This week's Republican convention did an especially efficient job of encapsulating the current state of the party after four years of Donald Trump's leadership. In terms of the roster of speakers and the venues at which they spoke, the convention reflected how much the party has become a personal extension of Trump. Among the usual appearances by up-and-coming politicians and regular-citizen testimonials, a long succession of members of the reigning court—including a deputy chief of staff, press secretary, assistant to the president, counselor to the president, personal attorney of the president, and seven Trump family members—dominated the schedule, while the White House itself served as the backdrop to the addresses of both of its current adult occupants.
But the words of these speeches showed how much Trump's consolidation of power within the party has been accompanied by his adoption of its existing ideological commitments. Speaker after speaker at this week's convention reinforced standard Republican themes: small government, social traditionalism, veneration of the military and law enforcement, and attacks on "socialism," the "radical left," and the news media. Even the president's children, who might have been expected to spend their stage time sharing family anecdotes intended to create favorable personal impressions of their father, concentrated instead on delivering familiar conservative rhetoric. The occasional heterodoxies of the 2016 Trump campaign, which convinced many pundits and voters at the time that he was pulling the Republican Party to the left on economic policy, are no longer evident.
If there was something a bit redundant about the Republican convention, beyond the repetitive format forced in part by COVID-related restrictions, it stems from this presidency's unprecedented day-to-day domination of the political world over the past four years and the volume of coverage it already receives in both the mainstream and conservative media. Even enthusiastic supporters already have many other avenues of constant exposure to communication from Trump and his staff, and the campaign chose not to use their candidates' acceptance addresses, or the convention in general, to make much news.
It's hard to remember another presidential campaign in which concrete proposals and potential legislative initiatives have played such a minor role. Democrats have plenty of ideas for policy reform, as usual, but they did not make them the centerpiece of their public message in last week's convention; Biden's acceptance address mostly omitted the traditional "laundry list" of issue-specific domestic appeals in favor of a narrower focus on denouncing Trump as a threat to American values and mismanager of the COVID response. But the Republican convention was even more devoid of a vision for the next four years that centered on the actual powers and responsibilities of the president, as opposed to its frequent expression of emotionally charged but mostly symbolic opposition to the media, national anthem protests, destruction of local statuary, and "cancel culture." In the midst of an ongoing national economic and public health crisis that requires active, competent management to address effectively, it's remarkable that our national debate at this moment isn't more concerned with each candidate's specific plans and capacities to solve the immediate, life-threatening problem that the nation continues to face.
Showing posts with label Republican Convention. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Republican Convention. Show all posts
Thursday, August 27, 2020
Thursday, July 30, 2020
An Elegy for Old-Fashioned Political Campaigns in the COVID Age
The traditional campaign trail has become one of the political casualties of the COVID-19 epidemic. Joe Biden ceased holding large public events after he became the de facto Democratic nominee the week after Super Tuesday, just as the virus began its nationwide spread, and the Trump campaign has retreated to a similar policy after its comeback rally in Tulsa last month proved to be an over-hyped and under-attended disappointment. Even the president's most dedicated supporters turned out to be less enthusiastic about in-person electioneering in the midst of an uncontrolled national outbreak of disease.
It's become obvious this year how much of the standard press coverage of presidential campaigns is structured around the idea of a daily "top story" generated by the assignment of reporters and camera crews to follow the candidates around the country, ready to leap on anything that appears novel or unscripted amidst the otherwise repetitive cycle of stump speeches, rope lines, factory visits, and diner drop-ins. Most personal accounts of presidential elections written by candidates or journalists are blurry, weary travelogues that grudgingly acknowledge the democratic virtue of in-person politicking before returning to complaints about endless drudgery, exhaustion, and logistical snags.
But take away all that hopscotching from one battleground state to the next, and it's easy to wonder whether there really is a campaign at all. Joe Biden is continuing to hold virtual events and deliver policy speeches, but they simply don't seem as important—and certainly don't receive as much coverage—without big, cheering crowds and a chartered jet to schlep around the entourage. And Donald Trump's inability to hold his signature raucous rallies has helped to erase the line between presidential campaigning and presidential governing, as his COVID briefings and other White House events have come to serve as substitutes. Even if the virtual programs for the national conventions end up being snazzy productions, they will likely receive less attention than usual this year merely because they won't seem as momentous to the press or public as the in-person events of years past.
Might the lack of a traditional campaign trail affect the outcome of the election? Republicans are starting to worry that the result in November will wind up being a simple popular referendum on an increasingly unpopular admininistration—and not just in the presidential vote, but in congressional and down-ballot races as well. The Washington Post recently reported that many electorally vulnerable Republican Senate incumbents are challenging their opponents to an extensive series of debates with the hope that less-tested candidates will have a greater chance of screwing up in public, since the reduction of normal campaign events has also curtailed the usual practice of shadowing the opposing candidate with a "tracker" armed with a video camera to capture footage of any mistake. Meanwhile, Democrats have become concerned that their efforts to register new voters and mobilize sporadic participants will suffer from the relative lack of traditional grassroots activity this year.
Of course, the election was likely to serve as a referendum on Trump even before the onset of COVID, and the primary campaign arsenal of congressional candidates—paid advertising—remains unaffected by the current crisis. Interested would-be voters who have postponed registration so far may start to register in greater numbers as the election starts to approach, and the atmosphere of national crisis could also boost participation independent of organized get-out-the-vote initiatives. So the reduction of in-person campaigning this year may well have little effect on the outcome of the 2020 elections.
But the lack of so many familiar trappings of American political culture, from hand-shaking and small talk at midwestern state fairs and ice cream shops to the quadrennial spectacles of the national conventions, is still something worth mourning in our moment of disruption and isolation. Sure, a lot of this activity was formally obsolete and (for candidates, staff, and journalists) sometimes annoyingly inconvenient. But why should political campaigns necessarily be conducted for the maximum comfort or entertainment of their professional participants? Like so many other social rituals, these practices have taken on a meaning of their own as symbols of participatory democracy, and their absence—hopefully a temporary one—should rightfully be lamented as a small part of all that has been lost in this very sad year.
It's become obvious this year how much of the standard press coverage of presidential campaigns is structured around the idea of a daily "top story" generated by the assignment of reporters and camera crews to follow the candidates around the country, ready to leap on anything that appears novel or unscripted amidst the otherwise repetitive cycle of stump speeches, rope lines, factory visits, and diner drop-ins. Most personal accounts of presidential elections written by candidates or journalists are blurry, weary travelogues that grudgingly acknowledge the democratic virtue of in-person politicking before returning to complaints about endless drudgery, exhaustion, and logistical snags.
