As of late I have been spending more time on RedState than here at DailyKos. The Republican trolls that are antagonizing both sides of the Hillary/Bernie contest get me down. I’m going to proudly vote for Hillary come November no matter who she is running against. But let’s not count on it being The Donald just yet.
RedState is a bastion of support for Ted. He really is the darling of the religious right and RedState is heavily burdened with their ilk. I blogged for Trump there briefly but was quickly booed into oblivion (although not banished this time). I will return if Donald ever wraps up the nomination, but I am beginning to wonder if that will actually happen. About a week ago a real sense of dread and defeatism took over there, as it appeared that Trump had all but wrapped things up. Republican pols around the country were beginning to accept Trump as their inevitable candidate and were jumping on the Trump bandwagon. Not that it is healthy, to revel in their anguish, but it really was fun to read.
But Super Tuesday wasn’t as complete a blow-out for Trump as one might think from the headlines. Ted managed to win three states (his home state of Texas, neighboring Oklahoma, and Alaska). More importantly to the RedState hopeful, Trump’s margins of victory in other states significantly underperformed the pre-election polls. And then last Thursday’s Detroit debate happened.
RedState front-pagers loudly proclaimed Ted’s dominance of that fluster-cluck and claimed that Trump had been destroyed. Indeed, we may soon see that debate as the turning point of this campaign, but it had little to do with Ted Cruz’s performance. In all likelihood, if the tide continues to turn, it will have been Donald’s defense of his dick length that shook enough of his supporters into realizing what they were holding.
Perhaps I am accepting too much of the RedState desperado’s optimism, but things do appear to be changing. Rubio is about finished, The Donald is consistently underperforming the poll numbers, and Ted is winning some states. Yesterday’s wins in Kansas and especially Maine are telling. The Donald did not win by much in Louisiana and Kentucky, and the combination of Cruz’s and Rubio’s support easily eclipsed Trump’s totals. When Rubio drops out after he loses his home state of Florida on March 15 the race will finally be a two-man contest, and the RedStaters believe that Cruz will win.
Now there are some flaws in their logic, of course. First is their assumption that Cruz will gain most of Rubio’s support. That is patently false, but not by as much as one might think. If Rubio were to drop out AND endorse Cruz we might see Cruz gain considerably. But there is real, palpable bad blood between those two camps and it is anything but certain that they will be able to patch things up in time. Right now, the debate is over who should drop out in Florida so that Trump doesn’t win it. Rubio is highest in the polls behind Trump, but with Cruz’s voters he would certainly win. Fortunately, Cruz is opening offices there in an effort to ensure that Rubio loses. Rubio, of course, would dearly love to have Florida’s winner-take-all 99 votes at a brokered Republican convention, so he isn’t likely to concede before Floridians vote.
The other flaw is that Cruz is running out of states that are heavily burdened with evangelical voters. Most of the south has voted. The optimists at RedState assume that, mano-a-mano, Cruz will prove to be more virile than Trump.
The realists at RedState are realizing that their only hope in preventing Trump from winning is a brokered convention and are advocating measures be taken to make that happen. Some however deride that strategy as hastening the end of the Republican Party (and with it the entire country and world).
Will Ted and Marco make up? We will know that they have if we see Ted stop competing for Florida. Cruz probably cannot concede Florida outright because that would show weakness and that’s the real problem, because Rubio cannot win his home state on his own.
I’m not really sure it matters if Trump triumphs or if Cruz climaxes. I think that Hillary will destroy either one. It would probably be slightly better to see Trump as their candidate as that would do more damage to the Republican Party than a Cruz nomination.
With Trump we would certainly see the religious right go it’s own way. They would realize that the Republican Party is beyond redemption. They could elect Ted as their perennial champion, and they would actually control a few seats in Congress for years to come. They would, however, be relegated to the same position as the Greens are on our side.
With Cruz as their candidate, the religious right would finally have their chance to discover just how little support they really have. This has been long needed, as they have played king-maker far too long and their influence on American politics has been far in excess of their real numbers. If only, they say, the Republican Party would nominate a REAL conservative, everything would be great. Conservatives would actually get out and vote, and as president, he would save the entire world for Jesus (oh yes, they do have that backwards).
Either way, I think we win — BIG!! But that’s my optimism. We are Democrats after all.