After a furious four-week period in which voters in 30 states cast ballots for either the Democratic or Republican presidential nomination, we are now in a period of calm. For the Republicans, there is only one nominating contest in the next 21 days, the Wisconsin primary next Tuesday, April 5th and possibility of a contested convention in July looms.
Donald Trump leads with 762 delegates to date (out the required 1,237 to win a majority), so the billionaire businessman will need to win 61% of the remaining delegates between now and June 7th to seal up the nomination. In a three-person race, that’s an attainable goal but certainly a challenging one. Trump, who has been the teflon man throughout this process, may have, in the last week, suffered a self-inflicted wound that will hamper his ability to build upon his faithful supporters to the level needed to secure the nomination.
Just in case you missed it, a junior high school level spat has emerged between Trump and Texas Senator Ted Cruz. A super PAC supporting Cruz posted a suggestive near naked photo of Trump’s supermodel wife Melania and sent it out for the conservative voters of Utah to see. What Trump did was a massive overreaction. This is what Trump re-tweeted, regarding his wife and Cruz’ wife Heidi:
Seeing the unflattering picture of his wife next to the model shot of Trump’s, Cruz was understandably furious and the Republican nominating process reached a new low in vicious political discourse.
Trump’s mistake in his “my wife is hotter than yours” tweet is that he keeps digging his own grave regarding his potential to win a general election in which the women’s vote is so important and in which he would likely face a candidate running to be the first female president. In a recent Fox News poll, Trump loses to Clinton among women by 53% to 34%. In the same poll, Cruz barely loses the women’s vote to Hillary and Ohio Governor John Kasich wins.
In a recent Quinnipiac poll, 60% of women surveyed said they would never vote for Donald Trump (compared to 31% who said the same about Cruz and 14% who said the same about Kasich). Considering the hurdle Trump has with the Latino vote due to his draconian deportation immigration plan, he’s alienating two critical voting blocs required to win a general election. So, with Trump continuing to show that he has a ceiling of support, the likelihood increases that the Republicans are looking at a contested convention, with no nominee accumulating the 1,237 delegates required to lock up the prize.
Now, it’s interesting that when Ted Cruz is interviewed, he insists that, if John Kasich would just get out of the race, he would also have a path to 1,237 and that Kasich is essentially a “spoiler.” I’ve seen many pundits (most notably Fox News’ Sean Hannity) who have called the Ohio Governor “delusional” for staying in the race since he has no mathematical chance to reach 1,237. Kasich’s chances to actually win the nomination are a second point (which I’ll address below) but the idea, if he were to depart the race, that Cruz could win virtually everywhere and get the majority of the delegates by the end of the process is equally delusional. While Trump needs to win 61% of the remaining delegates to get to 1,237, the Texas Senator would need to win a whopping 95% to get to the magic number. Considering that New York and New Jersey are still on the docket (with a combined 146 delegates at stake), it’s equally delusional for anyone to think that Cruz has a path to 1,237. To be fair, Cruz has started talking about a contested convention being a strong possibility since he can do the math as well as I can.
So Donald Trump is the only person who can reach the majority of needed delegates by the time of the Republican National Convention. The only one. And thus, if either Cruz or Kasich is to be the nominee it must be through a contested convention.
Let’s first explain how that works. When candidates win caucuses and primaries during the five-month voting process, in almost all cases the delegates assigned to them are required to vote for that candidate at the convention on the first ballot when he’s put into nomination.
Please note that these delegates are actual human beings, mostly prominent members of each state’s Republican party. Not all delegates are necessarily bound to a particular candidate, Most of Marco Rubio’s 171 pledged delegates are free to vote for whomever they choose since Rubio is no longer in the race. Rubio could state a preference about who he would like them to vote for but the real humans are not required to follow his wishes.
Also, there are two states that actually don’t bind delegates to the candidates. In Colorado, for reasons I have not been able to unearth, there is no nominating contest in which the public has a say in who the 37 delegates are so those 37 individuals are essentially “free agents.” In an even more bizarre and un-explainable scenario, Pennsylvania asks the voters to choose the delegates directly, without knowing who they support. This is like going to the ballot box and voting for your state legislators, most of whom you’ve probably never heard of. So that’s another 54 “free agent” delegates.
So, at the convention, after the first ballot, if a candidate fails to get the 1,237 votes (from his pledged delegates and the “free agents”), then there is a second ballot, in which many of the candidates’ pledged delegates become free to follow their conscience (some states require loyalty through two or three ballots). It’s in this scenario that the voters throughout the United States are no longer involved and it’s the delegates themselves who choose the nominee. This is the path for Cruz, less likely Kasich or (in a much less likely possibility) somebody else.