But take away all that hopscotching from one battleground state to the next, and it's easy to wonder whether there really is a campaign at all. Joe Biden is continuing to hold virtual events and deliver policy speeches, but they simply don't seem as important—and certainly don't receive as much coverage—without big, cheering crowds and a chartered jet to schlep around the entourage. And Donald Trump's inability to hold his signature raucous rallies has helped to erase the line between presidential campaigning and presidential governing, as his COVID briefings and other White House events have come to serve as substitutes. Even if the virtual programs for the national conventions end up being snazzy productions, they will likely receive less attention than usual this year merely because they won't seem as momentous to the press or public as the in-person events of years past.
Might the lack of a traditional campaign trail affect the outcome of the election? Republicans are starting to worry that the result in November will wind up being a simple popular referendum on an increasingly unpopular admininistration—and not just in the presidential vote, but in congressional and down-ballot races as well. The Washington Post recently reported that many electorally vulnerable Republican Senate incumbents are challenging their opponents to an extensive series of debates with the hope that less-tested candidates will have a greater chance of screwing up in public, since the reduction of normal campaign events has also curtailed the usual practice of shadowing the opposing candidate with a "tracker" armed with a video camera to capture footage of any mistake. Meanwhile, Democrats have become concerned that their efforts to register new voters and mobilize sporadic participants will suffer from the relative lack of traditional grassroots activity this year.
Of course, the election was likely to serve as a referendum on Trump even before the onset of COVID, and the primary campaign arsenal of congressional candidates—paid advertising—remains unaffected by the current crisis. Interested would-be voters who have postponed registration so far may start to register in greater numbers as the election starts to approach, and the atmosphere of national crisis could also boost participation independent of organized get-out-the-vote initiatives. So the reduction of in-person campaigning this year may well have little effect on the outcome of the 2020 elections.
But the lack of so many familiar trappings of American political culture, from hand-shaking and small talk at midwestern state fairs and ice cream shops to the quadrennial spectacles of the national conventions, is still something worth mourning in our moment of disruption and isolation. Sure, a lot of this activity was formally obsolete and (for candidates, staff, and journalists) sometimes annoyingly inconvenient. But why should political campaigns necessarily be conducted for the maximum comfort or entertainment of their professional participants? Like so many other social rituals, these practices have taken on a meaning of their own as symbols of participatory democracy, and their absence—hopefully a temporary one—should rightfully be lamented as a small part of all that has been lost in this very sad year.
Friday, July 22, 2016
As Cleveland Showed, The Big Republican Split Is Between Leaders and Voters
The primary purpose of a national convention—now that the actual selection of the nominee is completed beforehand by primary voters—is to foster party unity and put it on display, thus earning positive attention from the news media that will in turn engender heightened support and enthusiasm from partisan identifiers and persuadable independents in the mass electorate. It's fun to watch and kibitz over the quality of the speeches and the competence of the stage management, but most of the hour-to-hour proceedings are soon forgotten (OK, Clint Eastwood's empty chair is an exception). The big picture is what's important: what is the state of the party at the start of the general election?
It's clear from the events in Cleveland that Republicans remain a divided party. The single most dramatic moment of the entire four-day convention occurred at the end of Ted Cruz's speech Wednesday night, when the runner-up presidential candidate, building to a rhetorical peak, danced on the edge of an expression of support for Trump before exhorting his audience instead to "vote your conscience" for candidates who are true to constitutional principles, clearly implying that Trump himself did not meet this standard. The media immediately seized on Cruz's behavior as a signal not only of disunity but of political incompetence—why had the Trump campaign allowed Cruz to speak without securing an assurance that he would endorse the nominee?—and a furious Trump reignited a row with Cruz at a bizarre press conference today that defies easy summary or explanation.
The Trump-Cruz feud will consume most of the post-convention media attention, but the convention itself revealed a more fundamental, and probably more important, divide. In one camp are a majority of Republican delegates, activists, and voters, who are firm supporters of Trump (whether or not they voted for somebody else in the primaries) and highly motivated to defeat Hillary Clinton. In the other camp are the vast majority of the party's top elected officials, both past and present, who have serious reservations about the Trump candidacy and wish to limit their association with him. From beginning to end, the proceedings in the Cleveland formed a picture of a party leadership trying to cope with the fact that a presidential candidate is being forced upon them unwillingly by their own voters.
The many Republicans who harbor various degrees of qualms about Trump have responded to his nomination in different ways. One faction, including Mitt Romney, John Kasich, Lindsey Graham, Ben Sasse, Jeff Flake, and the Bush family, remains openly unreconciled to Trump; these leaders failed to appear at the convention, whether due to their preference or Trump's. A second group, consisting of many Republicans from politically competitive constituencies, is not explicitly opposed to Trump—in fact, some have endorsed him—but pointedly declined to attend the convention as a means of signaling their distance from the candidate (Marco Rubio, running for reelection in the "purple" state of Florida, recorded a brief taped message of support for Trump that was shown on Wednesday night).
That left the convention itself to be dominated by a third set of officials: the nominal Trump supporters. These politicians showed up in Cleveland to address the nation on behalf of the presidential ticket, but their speeches almost to a person spent more time attacking Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama than praising the virtues of the Republican alternatives. References to Trump, when they occurred, were brief and strikingly muted. Mitch McConnell advocated on behalf of an unnamed "Republican president" whose role would be merely to sign the legislation passed by a Republican Congress. Paul Ryan's speech mentioned the name of his party's nominee only to argue that "only with Donald Trump and Mike Pence do we have a chance at a better way." (Traditionally, predictions of future partisan governing success take a more confident tone.) Scott Walker's case for Trump rested on the premise that "any Republican" would be a better choice than Hillary Clinton.
These and other speeches communicated a message that was clear enough. Most leading Republicans view Trump as a poor candidate facing near-certain defeat in November, and they appear worried that any public expression of impassioned support for his campaign risks tainting them with political or historical embarrassment. But for many Republican delegates, activists, and voters, a Trump loss is far from inevitable and a Hillary Clinton presidency close to unthinkable. The persistence of this internal schism is likely to have implications for Republican politics for the remainder of the campaign, and may even outlast it.
As for Cruz, it will take some time before we know whether his big bet will pay off. Cruz is transparently wagering that Trump will eventually be so thoroughly discredited among Republicans that his own ostentatious refusal to endorse Trump before a national audience will be interpreted in retrospect as an honorable devotion to principle. But Cruz is sometimes prone to tactics that are too clever by half, and his own reputation among Republicans as a poor team player has cost him in the past. Even if Trump turns out to be a disaster for the party, it may turn out that the Paul Ryan approach was savvier: give a pro forma endorsement to the choice of the Republican electorate while simultaneously acting like you think it's a big mistake.
