The Quiet Reinvention of Ted Cruz

It's hardly unusual for an incumbent politician to kick off a re-election campaign by producing a television ad recalling a past crisis when he provided both personal comfort and—even more importantly—public resources to his constituents in their moment of need. But when that politician is better known for taking symbolic stands on the floor of Congress than for working pragmatically with others to deliver material benefits to his home state, even a fairly ordinary 30-second spot seems like a window into a larger personal reinvention.

The politician in question is Texas senator Ted Cruz, who built a national reputation as a Tea Party-aligned conservative purist during the second term of the Obama presidency before running for president himself in 2016. Earlier this month, Cruz, now seeking a second term in the Senate, released his first positive campaign ad of the year, which emphasized his role in securing federal funds on behalf of the victims of Hurricane Harvey and featured video clips of the senator—not normally known as a touchy-feely type—embracing and holding the hands of disaster-afflicted citizens. The Cruz portrayed in the ad is indeed a fighter, but for the immediate interests of fellow Texans rather than for timeless ideological principles.

Cruz appears to have good reason to recast his public persona. Unlike other candidates like Bernie Sanders, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich, who returned home with their popularity intact after losing the 2016 nomination race, the elevated visibility that Cruz received by running for president damaged his reputation among Texas voters. According to University of Texas surveys, the proportion of state residents holding a favorable impression of Cruz peaked at 46 percent (compared to 34 percent reporting an unfavorable impression) in June 2014; by the end of his presidential candidacy two years later, Cruz's favorability rating had sunk to just 31 percent (versus 48 percent unfavorable).

Cruz seems to have enjoyed a bit of a rebound since then; the latest UT survey, from June 2018, gives him a 41 percent favorable rating and a 42 percent unfavorable rating. But that showing still places him in a potentially vulnerable position as he seeks re-election, even as a Republican incumbent in a Republican state. Indeed, multiple recent polls—including a survey released this afternoon by NBC News—have found Cruz with just a single-digit lead over his Democratic challenger, El Paso congressman Robert "Beto" O'Rourke, who is running an energetic and well-funded, if at times amateurish, campaign. Cruz is still clearly favored to win, but he can't simply coast to a second term—and even a narrow victory would represent an undeniable sign of political weakness, given the massive head start bestowed on any Republican by the strong partisan lean of the Texas electorate.

Buzzfeed's recent profile of O'Rourke revealed that the Democrat's campaign "proudly employs no pollsters or traditional consultants," which seems like a very odd thing to be proud of. Cruz, presumably, has not adopted such a policy. Indeed, the visible change in his public behavior since returning to the Senate from the presidential campaign trail two years ago suggests a deliberate shift in strategy informed by direct evidence of declining popularity back in his home state. Once best known for delivering floor speeches blasting the Republican leadership as sellouts to conservatism and for leading the right wing of his party into procedural confrontations on behalf of ideological causes, Cruz has been a fairly quiet senator for a while now. In some ways, the Cruz of the new TV spot, bringing home the federal bacon to Texas with a hug and a smile, is just the latest version of a personal reinvention that began even before O'Rourke emerged as a viable challenger.

Such a change of course may only confirm the suspicions of critics—like many of his eye-rolling Senate colleagues—who found Cruz's previous persona as a tireless defender of sacred principles to be merely the product of transparently insincere and self-serving calculation. But all politicians must change with the times or risk defeat. Lindsey Graham was once one of the fellow senators most frequently infuriated by Cruz's behavior, calling him "at his core . . . an opportunist" among many other pejoratives. Of course, Graham also trashed Donald Trump in the press for months, but has more recently become one of the president's golf partners. In politics, opportunism is less an occupational hazard than a virtual inevitability.

Cruz has ultimately found himself in the same place as many other Republicans, struggling to adapt to the massive changes that have occurred since Obama gave way to Trump—both within the Republican Party and in the larger political climate. Some Republican members of Congress, such as many of Cruz's former Capitol Hill allies in the House Freedom Caucus, have become enthusiastic supporters of their new party leader; a few others have voiced open criticism (usually on route to departure from office). But most Republican politicians have cautiously stayed in the middle, calibrating their words and actions to satisfy the conservative activist base without staking their own public reputation on Trump's behavior. Once an attention-grabbing insurgent within his party, Cruz has become one more Republican hoping to be among the survivors of the high winds whipped up by this season's political hurricane.

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.

Indiana Recap: We Have a Republican Nominee

1. The decisive victory by Donald Trump in the Indiana primary knocked Ted Cruz out of the race and confirmed Trump as the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee. The magnitude of Trump's victory compared to previous results in neighboring midwestern states suggests that he has gained popular momentum over the past month or so, which would have put him well within reach of a pledged delegate majority even if the margin in Indiana had been closer than it was. With Cruz departing the contest and John Kasich receiving an embarrassing 8 percent of the vote in a state adjacent to his own, Trump now faces an open path to a sweep of the remaining states on the primary calendar and an uncontested first-ballot victory at the national convention.