Trump has gone on the record saying that, if he’s close to 1,237 and the party insiders “steal” the nomination from him, there would be riots. Presumably, he didn’t mean actual riots, or did he? Anyway, since the Donald is exceedingly unpopular and distrusted by the party loyalists, it is entirely plausible that theses delegates will vote for Cruz. Of course, the Texas Senator is also unpopular with the rank and file of the part, hence why Kasich, winner of just his home state to date and the last standing “insider” candidate, is stubbornly sticking in the race.
The question on the mind of many is, if Trump has the most delegates compared to his rivals, should the unbound delegates follow the will of the American people, “do the right thing” and hand the nomination to Trump? The answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT! Why do I say this, besides my own personal distaste for him as a presidential candidate? The reason is that, if he doesn’t get the majority of the delegates, it means by definition that more than half of the voters consider him an unacceptable nominee. The rules of this game, which have been in place for half a century, is that a candidate must get a MAJORITY of the delegates before the convention begins. This usually isn’t a problem; a front-runner emerges and the party and voters get behind the leader. But Donald Trump is no ordinary candidate. If he can’t start posting majority wins to get the delegates he needs in a three-person race, he hasn’t earned the nomination.
In a contest that started with 17 candidates, it started off easy for Trump for gain a plurality of the votes. The networks gave the billionaire candidate billions of dollars in free airtime. He was the angriest and most controversial, he was the only candidate boasting he could get Mexico to pay for a wall on our southern border and he was the only candidate calling on a ban of all Muslims to enter the country (a plan that, despite being completely insane and impractical, is popular with the Republican voters). I guarantee you that nearly half of every single person who voted for Donald Trump couldn’t tell you one darned thing about the other candidates or pick most of them out of a police lineup. With apologies to my friends who read this blog and are informed voters, a significant chunk of his supporters are less educated (every poll shows this) and, when asked why they’re voting for Trump, just repeat the slogan “he’ll Make American Great Again.”
So, when all the states have finished voting, if a majority of the Republican voters and the vast majority of the party loyalists positively do not want a certain candidate to be president, it is the duty of the delegates at the convention to find a candidate who is acceptable to the majority. Since Cruz may not be acceptable to a majority either, this is where “let’s get along” Kasich might wind up as the nominee. I consider this highly unlikely, by the way, unless Kasich makes a big comeback and wins a bunch of upcoming states. If Trump has the most delegates, Cruz is a close second and Kasich is a very distant third, I would expect the party to follow the lead of Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham and coalesce around Cruz even if he’s not really their cup of tea. It would be a bad signal to the electorate to choose a candidate who finished a distant third over one who finished a close second.
Now, this is not to say that it’s curtains for Donald Trump if he fails to get to 1,237. In fact, a contested convention would be the perfect test to justify the entire brand of Trump. What is it he says all the time? “I’ll make great deals, I’m a deal maker.” Well, Mr. Trump, if you need 100 to 200 delegates to get over the finish line, it’s time to make some deals! If the greatest deal-maker in the universe can’t make the sale within his own party, then the entire rationale for President Trump will be proven a farce. It’s one thing to make deals in real estate, it’s quite another in politics where you’re dealing with multiple people who are dead set against you.
It’s not as if Trump doesn’t have some good selling points: his chief rival is also disliked with the party loyalists, he’ll have won the most votes and he’s brought potentially millions of new voters to the Republican party. Of course the GOP would prefer not to lose if those voters stay home or switch back to the Dems, disillusioned over what they feel is the “rigged game” that denied the nomination to their champion. So if Donald Trump cannot make this deal, what makes anyone think he can make deals with foreign leaders or with members of the opposing party?
Now this will surprise many and I’m going out on a bit of a limb, but I think it’s entirely possible that Trump would walk away fairly quietly (as quietly as possible for the Donald) if he is denied the nomination at a contested convention. I’m just speculating here, but I still question how much Trump wants to actually serve as president. He often asks at his rallies “why am I doing this, I had a great life?” The truth is that it seems that he’s having the time of his life running for president, as if he’s fulfilling a bucket list item. But being president is much more serious and he has not shown a lot of growth in the last eight months with respect to policy knowledge and temperament.
Here is what he said to Fox News’ Sean Hannity in an interview last week when Hannity asked about the possibility of the “establishment” stealing the nomination from him at the convention.
“If I’m right up there, let’s say I’m 50 delegates short and somebody else is 500 or 600 delegates short, I don’t mind that one as much as somebody else that comes up that may have been defeated during the process.”
— Donald Trump (on Fox News’ “Hannity), Mon, 3/21
Not a lot of people picked up on this but it sounded to me like he was saying, “I don’t mind if they steal it from me as long as it’s not Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney.” Again, it’s just a feeling that he never thought he might actually win and he just wanted to have fun running. But I’m probably delusional.
Thanks for reading.
Chris Bodig