Monday, April 11, 2016
Why Ryan Should Run
In the daydreams of most Washington Republicans and nearly the entire political press corps, Donald Trump is stopped short of a majority on the first roll call vote at the Republican convention in Cleveland this summer. After a few deadlocked ballots on which neither Trump nor Ted Cruz can manage to win enough delegates to capture the nomination, the lights dim, thick smoke and loud music fill the air, and the arena doors open to reveal...Paul Ryan, riding in on a white steed to save the Republicans once again!
While this seems like wishful thinking more than a serious prediction, there is some logic at work. Trump will find it difficult to win over Republican delegates who are not already supporters of his campaign. Cruz also lacks broad appeal within the party and seems unlikely to be a strong general election candidate. And Ryan has already played the role of "The Only Man Who Can Unite the Party" once before: last fall in the House speakership race, when he was prevailed upon to succeed John Boehner after Kevin McCarthy's ascension from majority leader was blocked by the House Freedom Caucus.
Tonight, Politico tries to spoil everyone's fun by publishing "Why Ryan Won't Run," an article full of on-background denials from Ryan aides that their man has any interest in being the savior of his party at the national convention. The piece is full of arguments that are convincing enough—taking the nomination under such circumstances would divide more than unify a party in which the vast majority of voters supported either Trump or Cruz; assembling a national presidential campaign from a standing start in July would put him at a disadvantage against the Democratic opposition; running and losing this year would probably foreclose any future ambitions.
And yet: in the unlikely scenario that Ryan is presented with an opportunity to maneuver his way to the nomination, it seems to me that he should grab it without delay.
The main reason I draw this conclusion is that it sure looks like the speakership will eventually swallow him up just like it did John Boehner. Ryan has been speaker for less than six months, and he's already facing a serious rebellion over the budget from Boehner's old nemeses in the Freedom Caucus (a development that would be a much bigger story if the political world weren't fully distracted by the presidential race; in truth, the dumping of Boehner was itself a remarkable event that never really got the attention it deserved either). Republican regulars, perhaps including Ryan himself, may have assumed that their party's internal divisions would be abated after the installation of a new, more conservative speaker without Boehner's history of slighting the Freedom Caucusers. Instead, it looks as if the problem is structural, not personal—and now the problem is Ryan's.
The best-case scenario for a successful Ryan speakership requires a Republican victory in the 2016 presidential race. The new president would take responsibility for shaping the party's legislative agenda, and hard-right dissatisfaction and troublemaking would likely decline—or at least find a new target.
But if the Republicans are defeated in the presidential election—a nearly-certain scenario if Trump or Cruz wins the nomination—Ryan's job as speaker will only get harder. Republicans are likely to lose seats in the House this fall, reducing the party's margin of control, but these losses will not be suffered by the Freedom Caucus, whose members occupy safe deep-red districts. A newly-elected President (Hillary) Clinton will stimulate a gushing stream of conservative outrage that will inevitably splash onto the Republican leadership in Washington, as it did in the Obama years. Like Boehner before him, Ryan will be caught between making the compromises needed to govern and satisfying the incessant demands of his own partisan-ideological base. And if the election is a true landslide, the House Republican majority itself will be in jeopardy (though this remains a remote possibility at present).
Several of Politico's sources in the Ryan orbit appear convinced of the idea that four years of this madness would somehow leave Ryan in a good position to seek the presidency. That seems unlikely, if not outright delusional. In truth, Ryan will be lucky to still remain speaker at the end of the next president's term, and any further ambitions will probably be closed off completely. If Ryan really envisions himself in the White House, he shouldn't have accepted the speakership in the first place—but if he still wants the job, the time to run is now.
While this seems like wishful thinking more than a serious prediction, there is some logic at work. Trump will find it difficult to win over Republican delegates who are not already supporters of his campaign. Cruz also lacks broad appeal within the party and seems unlikely to be a strong general election candidate. And Ryan has already played the role of "The Only Man Who Can Unite the Party" once before: last fall in the House speakership race, when he was prevailed upon to succeed John Boehner after Kevin McCarthy's ascension from majority leader was blocked by the House Freedom Caucus.
Tonight, Politico tries to spoil everyone's fun by publishing "Why Ryan Won't Run," an article full of on-background denials from Ryan aides that their man has any interest in being the savior of his party at the national convention. The piece is full of arguments that are convincing enough—taking the nomination under such circumstances would divide more than unify a party in which the vast majority of voters supported either Trump or Cruz; assembling a national presidential campaign from a standing start in July would put him at a disadvantage against the Democratic opposition; running and losing this year would probably foreclose any future ambitions.
And yet: in the unlikely scenario that Ryan is presented with an opportunity to maneuver his way to the nomination, it seems to me that he should grab it without delay.
The main reason I draw this conclusion is that it sure looks like the speakership will eventually swallow him up just like it did John Boehner. Ryan has been speaker for less than six months, and he's already facing a serious rebellion over the budget from Boehner's old nemeses in the Freedom Caucus (a development that would be a much bigger story if the political world weren't fully distracted by the presidential race; in truth, the dumping of Boehner was itself a remarkable event that never really got the attention it deserved either). Republican regulars, perhaps including Ryan himself, may have assumed that their party's internal divisions would be abated after the installation of a new, more conservative speaker without Boehner's history of slighting the Freedom Caucusers. Instead, it looks as if the problem is structural, not personal—and now the problem is Ryan's.
The best-case scenario for a successful Ryan speakership requires a Republican victory in the 2016 presidential race. The new president would take responsibility for shaping the party's legislative agenda, and hard-right dissatisfaction and troublemaking would likely decline—or at least find a new target.
But if the Republicans are defeated in the presidential election—a nearly-certain scenario if Trump or Cruz wins the nomination—Ryan's job as speaker will only get harder. Republicans are likely to lose seats in the House this fall, reducing the party's margin of control, but these losses will not be suffered by the Freedom Caucus, whose members occupy safe deep-red districts. A newly-elected President (Hillary) Clinton will stimulate a gushing stream of conservative outrage that will inevitably splash onto the Republican leadership in Washington, as it did in the Obama years. Like Boehner before him, Ryan will be caught between making the compromises needed to govern and satisfying the incessant demands of his own partisan-ideological base. And if the election is a true landslide, the House Republican majority itself will be in jeopardy (though this remains a remote possibility at present).
Several of Politico's sources in the Ryan orbit appear convinced of the idea that four years of this madness would somehow leave Ryan in a good position to seek the presidency. That seems unlikely, if not outright delusional. In truth, Ryan will be lucky to still remain speaker at the end of the next president's term, and any further ambitions will probably be closed off completely. If Ryan really envisions himself in the White House, he shouldn't have accepted the speakership in the first place—but if he still wants the job, the time to run is now.
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
How Hard Will Republican Leaders Fight for Ted Cruz?
