process—and retain the lead—in a fractured field where almost every candidate has a wealthy patron or two.
In a better-controlled environment, Trump would be a less potent force. As the frontrunner, though, he’s steering the policy debate in ways that have Republican donors and strategists deeply spooked. As Greg Sargent writes at the Washington Post, “his willingness to say what other Republicans won’t has forced out into the open genuine policy debates among Republicans that had previously been shrouded in vagueness or imprisoned within party orthodoxy.”
Right now, Trump has his hand on the third rail of Republican politics. He’s arguing that wealthy people shouldn’t get a pass on paying regular federal income taxes. “The middle class is getting clobbered in this country. You know the middle class built this country, not the hedge fund guys, but I know people in hedge funds that pay almost nothing, and it’s ridiculous, okay?”
For almost any candidate, promising to reduce taxes on rich people is the price of admission into the Republican primary. Trump, by contrast, is poised not only to survive this apostasy, but to singe any of the more orthodox rivals who challenge him.
Senator Marco Rubio’s tax plan represents the most pointed contrast to Trump’s middle-class populism. Rubio proposes not just to lower the top marginal income tax rate, but to completely zero out capital gains taxes. To escape scrutiny for offering such a huge sop to the wealthy, Rubio plans to fall back on his origin story—as the son of a bartender who worked at a hotel financed by investors, Rubio can elide the typical criticisms of trickle-down economics, by claiming to be a direct beneficiary of it. This might be an effective diversion against a Democratic politician promising to increase people’s taxes, but against a rapacious developer like Trump, it falls completely flat. Trump would love nothing more than for a career elected official like Rubio to lecture him about the impact tax rates have on investment and growth. Trump has managed to survive in the business world at a number of different capital gains tax rates, whereas Rubio has struggled to stay afloat, and racked up high levels of credit card debt, in the working world.
If Trump were running an insurgent candidacy against Rubio and one other viable Republican, a supply-side platform would fare pretty well. Republican base voters aren’t as doctrinaire about taxes as Republican elites are, but they still support cutting taxes by a significant margin. In a smaller field, Rubio might be the standard bearer. Instead, the standard bearer claims to want to raise taxes on the rich. And much to the dismay of just about everyone else in the Republican Party, he isn’t going anywhere.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, August 28, 2015
“Lipstick On A Pig”: You Can Teach Republicans What They Shouldn’t Say, But That Won’t Change What They Believe
When someone asks you if a victim of rape should be compelled by the state to carry a resulting pregnancy to term, it is not a gaffe if you reply that this hypothetical almost never happens because women’s bodies have a way of preventing conception when they are under stress. It’s also not a gaffe to reply that, while it is certainly unfortunate that rape babies are occasionally produced, it’s all part of God’s plan and clearly God wants that baby to come into the world. These responses are not gaffes because they are actually honest responses that reflect what Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, respectively, actually believe.
A gaffe should be understood as an event where you actually say something that you didn’t mean to say or where you are caught being misinformed about some issue. While Todd Akin was misinformed about how human reproduction actually works, it was still how he thought human reproduction works. Call that one a half-gaffe. You can teach politicians what they shouldn’t say, but that won’t change what they believe. That’s why the following will not work very well:
The National Republican Congressional Committee wants to make sure there are no Todd Akin-style gaffes next year, so it’s meeting with top aides of sitting Republicans to teach them what to say — or not to say — on the trail, especially when their boss is running against a woman.
Speaker John Boehner is serious, too. His own top aides met recently with Republican staff to discuss how lawmakers should talk to female constituents.
“Let me put it this way, some of these guys have a lot to learn,” said a Republican staffer who attended the session in Boehner’s office.
There have been “multiple sessions” with the NRCC where aides to incumbents were schooled in “messaging against women opponents,” one GOP aide said.
When Todd Akin said that women can’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape,” he was suggesting that any woman who does get pregnant must have consented to have sex in some way. That’s what he believes. When Richard Mourdock said that pregnancies that result from rape are a “gift from God” and “something that God intended to happen,” he was suggesting that women should be grateful for their very unwanted pregnancies. That is what he believes.
Perhaps both men could have been elected to the U.S. Senate if they had just been counseled to keep their mouths shut or to repeat some GOP-approved talking point instead of saying what they actually believe. Personally, I think the electorate was better able to make a choice in those elections because the candidates were honest.
