The big money is finally flowing against Donald Trump, but the Republican groups now putting in millions of dollars to defeat their party’s frontrunner have to worry that it’s just too late. Florida is being deluged by at least $10 million in ads against Trump, with millions more being spent in Illinois. The problem for the groups spending all this money:
“Saturday proved that Trump can be contained and even beaten,” said Scott Jennings, a longtime Republican strategist, who looked ahead to this summer’s Republican convention in Cleveland. “The question is whether the field is going to allow for it moving forward. The most likely scenarios remain that Trump gets enough before Cleveland, or nobody does. The latter moved a little closer to realistic Saturday.”
And even if another candidate can overtake Trump and get enough delegates for the nomination, it’s not looking like it would be Marco Rubio, the favored choice of several of the outside groups advertising against Trump:
Mr. Cruz’s emergence as the most credible alternative to Mr. Trump has proved both a boost and a complication for those seeking to derail the New Yorker. Mr. Cruz has tried to undercut calls for a contested convention to deny Mr. Trump the nomination, which Mr. Cruz says would yield a “manifest revolt” among voters. But Mr. Cruz has done little so far to threaten Mr. Trump’s lead in the delegate race.
Much of Mr. Cruz’s late-breaking support on Saturday seemed to come at the expense of Mr. Rubio, not Mr. Trump. And the Cruz campaign’s message of ideological purity and religious faith is a less natural fit for many of the delegate-rich Midwestern and coastal states that remain on the map.
What a mess. What a sad, sad mess. For Democrats, of course, there’s some pleasure in watching the mess, but it has to be tempered by the reality that one of these terrifying men is overwhelmingly likely to be the eventual Republican nominee.
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