Over the past few weeks, several prominent leaders of the wilting faction of Republican Regulars—including Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Lindsey Graham—have called on party voters to unite behind the presidential candidacy of Ted Cruz. To observe that these expressions of support have been "grudging" is to understate the matter considerably. Romney announced that he was voting for Cruz in the Utah caucus but refused to acknowledge that he was officially endorsing the senator; Bush simply issued a short statement to the press, suggesting that he was not ready to hit the campaign trail on Cruz's behalf any time soon; and Graham, who previously compared the competition between Cruz and Donald Trump to a choice between death by gunshot or by poison, openly conceded that his sole purpose in backing a candidate for whom he has considerable contempt was to resist an even less palatable Trump nomination.
Today, Politico reports that these recent public gestures represent a larger shift in thinking among Republican politicians and strategists. Washington Republicans continue to disdain Cruz as both personally dishonorable and politically toxic, but many have concluded that his probable defeat in a general election would be less damaging than a Trump-led ticket to both the down-ballot fortunes of Republican congressional candidates in 2016 and the long-term health of the party beyond this year.
Left unexplored in the Politico article, however, is the key matter of delegate math. At this stage of the nomination process, Cruz has no realistic chance of winning an outright majority of delegates by the end of the primary calendar, and is nearly as unlikely to pass Trump (who is now almost 300 delegates in the lead) in the overall count. Anyone still contemplating the prospect of a Cruz nomination needs to acknowledge that such an outcome can now only occur as a product of a contested convention at which a pro-Trump plurality is outvoted by a pro-Cruz majority consisting of an alliance between Cruz's own pledged delegates and those originally bound to other candidates—an event that would produce certain controversy, if not outright procedural (and even physical) conflict.
For Republicans who have resigned themselves to Cruz as not merely a stalking-horse for a deadlocked convention that would ultimately nominate someone like Paul Ryan but as the only plausible remaining alternative to nominating Trump, this is an important point to realize. It's one thing to concede today from an armchair that Cruz is a preferable nominee to Trump, but committing oneself to a bloody battle at the convention in order to throw the nomination to Cruz will require a much greater investment of energy, degree of coordination, and assumption of political risk. Republican Regulars may have made their peace with Cruz's status as a better option than Trump. But are they really willing to go to war for him?
Today, Politico reports that these recent public gestures represent a larger shift in thinking among Republican politicians and strategists. Washington Republicans continue to disdain Cruz as both personally dishonorable and politically toxic, but many have concluded that his probable defeat in a general election would be less damaging than a Trump-led ticket to both the down-ballot fortunes of Republican congressional candidates in 2016 and the long-term health of the party beyond this year.
Left unexplored in the Politico article, however, is the key matter of delegate math. At this stage of the nomination process, Cruz has no realistic chance of winning an outright majority of delegates by the end of the primary calendar, and is nearly as unlikely to pass Trump (who is now almost 300 delegates in the lead) in the overall count. Anyone still contemplating the prospect of a Cruz nomination needs to acknowledge that such an outcome can now only occur as a product of a contested convention at which a pro-Trump plurality is outvoted by a pro-Cruz majority consisting of an alliance between Cruz's own pledged delegates and those originally bound to other candidates—an event that would produce certain controversy, if not outright procedural (and even physical) conflict.
For Republicans who have resigned themselves to Cruz as not merely a stalking-horse for a deadlocked convention that would ultimately nominate someone like Paul Ryan but as the only plausible remaining alternative to nominating Trump, this is an important point to realize. It's one thing to concede today from an armchair that Cruz is a preferable nominee to Trump, but committing oneself to a bloody battle at the convention in order to throw the nomination to Cruz will require a much greater investment of energy, degree of coordination, and assumption of political risk. Republican Regulars may have made their peace with Cruz's status as a better option than Trump. But are they really willing to go to war for him?
Friday, March 18, 2016
Dumping Trump at the Convention Requires Help From GOP Voters
Anecdotally, it seems as if some of the fight has gone out of the Never Trump movement this week. Anti-Trump Republicans have continued to blast away at their nemesis in the press and on the Internet, but Trump's multiple electoral victories on Tuesday have dimmed his critics' hopes that Republican primary voters will rally around the two other remaining candidates in order to send a clear sign that they, too, find Trump an intolerable choice for the nomination.
Whether Trump will actually gain an outright majority of pledged delegates remains mathematically unclear and probably will not be resolved until June 7, the final date on the primary calendar, when delegate-rich California and New Jersey have scheduled their primaries along with three smaller states. But we can conclude at this stage that Trump is positioned to hold a delegate plurality at minimum, and with it the standing to argue that he, as the first choice of Republican voters, cannot rightfully be denied the nomination.
One set of issues raised by the prospect of a contested convention is procedural, encompassing party rules (and their interpretation and possible revision), the selection of delegates, and so forth. But another set involves the question of legitimacy: whether the national party organization has the "right" to block the popular choice of the Republican electorate from receiving its presidential nomination, and whether doing so would or would not cause more damage to the Republican Party—both in the short and long term—than ratifying the expressed preference of party members.
Given the magnitude of the threat posed by Trump to much of the existing Republican leadership, it is somewhat remarkable how little open resistance there has been (one short speech by Mitt Romney does not really constitute a party-wide revolt). It is possible that party leaders are quietly confident that Trump can be defeated down the road; more likely, they are more or less resigned to a Trump nomination unless the voters themselves shift against Trump in the remaining primaries. This behavior suggests the existence of a powerful norm respecting the perceived democratic legitimacy of the primary process even when it results in a deeply undesirable outcome.
Put simply, Republican leaders are unlikely to risk building a coordinated effort to block Trump at the convention unless they feel as if the voters are behind them. If Trump's support were to decline significantly in the later primaries, so that he barely crawled across the finish line with a plurality of delegates, anti-Trump forces might be emboldened to carry the fight to Cleveland. Alternatively, if the Republican electorate as a whole expressed obvious buyer's remorse—for example, if a majority of Republican identifiers told pollsters by July that they supported an effort to discard Trump in favor of an alternative candidate—the anti-Trump Republicans could claim a popular legitimacy of their own to rival that conferred on Trump by the electoral process.
Absent such signals from the voters, however, the usual presumption that a first-place candidate should rightfully claim victory is likely to hold—and a demoralized Republican leadership will reluctantly acknowledge that the people have spoken.
Whether Trump will actually gain an outright majority of pledged delegates remains mathematically unclear and probably will not be resolved until June 7, the final date on the primary calendar, when delegate-rich California and New Jersey have scheduled their primaries along with three smaller states. But we can conclude at this stage that Trump is positioned to hold a delegate plurality at minimum, and with it the standing to argue that he, as the first choice of Republican voters, cannot rightfully be denied the nomination.
