Anti-Trump Republicans appear to be in full-on, throw-the-kitchen-sink-at-him panic mode. An assortment of Super PACs is hitting Donald Trump with millions in television advertising, direct mail, online advertising, and more—but are they going to succeed at defeating him, or just end up with a nominee who hates them? The big plan is no sure thing:
The presentation is an 11th-hour rebuttal to the fatalism permeating the Republican establishment: Slide by slide, state by state, it calculates how Donald Trump could be denied the presidential nomination.
Marco Rubio wins Florida. John Kasich wins Ohio. Ted Cruz notches victories in the Midwest and Mountain West. And the results in California and other states are jumbled enough to leave Trump three dozen delegates short of the 1,237 required — forcing a contested convention in Cleveland in July.
But to many establishment Republicans, that chance of beating Trump in however contested and borderline dirty a fashion is better than the possibility of having him as their nominee. Even if the plan is successful, though, Greg Sargent points out a major problem.
On the one hand, some Republicans think the best way to deny Trump an outright majority (and prevent him from winning the nomination outright) is if all of his rivals stay in the race. That way, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich stand a chance of piling up more delegates than one non-Trump alternative might have — meaning that all three staying in have a better chance of collectively preventing Trump from getting 1,237 delegates, a majority, than a single anti-Trump alternative would.
The problem with this, though, is that it may make it harder, ultimately, to take the nomination from Trump even if he does fall short of a majority of the delegates. That’s because, if all three stay in, and all three split up the delegates that don’t go to Trump, that makes it more likely that Trump will end up with significantly more delegates than the runner-up does — making the scenario in which he loses the nomination after a contested convention even harder to defend.
It’s definitely not hard to see where the Republican Party saying “well, Trump didn’t get enough delegates, therefore we had to nominate a guy who got many fewer delegates” would enrage Trump supporters and even some people who don’t support Trump but don’t like to see such clear backroom dealing and insider control. Republicans have to ask themselves how much better a bitterly divided party would be than a possible Trump nomination.
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