Can the establishment stop Trump?
Answer: It is possible, and we shall know by midnight, March 15. If Trump loses Florida and Ohio, winner-take-all primaries, he would likely fall short of the 1,237 delegates needed for nomination on the first ballot.
.. In every primary upcoming, Trump is under a ceaseless barrage of attack ads on radio, TV, cable and social media, paid for by super PACs with hoards of cash funneled in by oligarchs.
But Trump, who is self-funding his campaign, has spent next to nothing on ads answering these attacks, or promoting himself or his issues. He has relied almost exclusively on free media.
Yet no amount of free media can match the shellfire falling on him every hour of every day in every primary state.
How the Anti-Trump Republicans Set Themselves Up to Fail
There is no scenario in which anti-Trump Republicans can now thwart Trump’s nomination without sabotaging the party ahead of the general election. Dan McCarthy explains what giving the nomination to someone other than Trump and Cruz would mean:
.. There is no scenario in which anti-Trump Republicans can now thwart Trump’s nomination without sabotaging the party ahead of the general election. Dan McCarthy explains what giving the nomination to someone other than Trump and Cruz would mean:
That might console the #neverTrump elites—until they stop to think about just what might be in store at Cleveland, where Trump and Cruz together will command a majority of delegates. Cruz is personally disliked by much of the party elite, which has come to resent his grandstanding ways in the Senate, while Trump is actively hated and feared. Yet if both of them were to be denied the nomination or some significant consolation prize—and what could that be?—by the party’s D.C. leadership class, there would be hell to pay in the long run.
The convention would go down in history as the GOP’s ultimate betrayal of its own voters.
.. Anyone foolish enough to accept the nomination under these circumstances would be seen as illegitimate by at least half of Republican voters whose preferences were ignored, and a nominee foisted upon the part in this way would have enormous difficulty securing the loyalty of his party’s core supporters.
.. If anti-Trump Republicans were capable of thinking through the long-term consequences of what they’re doing (and that is a questionable assumption), they would realize that stopping Trump’s nomination would be a thoroughly discrediting Pyrrhic victory for their faction. It would confirm everything that most Trump and Cruz voters think is wrong with the GOP, and it would vindicate them in their loathing for the party’s elites. Instead of accepting the temporary defeat that a Trump nomination represents for them, his opponents are trying to do something that would all but guarantee more populist insurgencies for years to come.
Rubio’s Florida Endgame
The Florida delegate apportionment model lets the winner take all, and it was set up that way to clear a path to the nomination for Jeb Bush.
.. The campaign wanted to have the rally at the University of North Florida arena on Jacksonville’s Southside. But they couldn’t swing the $11,000 charge. So they went with the Morocco Temple, a nearby concert and event facility, which rents for $5,000. The Morocco Temple’s main ballroom holds 3,000 for concerts, when not configured for press corps setups, which took up maybe a tenth of the floor space.
.. The bigger problem revealed in Rubio’s speech was a fundamental disconnect between the movement conservative talking points that are de rigueur in his speeches, and the kind of populist appeals that are moving the Golden Corral Conservatives and Gun Rack Republicans who are deciding state after state for Cruz or Trump.
.. Appeals to a National Greatness conservatism, paeans to conservatism in general, and pledges to support Israel and reform regulatory structures all fell flat with the crowd beyond the true believers in the front and the VIP seats. As did a pledge to “repeal every one of Barack Obama’s unconstitutional executive orders.”
.. If anyone is going to emerge as Trump’s permanent intraparty foil, it’s Ted Cruz, whose data driven campaign has gotten tremendous return on investment for money spent.
.. “Identify[ing] the low propensity voters who other campaigns are ignoring,” and “tailoring issues and how they think about those issues,” has been key to Cruz’s success thus far.
.. The Northwest Florida Daily News, a Pensacola paper, said that “Rubio appeared to attempt to diminish ‘North Florida’ as a voting force” after a Fox News host noted that “Florida shares media markets with 19 counties in Alabama and Georgia and in those counties Trump beats you 50 percent to 16 percent.”
“Obviously these are important counties and great people that live in those counties, but you’re talking about North Florida, not heavily populated areas,” Rubio said, adding that “the bulk of the vote comes from the I-4 corridor, Southwest Florida and, of course, my home area of Miami and even up into Jacksonville.”
So Rubio’s Florida strategy is not predicated on appeal throughout the state. (This is probably just as well given that his favorability rating is -24 in a recent Public Policy Polling poll.) It’s targeted to appeal to very specific demographics that are anomalous in the GOP base.
Is the GOP Worth Saving?
Right now, many conservatives are reacting to the #NeverTrump movement by pointing to the horrors of Hillary Clinton and urging conservatives to avert their eyes from Trump’s constant parade of horribles. Join together as Republicans to beat Horrible Hillary, they say, or lose the Supreme Court for a generation.
.. Trump is surging, in large part, because the standard pro-business message of the GOP hasn’t resonated with voters and nobody seems to give a darn.
.. The really grave fissure in the GOP, and the one that has catapulted Trump to power, is the chasm that has emerged between Chamber of Commerce Republicans and the rest of us.
.. And today, as history marches on, Chamber of Commerce business interests are doing the Left’s dirty work, leading the fight against conscience protections for gay-marriage dissenters. And the GOP is caving massively.
.. The old Reagan coalition is dead, destroyed not by social conservatives but by business interests and the GOP elites.