One set of issues raised by the prospect of a contested convention is procedural, encompassing party rules (and their interpretation and possible revision), the selection of delegates, and so forth. But another set involves the question of legitimacy: whether the national party organization has the "right" to block the popular choice of the Republican electorate from receiving its presidential nomination, and whether doing so would or would not cause more damage to the Republican Party—both in the short and long term—than ratifying the expressed preference of party members.
Given the magnitude of the threat posed by Trump to much of the existing Republican leadership, it is somewhat remarkable how little open resistance there has been (one short speech by Mitt Romney does not really constitute a party-wide revolt). It is possible that party leaders are quietly confident that Trump can be defeated down the road; more likely, they are more or less resigned to a Trump nomination unless the voters themselves shift against Trump in the remaining primaries. This behavior suggests the existence of a powerful norm respecting the perceived democratic legitimacy of the primary process even when it results in a deeply undesirable outcome.
Put simply, Republican leaders are unlikely to risk building a coordinated effort to block Trump at the convention unless they feel as if the voters are behind them. If Trump's support were to decline significantly in the later primaries, so that he barely crawled across the finish line with a plurality of delegates, anti-Trump forces might be emboldened to carry the fight to Cleveland. Alternatively, if the Republican electorate as a whole expressed obvious buyer's remorse—for example, if a majority of Republican identifiers told pollsters by July that they supported an effort to discard Trump in favor of an alternative candidate—the anti-Trump Republicans could claim a popular legitimacy of their own to rival that conferred on Trump by the electoral process.
Absent such signals from the voters, however, the usual presumption that a first-place candidate should rightfully claim victory is likely to hold—and a demoralized Republican leadership will reluctantly acknowledge that the people have spoken.
Monday, March 14, 2016
Dumping Trump Without Choosing Cruz
The more subdued Donald Trump who showed up at last Thursday's debate was seemingly eager to coast on his front-runner status without risking any political damage by indulging in his usual pastimes of making controversial remarks and aggressively belittling his opponents. But this new "kinder, gentler" phase of the Trump campaign lasted less than 24 hours before the candidate plunged the Republican race back into turmoil. Trump's abrupt cancellation of a planned Chicago rally on Friday in the face of a large contingent of protestors, his subsequent verbal defense of supporters who engaged in violent acts against his critics, and the attempt of one anti-Trump activist to rush the stage during a Saturday morning speech in Ohio—to which Trump later responded by accusing the man of terrorist connections—added up to one particularly unsettling weekend of the campaign, inspiring a variety of political analysts and thinkers on the left and right alike to condemn Trump as a uniquely malignant force in American politics whose pursuit of power must be stopped for the very sake of the nation.
It is safe to assume that the majority of Republican leaders are privately aghast at the prospect of a Trump nomination. Apart from highly dubious assertions that he expands the traditional appeal of the GOP to independents and Democrats, Trump brings nothing to the party table. He is neither consistently loyal to conservative principles nor devoted to the Republican Party as an institution. His political rhetoric, business record, and decades of media pronouncements are rife with potential attack-ad fodder. He leads no larger faction within the party that can demand deference from its elected officials. He is, by all evidence, the most unpopular major political figure in the eyes of American voters, and he inspires especially intense antipathy among several key groups—racial minorities, young people, single women—whose electoral participation is undependable but whose energetic mobilization in November would be particularly beneficial to the Democratic opposition. It is reasonable to expect that a Trump candidacy would produce a potentially cataclysmic Republican defeat, with damaging consequences enduring for years to come.
And yet luck smiles on Trump. For, in an unlikely twist, his chief rival in the nomination race is Senator Ted Cruz of Texas—the one Republican politician whom party elites detest more than any other (Trump included). The undoubtedly-strong instinct of many Republicans to denounce Trump, to call for all right-thinking party members to unite in order to ensure his defeat, is stayed by the consideration that such an effort at this stage in the race would primarily benefit Cruz.
Over the weekend, the nomination race provided quantitative evidence to bear on this matter in the form of the District of Columbia Republican caucus. DC is, of course, overwhelmingly Democratic, and its relatively modest population of registered Republicans is mostly composed of political professionals: congressional staffers, campaign operatives, think tank fellows, and the like. About 2,800 of them turned out on Saturday to register their presidential preferences, producing a narrow victory for Marco Rubio—still the favorite of Republican politicos if not Republican voters—over fellow "establishment" type John Kasich. Unsurprisingly, Trump finished far behind the two leading candidates, gaining less than 14 percent of the vote—his worst showing by far in any primary or caucus in an English-speaking state or territory.
He still placed ahead of Cruz.
For the majority of Republican elites, the presidential primary process—up to and including the convention itself—is not currently dedicated to the lone purpose of preventing the unique national catastrophe of a Trump nomination, but has instead evolved into a frantic exercise in steering the prize away from Trump and Cruz alike. Single-minded efforts to minimize Trump's delegate count at any cost might have the unwelcome consequences of opening a window for Cruz to claim an overall delegate plurality, if not a majority—a particularly troublesome development from the perspective of party leaders, who would have much less pretext to deny the leading candidate the nomination at the convention if it were Cruz, not Trump, who wound up with the most delegates.
What does this mean for the Republican contest from this point forward? If the polls are accurate, Marco Rubio is likely to lose his home state of Florida by an ample margin on Tuesday, which would make it nearly impossible for him to avoid folding his campaign. Assuming that John Kasich does well enough on his own home turf of Ohio that same day to justify soldiering on, Kasich would then become the only non-insurgent in a three-candidate contest—and thus the lone remaining factor keeping either Trump or Cruz from assembling a majority of delegates. Republican regulars would likely provide Kasich with the necessary resources to stay in the race for the long term, rendering him a stalking horse—now there's a newly-relevant entry in the American political lexicon!—for an eventual establishment-approved nominee to be chosen at the convention itself.
It's a pretty crazy scheme that just might work. But let's be clear: this plan is not merely dedicated to the cause of averting a national crisis by stopping a uniquely destructive individual from capturing the banner of a major party. It is also a scramble by desperate Republican leaders to seize control of a nomination process heretofore dominated by a mass electorate that has repeatedly registered a preference for not one but two candidates whom most party elites view as thoroughly, and equally, unacceptable.
It is safe to assume that the majority of Republican leaders are privately aghast at the prospect of a Trump nomination. Apart from highly dubious assertions that he expands the traditional appeal of the GOP to independents and Democrats, Trump brings nothing to the party table. He is neither consistently loyal to conservative principles nor devoted to the Republican Party as an institution. His political rhetoric, business record, and decades of media pronouncements are rife with potential attack-ad fodder. He leads no larger faction within the party that can demand deference from its elected officials. He is, by all evidence, the most unpopular major political figure in the eyes of American voters, and he inspires especially intense antipathy among several key groups—racial minorities, young people, single women—whose electoral participation is undependable but whose energetic mobilization in November would be particularly beneficial to the Democratic opposition. It is reasonable to expect that a Trump candidacy would produce a potentially cataclysmic Republican defeat, with damaging consequences enduring for years to come.