Wouldn’t it be better to nominate people who don’t believe things that make women want to flee rather than “guys [that] have a lot to learn”?
The problem isn’t the messaging. The problem is “these guys.”
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 7, 2013
“Poor Donald Trump”: His RNC Prime Time Billing Goes To The Other Clowns
Donald Trump, a television character in a 1980s-era satirical dystopian future SciFi movie, was supposed to have a big “surprise” on Monday at this week’s RNC, which he wasn’t invited to (he says otherwise but he is delusional), but then the Republicans were “forced” to cancel because of Hurricane Isaac. And they didn’t reschedule it.
What they did make time for at the convention included a song by the guy your grandma liked on “American Idol” a few years back, a speech by former Hooters promoter Connie Mack and an old man yelling at a chair.
The old man yelling at the chair was, of course, legendary American actor and director Clint Eastwood, who was invited because I think the organizers assumed he wasn’t as crazy as every single other Republican celebrity, but then he went and did the craziest thing of the week. (I don’t think Eastwood is crazy, actually. He’s just … eccentric.)
That had to be particularly galling, for Donald. This totally unvetted rambling piece of absurdist theater got prime billing right before the nominee, but the dumb video he made was just ignored completely.
Poor Donald didn’t get any attention this week for his craziness, because he wasn’t invited to Tampa. Because he embarrasses the Republican Party. Because he is basically a giant national joke. Donald Trump, object of fun for all Americans, was too embarrassing to be allowed to go to Tampa and ruin Mitt Romney’s party.
You know who was in Tampa? And not just there but constantly being followed by a gaggle of reporters eager to listen to every statement he uttered? Jon Voight. Jon Voight was a special guest at the Republican National Convention, because he is less embarrassing than Donald Trump. Jon Voight, who was in “Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2,” and who is, in 2012, most famous for being Angelina Jolie’s embarrassing estranged father, was on Fox like every 10 minutes while Donald Trump was in New York being ignored by everyone.
Also Stephen Baldwin. He was there too! Everyone said he was super nice.
Those two people — both of whom are completely insane, by the way — are less embarrassing than Donald Trump, who for real thinks he is a well-respected and feared businessman and not a TV clown. I feel so bad for the guy.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, August 31, 2012
“Heck Of A Job Romney”: Just Look Around, George W. Bush Blows Into Tampa
Reports are that George W. Bush took the hint and is skipping the Republican National Convention in Florida this week. But if you look around, you can see that he will be there in a very big way.
The hurricane that’s headed for New Orleans by way of Tampa is a tragic reminder of one of the Bush presidency’s greatest failures, the disastrous handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Try as they might, that inescapable reminder of Bush is something that the Romney campaign and the Republican Party just can’t seem to avoid.
As much as they’re trying to have the country forget the Bush years, they just keep on reminding us. Just a few weeks ago, for instance, Romney’s announcement of his vice presidential pick atop the USS Wisconsin brought back warm memories of the “Mission Accomplished” speech on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln .
But maybe we should give credit for truth in advertising. After all, Romney and Ryan have proposed nothing more than a promise to relive an even more extreme version of the George W. Bush administration. Their massive tax cuts for the rich are Bush’s plus some. Their hard line against gay rights and reproductive rights are his plus a lot. Their constant kowtowing to the Religious Right are his as well, although they say that this time around they’ll deliver even more social policy extremism. To prove it, they’ve replaced Bush’s not-quite-accurate “compassionate conservative” catchphrase with the all-too-accurate “severely conservative.”
The stormy reminder of Bush in Tampa threatens to interrupt what will be a week of celebrating the slashing of government agencies, demonizing public employees and those who receive public services, celebrating deregulation, extolling the wonders of tax cuts for the rich, redefining rape, and bowing to the Religious Right. It reminds us of what those things mean in practice: tax breaks for the rich on the backs of the middle class, rapidly widening economic inequality, a federal government that can’t respond to major crises, all while paying back the oligarchs who will have bought his election.
George W. Bush may not be there in person to witness the collision of Hurricane Isaac with his party’s convention. But we already know that Mitt Romney will do a “heck of a job” implementing Bush’s policies.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post Blog, August 28, 2012
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