This week, GOP presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz and John Kasich agreed, briefly, on a plan that might have helped deny frontrunner Donald Trump enough delegates to avoid a contested convention.
The alliance might have worked, except for, well, nearly everything about it. It was simply too little, too late, and too manipulative, and before long, Cruz and Kasich seemed to back away from it.
A plan like this could have succeeded if more candidates had recognized Trump’s momentum weeks or even months ago and dropped out of the race. Enough voters do not like Trump that his march to the nomination might have faltered in a head-to-head contest with one strong candidate. Instead, candidates hung on until voters forgot about them, dividing a substantial pot of anti-Trump votes into tiny, useless shares.
While the possibility of stopping Trump seemed remote, Kasich and Cruz concocted a plan by which each would not campaign in the states in which he was weaker than the other, so that the stronger candidate, with less competition, could deny Trump the delegates he needed. The deal was for Kasich to back off in Indiana’s winner-take-most primary next Tuesday, in exchange for Cruz ceding the field in Oregon on May 17 and New Mexico in June, all with California waiting in the wings.
In theory, if Trump could not win on the first ballot, Cruz could pick up many of his delegates on the second, and if that did not work, in some future round perhaps, Kasich would emerge as the candidate.
Does that sound like a long shot? It is, even before Cruz performed poorly Tuesday, and party officials would have been objecting if they were not so opposed to Trump.
Delegate math aside, the main problem was that this “solution” treats Republican voters like game pieces to be traded as needed. Even Kasich and Cruz appeared to grow a little squeamish of such transparent manipulation. Kasich, who did stop campaigning in Indiana, told Pennsylvania reporters, “I’ve never told (Indiana voters) not to vote for me. They ought to vote for me.”
Kasich and Cruz are right in suspecting that Trump as the nominee would be harmful to the Republican Party, and Trump as president would be dangerous to the United States of America. They just should have thought of that a long time ago, and they and their fellow candidates should have been more willing to sacrifice their own Oval Office dreams for the good of their country.
Because about this, Trump is right. More Americans have voted for him than for any other Republican presidential candidate, and that has to mean something.
Strong turnout for Trump and Bernie Sanders, running as a Democrat, is a populist message that cannot be ignored. For a small group of what many alienated voters consider to be the “party elite” to thwart the will of a plurality would – and should – worry Americans regardless of whom they favor. Voters may come to regret supporting Trump, and if a contested convention comes to pass, they may express a different preference to their delegates, but they do not care what the party elite thinks. They do not want a party elite to exist.
This mess could have been averted at several junctures, and the right one would have been when Congress and the national party leaders diverged from their voters. Last-minute vote-trading is not the way to fix it. No Republican presidential candidate appeals to as many voters as Donald Trump does, and the GOP must face that problem head-on.