And yet luck smiles on Trump. For, in an unlikely twist, his chief rival in the nomination race is Senator Ted Cruz of Texas—the one Republican politician whom party elites detest more than any other (Trump included). The undoubtedly-strong instinct of many Republicans to denounce Trump, to call for all right-thinking party members to unite in order to ensure his defeat, is stayed by the consideration that such an effort at this stage in the race would primarily benefit Cruz.
Over the weekend, the nomination race provided quantitative evidence to bear on this matter in the form of the District of Columbia Republican caucus. DC is, of course, overwhelmingly Democratic, and its relatively modest population of registered Republicans is mostly composed of political professionals: congressional staffers, campaign operatives, think tank fellows, and the like. About 2,800 of them turned out on Saturday to register their presidential preferences, producing a narrow victory for Marco Rubio—still the favorite of Republican politicos if not Republican voters—over fellow "establishment" type John Kasich. Unsurprisingly, Trump finished far behind the two leading candidates, gaining less than 14 percent of the vote—his worst showing by far in any primary or caucus in an English-speaking state or territory.
He still placed ahead of Cruz.
For the majority of Republican elites, the presidential primary process—up to and including the convention itself—is not currently dedicated to the lone purpose of preventing the unique national catastrophe of a Trump nomination, but has instead evolved into a frantic exercise in steering the prize away from Trump and Cruz alike. Single-minded efforts to minimize Trump's delegate count at any cost might have the unwelcome consequences of opening a window for Cruz to claim an overall delegate plurality, if not a majority—a particularly troublesome development from the perspective of party leaders, who would have much less pretext to deny the leading candidate the nomination at the convention if it were Cruz, not Trump, who wound up with the most delegates.
What does this mean for the Republican contest from this point forward? If the polls are accurate, Marco Rubio is likely to lose his home state of Florida by an ample margin on Tuesday, which would make it nearly impossible for him to avoid folding his campaign. Assuming that John Kasich does well enough on his own home turf of Ohio that same day to justify soldiering on, Kasich would then become the only non-insurgent in a three-candidate contest—and thus the lone remaining factor keeping either Trump or Cruz from assembling a majority of delegates. Republican regulars would likely provide Kasich with the necessary resources to stay in the race for the long term, rendering him a stalking horse—now there's a newly-relevant entry in the American political lexicon!—for an eventual establishment-approved nominee to be chosen at the convention itself.
It's a pretty crazy scheme that just might work. But let's be clear: this plan is not merely dedicated to the cause of averting a national crisis by stopping a uniquely destructive individual from capturing the banner of a major party. It is also a scramble by desperate Republican leaders to seize control of a nomination process heretofore dominated by a mass electorate that has repeatedly registered a preference for not one but two candidates whom most party elites view as thoroughly, and equally, unacceptable.
Friday, March 11, 2016
Debate Recap: Would Republicans Really Stand Up to Their Base to Dump Trump?
The Republican debate in Miami Thursday night surprised almost everyone with its unexpectedly calm tone and focus on policy, to the extent that Donald Trump himself remarked on stage that he "cannot believe how civil it's been up here." Undoubtedly, all four candidates are running short on energy after weeks on the campaign trail. Trump clearly chose to sit on his lead in the race and refrain from stirring up more controversy, John Kasich remained loyal to his strategy of selling himself as the most positive candidate in the race, and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who have tussled with Trump in the past, no longer exhibit confidence that attacks on the front-runner will benefit their own campaigns.
Late in the evening, conservative writer and radio host Hugh Hewitt asked the candidates about the prospect of a contested convention in which no single candidate held a majority of delegates. Kasich and Rubio, neither of whom could plausibly receive a majority themselves at this stage in the race, both dodged the question. Trump replied that he believed that "whoever gets the most delegates should win" even if the total fell short of an overall majority, which he referred to as an "artificial" and "random" number. Cruz did not explicitly agree with Trump's position, but argued that "some in Washington" are "unhappy with how the people are voting and they want to parachute in their favored Washington candidate to be the nominee. I think that would be an absolute disaster and we need to respect the will of the voters."
Trump and Cruz both understand that they are disliked by Republican Party leaders and that recent talk of a contested convention is coming from corners of the party that wish to block their ascent. Trump, anticipating that he will lead in the overall delegate count at the end of the primaries, is signaling that he will demand the nomination anyway even if he fails to accrue an overall majority. Cruz would presumably do the same if he manages to surpass Trump in delegates, but he may also be keeping the option open of arguing that any convention bent on denying a majority- or plurality-winning Trump the nomination should rightfully turn to him, the likely second-place finisher, instead. It is clear that Cruz would prefer a Trump nomination to an insider-blessed compromise choice, for reasons I have discussed before.
Any contested-convention scenario would thus surely occur over the intense opposition of the party's two leading presidential candidates (who between them will likely have attracted at least 70 percent of the total popular vote and an even greater share of the delegates), further validating the central premises of both men's candidacies that the "Republican establishment" is out of touch with, and even hostile to, the party grassroots. One can only imagine the protests that would ensue, egged on by talk radio hosts and other populist voices as well as Trump and Cruz themselves, against such a maneuver. Republican members of Congress and other elected officials would likely be threatened with future primary challenges for even suggesting publicly that the top choices of the voters be denied the nomination, much less carrying it out—and such threats are by no means idle in today's Republican Party.
The nomination of Trump in particular might well turn out be such a disastrous event that it would be worth whatever price Republican politicians would need to pay to prevent it from happening. But both Trump and Cruz provided notable reminders last night that the cost of choosing a nominee who is not one of them is likely to be high indeed. While it's comforting for many Republicans—and fun for many analysts—to envision a surprise twist ending to the nomination process in Cleveland this July, such an outcome remains somewhat improbable from today's vantage point. How likely is it that a party leadership that has become scared to death of its own popular base would reject the preferences of that base in the most dramatic possible manner?
Late in the evening, conservative writer and radio host Hugh Hewitt asked the candidates about the prospect of a contested convention in which no single candidate held a majority of delegates. Kasich and Rubio, neither of whom could plausibly receive a majority themselves at this stage in the race, both dodged the question. Trump replied that he believed that "whoever gets the most delegates should win" even if the total fell short of an overall majority, which he referred to as an "artificial" and "random" number. Cruz did not explicitly agree with Trump's position, but argued that "some in Washington" are "unhappy with how the people are voting and they want to parachute in their favored Washington candidate to be the nominee. I think that would be an absolute disaster and we need to respect the will of the voters."
Trump and Cruz both understand that they are disliked by Republican Party leaders and that recent talk of a contested convention is coming from corners of the party that wish to block their ascent. Trump, anticipating that he will lead in the overall delegate count at the end of the primaries, is signaling that he will demand the nomination anyway even if he fails to accrue an overall majority. Cruz would presumably do the same if he manages to surpass Trump in delegates, but he may also be keeping the option open of arguing that any convention bent on denying a majority- or plurality-winning Trump the nomination should rightfully turn to him, the likely second-place finisher, instead. It is clear that Cruz would prefer a Trump nomination to an insider-blessed compromise choice, for reasons I have discussed before.
Any contested-convention scenario would thus surely occur over the intense opposition of the party's two leading presidential candidates (who between them will likely have attracted at least 70 percent of the total popular vote and an even greater share of the delegates), further validating the central premises of both men's candidacies that the "Republican establishment" is out of touch with, and even hostile to, the party grassroots. One can only imagine the protests that would ensue, egged on by talk radio hosts and other populist voices as well as Trump and Cruz themselves, against such a maneuver. Republican members of Congress and other elected officials would likely be threatened with future primary challenges for even suggesting publicly that the top choices of the voters be denied the nomination, much less carrying it out—and such threats are by no means idle in today's Republican Party.
The nomination of Trump in particular might well turn out be such a disastrous event that it would be worth whatever price Republican politicians would need to pay to prevent it from happening. But both Trump and Cruz provided notable reminders last night that the cost of choosing a nominee who is not one of them is likely to be high indeed. While it's comforting for many Republicans—and fun for many analysts—to envision a surprise twist ending to the nomination process in Cleveland this July, such an outcome remains somewhat improbable from today's vantage point. How likely is it that a party leadership that has become scared to death of its own popular base would reject the preferences of that base in the most dramatic possible manner?
Monday, March 07, 2016
A Contested Republican Convention: Why Would Cruz Help Block Trump?
I usually write a recap post after presidential debates, but last night's Clinton-Sanders face-off in Flint left me devoid of inspiration. Little new substantive ground was broken (aside from a discussion of the Flint water crisis itself) and both candidates hewed to their now-familiar rhetorical themes and strategies. The Democratic nomination contest is on a glide path to an easy Clinton victory absent a truly major development, and the Tuesday primary in Michigan appears, from available polls, unlikely to provide Sanders with the major upset that he would need to shake up the race.
So let's talk about the Republicans instead.
Last week, Mitt Romney delivered a speech blasting Donald Trump and calling for Republicans to deny him the 2016 presidential nomination. Romney declined to endorse a specific alternative candidate, instead advocating a kind of strategic-voting scheme in which Republican voters supported the strongest non-Trump aspirant in their specific state primaries and caucuses. "Given the current delegate selection process," said Romney, "that means that I’d vote for Marco Rubio in Florida and for John Kasich in Ohio and for Ted Cruz or whichever one of the other two contenders has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state."
So let's talk about the Republicans instead.
Last week, Mitt Romney delivered a speech blasting Donald Trump and calling for Republicans to deny him the 2016 presidential nomination. Romney declined to endorse a specific alternative candidate, instead advocating a kind of strategic-voting scheme in which Republican voters supported the strongest non-Trump aspirant in their specific state primaries and caucuses. "Given the current delegate selection process," said Romney, "that means that I’d vote for Marco Rubio in Florida and for John Kasich in Ohio and for Ted Cruz or whichever one of the other two contenders has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state."
At least for Romney, and presumably for many other anti-Trump Republicans (who have adopted the hashtag #NeverTrump on Twitter to identify themselves), the goal is not to defeat Trump outright in the primaries by delivering a delegate majority to a single rival candidate. Instead, they hope that a robust multi-candidate field denies Trump a majority of his own, preventing him from winning a first-ballot victory at the Republican national convention in Cleveland. Then, the thinking goes, an agreement can be worked out among the non-Trump candidates and their delegates to nominate a superior compromise candidate, perhaps a widely-acceptable Republican who didn't run in the primaries this year. Maybe even someone like Mitt Romney.
This plan contains one obvious concession to reality: the delegate math at this stage makes it very difficult for any candidate other than Trump to gain an outright majority via the primary process, and a multi-candidate field of opposition may well do a better job than a single rival at holding Trump under the needed 1,237 delegates. But it still seems to rely on an awful lot of wishful thinking, politically speaking. Frankly, it's very hard to see exactly how it's supposed to work.
First, it will be very difficult for Republican leaders to explain to the American public why Trump should be denied the nomination if he wins the most states, votes, and delegates of all the candidates. If he falls short of an overall majority, of course, he would not be automatically recognized by the party itself as its official nominee, but he would still be widely seen by the citizenry as having the most legitimate claim to the prize—especially in comparison to someone like Romney or Paul Ryan who didn't even face the voters this year.
Second, any stop-Trump effort at the convention will need to reckon with Ted Cruz, who has pulled into a clear second-place position in the nomination contest. Between them, Trump and Cruz have won 63 percent of the popular vote and 77 percent of the delegates awarded so far—and both proportions may well increase between now and the end of the process, as winner-take-all primaries become more prevalent and also-ran candidates drop out of the race. It's a safe bet that the Trump and Cruz factions will together constitute a majority, and probably a supermajority, of the Republican convention delegates.
With this in mind, it's worth considering why it would be in Cruz's personal or political interest to be party to any move to deny the nomination to a plurality-winning Trump campaign. Of course, Cruz might be potentially amenable to an agreement that made him the nominee instead—though such a deal seems unlikely, given Republican leaders' personal antipathy toward Cruz and widespread view of him as a weak general-election candidate. But a senator who has already burned most of his bridges in Washington and who has carefully cultivated a public reputation as a principled foe of the Republican leadership also has no obvious reason to help that leadership stop Trump via a procedural maneuver that will be inevitably criticized as democratically illegitimate by a large segment of the party's popular base.
Under the circumstances, Cruz might well be better served by throwing his support to Trump as the acknowledged popular choice of the party electorate than by allying with other candidates to block him. If Trump were to become president, Cruz would then be in a position to enjoy considerable influence within the Republican Party; in the much more likely scenario of a Trump defeat, Cruz could run for the presidency again in 2020 with his anti-Washington credentials intact, appealing to purist conservatives and ex-Trump supporters alike.
It is thus unsurprising that Cruz himself has publicly disavowed the idea of playing for a contested convention. As he told CPAC this weekend, “Any time you hear someone talking about a brokered convention, it is the Washington establishment in a fevered frenzy. They’re really frustrated because all of their chosen candidates, all of the golden children, the voters keep rejecting. And so they’ve seized on this master plan: we go to a brokered convention and the D.C. power brokers will drop someone in who is exactly to the liking of the Washington establishment. If that would happen, we will have a manifest revolt on our hands all across this country.”
It is thus unsurprising that Cruz himself has publicly disavowed the idea of playing for a contested convention. As he told CPAC this weekend, “Any time you hear someone talking about a brokered convention, it is the Washington establishment in a fevered frenzy. They’re really frustrated because all of their chosen candidates, all of the golden children, the voters keep rejecting. And so they’ve seized on this master plan: we go to a brokered convention and the D.C. power brokers will drop someone in who is exactly to the liking of the Washington establishment. If that would happen, we will have a manifest revolt on our hands all across this country.”
These remarks did not appear to receive much attention in the press, but they indicate that the anti-Trump movement—which, to be accurate, is in some respects an anti-Trump-and-Cruz movement—faces odds of success that are quite long indeed. (They also suggest that Cruz may still maintain hopes of gaining a delegate plurality himself, in which case he would obviously demand the nomination as the choice of the Republican electorate.) Republicans might conceivably block Trump by quickly rallying around Cruz, though there seems to be little enthusiasm for doing so—and those who find neither candidate acceptable are unlikely to get their way in Cleveland.
Thursday, March 03, 2016
The Politics of Improvisation
Thanks to Donald Trump, we've entered a moment in American party politics in which actors and observers alike have lost their collective bearings almost everywhere you look. It's as if the American political community has been taken hostage and deposited in an unknown land where nobody has ever ventured. As some cast their eyes toward the horizon, squinting to make out familiar landmarks that might guide them back to safety, others have turned to more pressing matters of survival—simply trying to figure out how to make it through every day without being torn apart by hostile packs of hungry predators.
Such a situation will inevitably lead to wild swings of strategy, impulsive decision-making, and regular expressions of strong emotion. It's a politics of improvisation—nobody knows for sure what to do or what will happen, so they will do or say what seems appropriate for the moment, even if the swift parade of events soon contradicts their previous conclusions.
Elite Republicans, long complacent about the probability of a Trump nomination, have been jolted awake by the results of Super Tuesday. As I suggested yesterday, while the outcome of Tuesday's Republican primaries and caucuses decisively confirmed Trump's front-runner status, its most consequential effect was to virtually eviscerate Marco Rubio's chances of winning a national majority of delegates. With second-place candidate Ted Cruz remaining as an unpalatable alternative who has demonstrated significant weaknesses of his own in appealing to Republican voters outside the South, the party leadership is now effectively facing the prospect of a Trump nomination that may only be stopped by denying him an overall delegate majority and proceeding to a contested convention.
Mitt Romney's speech today was noteworthy not only for its argument that Trump was an unacceptable choice for the Republican nomination but also for explicitly endorsing an anybody-but-Trump approach that requires the continued presence of a multi-candidate opposition to hold Trump's delegate margins down across the electoral map. Romney suggested that no other single candidate can accrue a majority of delegates, and thus Trump cannot be stopped prior to the convention itself. (The Rubio and Kasich campaigns now appear to be proceeding under the same assumption.)
Note that this theory of the race directly contradicts the pre-Super Tuesday conventional wisdom, which held that Cruz and Kasich should both vamoose pronto so that Rubio could face down Trump one-on-one. But abrupt strategic reversals are a hallmark of the improvisational character of this political moment. If Trump is as formidable a threat to the Republican Party as his detractors believe, intellectual consistency is a luxury they cannot currently afford.
Cruz is caught in perhaps the most complex strategic dilemma. Does he, too, play the part assigned to him by Romney and the other anti-Trump Republicans, joining in the chorus of attacks against the front-runner with the goal of delaying the resolution of the contest until the convention? Or does he decide instead that a path forward remains for him in the primaries, if Rubio and Kasich can be dispatched from the race after March 15 losses in their home states of Florida and Ohio? In such an event, Cruz would be left as the lone active rival to Trump for the remaining three months of the primary season, and—even if he failed to win a majority of delegates himself—would no doubt claim that any convention bent on blocking a Trump nomination should rightfully turn to him as the party electorate's authorized second choice.
This much is clear: the nomination process is far too complex for anyone involved to claim mastery over its various provisions and dynamics. So the candidates, along with everyone else, are left to grope around as best they can in an increasingly unforgiving strategic environment.
Such a situation will inevitably lead to wild swings of strategy, impulsive decision-making, and regular expressions of strong emotion. It's a politics of improvisation—nobody knows for sure what to do or what will happen, so they will do or say what seems appropriate for the moment, even if the swift parade of events soon contradicts their previous conclusions.
Elite Republicans, long complacent about the probability of a Trump nomination, have been jolted awake by the results of Super Tuesday. As I suggested yesterday, while the outcome of Tuesday's Republican primaries and caucuses decisively confirmed Trump's front-runner status, its most consequential effect was to virtually eviscerate Marco Rubio's chances of winning a national majority of delegates. With second-place candidate Ted Cruz remaining as an unpalatable alternative who has demonstrated significant weaknesses of his own in appealing to Republican voters outside the South, the party leadership is now effectively facing the prospect of a Trump nomination that may only be stopped by denying him an overall delegate majority and proceeding to a contested convention.
Mitt Romney's speech today was noteworthy not only for its argument that Trump was an unacceptable choice for the Republican nomination but also for explicitly endorsing an anybody-but-Trump approach that requires the continued presence of a multi-candidate opposition to hold Trump's delegate margins down across the electoral map. Romney suggested that no other single candidate can accrue a majority of delegates, and thus Trump cannot be stopped prior to the convention itself. (The Rubio and Kasich campaigns now appear to be proceeding under the same assumption.)
Note that this theory of the race directly contradicts the pre-Super Tuesday conventional wisdom, which held that Cruz and Kasich should both vamoose pronto so that Rubio could face down Trump one-on-one. But abrupt strategic reversals are a hallmark of the improvisational character of this political moment. If Trump is as formidable a threat to the Republican Party as his detractors believe, intellectual consistency is a luxury they cannot currently afford.
Cruz is caught in perhaps the most complex strategic dilemma. Does he, too, play the part assigned to him by Romney and the other anti-Trump Republicans, joining in the chorus of attacks against the front-runner with the goal of delaying the resolution of the contest until the convention? Or does he decide instead that a path forward remains for him in the primaries, if Rubio and Kasich can be dispatched from the race after March 15 losses in their home states of Florida and Ohio? In such an event, Cruz would be left as the lone active rival to Trump for the remaining three months of the primary season, and—even if he failed to win a majority of delegates himself—would no doubt claim that any convention bent on blocking a Trump nomination should rightfully turn to him as the party electorate's authorized second choice.
This much is clear: the nomination process is far too complex for anyone involved to claim mastery over its various provisions and dynamics. So the candidates, along with everyone else, are left to grope around as best they can in an increasingly unforgiving strategic environment.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)