2. While he had previously declared that the Indiana results would be decisive, Cruz's exit in the immediate wake of his defeat was not universally expected. But Cruz, unlike Kasich, is young enough to consider seeking the presidency again in 2020 or thereafter. Staying in the race with little prospect of victory might only alienate Republicans whose support Cruz might wish to seek in a future contest. A guaranteed Trump nomination is also a better outcome for Cruz, in a strategic sense, than the possibility of an open convention throwing the nomination to an alternative compromise candidate. Trump will probably lose in the fall, and Cruz can run again in the future on the premise that the party suffered defeat by failing once again to nominate a true, principled conservative.

3. All the best evidence that can be brought to bear on the question indicates that Trump begins the general election with little probability of victory. Of course, dissenters will reply that few political experts foresaw Trump's nomination in the first place. But primaries are much more unpredictable than general elections, and Trump's political weaknesses are more vulnerable to attack by Democrats than by fellow Republicans. The complicated strategic dynamics of the multi-candidate Republican nomination race allowed Trump to escape being the target of a sustained negative campaign, but the Clinton campaign and allied Democratic groups will begin firing attacks in his direction immediately, hoping to "define" him quickly as an unacceptable candidate.

4. Yet a long campaign contains inevitable ups and downs in the standing of the candidates, as measured by public opinion surveys or as sensed by the political pundit class. Any signs of competitiveness or "tightening" will probably be heavily publicized by the segment of journalists who find stable races boring, are unimpressed with Hillary Clinton, and/or view Trump as having the potential to fundamentally reorder the electoral coalitions of the two parties. It is also clear that Trump is, in effect, judged by a different set of standards than other candidates; if Clinton or Obama or Mitt Romney had personally accused a rival candidate's father of associating with Lee Harvey Oswald based solely on a report by the National Enquirer, for example, it would be the biggest media story of the month and widely treated as a self-evidently disqualifying catastrophe. Expect much of the press to leap on any sign that Trump has become more "serious" or "presidential" over the course of the campaign—not because journalists are intentionally slanting coverage to favor Trump, but because change is always a better story than more of the same and "both sides do it" is often the default presumption.

5. We should not make too much of declarations from Republicans at this stage of the race that they will not vote for Trump in November. No doubt some disaffected partisans will indeed refuse to support him, though staying home or skipping over the presidential race on the ballot are both more likely forms of Republican protest than actually crossing party lines to vote for Clinton. But general election campaigns are usually effective at rallying partisans around their nominee—if only by reminding them of what they dislike about the opposition—and, unless Trump completely implodes, he is likely to gain the support of the vast majority of Republican identifiers who participate (with the possible exception of Republican Latinos, who may defect at higher rates). Even if Trump suffers a decisive defeat, this residual party loyalty will prevent the Democratic opposition from winning a double-digit victory in the popular vote or carrying more than 30–32 states. There is almost no chance of a true national landslide on the scale of 1964, 1972, or 1984 in today's highly partisan electoral environment—especially when the Democratic nominee is not particularly popular in her own right.

New York: Some Things We Learned Last Night

1. Donald Trump won the New York primary in a landslide, receiving about 60 percent of the popular vote and about 90 of the state's 95 Republican delegates. Trump undoubtedly benefited from a home-state advantage, but his performance bodes well for his chances in the five other northeastern states voting next Tuesday. Trump remains on track to flirt with an overall delegate majority by the end of the primary season in June.

2. Beyond the topline results, two additional developments represent good news for Trump. The first is Ted Cruz's poor performance. Cruz's brand of politics is not a natural fit for the Northeast, even among Republican voters, and he probably suffered from making a derogatory remark about "New York values" earlier in the race (perhaps not thinking ahead at the time). But the outcome in New York suggests that Cruz has not emerged as the main rival to Trump everywhere in the nation, and the fact that most of the remaining states on the calendar are located on the East and West coasts suggests that his campaign will face a serious challenge in consolidating the non-Trump vote and demonstrating positive "momentum" that might potentially impress Republican delegates weighing whether to throw the nomination to him over Trump.

3. Perhaps more importantly, Trump's victory speech departed from his signature cutting and bombastic style, lacking his usual tossed-off remarks belittling his Republican opponents. Some analysts have suggested that this new approach reflects a recent campaign shakeup in which nominal campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was unofficially supplanted by the more experienced Republican operative Paul Manafort. Trump's path to the nomination, still numerically unassured and perhaps hinging on the behavior of a pivotal bloc of unpledged delegates, will be smoothed considerably if he reduces the cloud of controversy surrounding his candidacy and signals a willingness to take advice from experienced campaign professionals.

In the past, the apparent emergence of a "kinder, gentler" Trump has been quickly reversed by a new eruption of slash-and-burn politics, so it is too soon to conclude that his speech marks a new strategic direction. Yet it is worth keeping an eye on his behavior in the coming weeks. At the very least, a more conciliatory Trump will dampen the energy within the party to organize a stop-Trump effort after the end of the primary season, which may allow him to claim the nomination even if he falls just short of a majority in pledged delegates. If a new, nicer style makes Trump's nomination more likely, however, it may not be in the interest of the Republican Party as a whole.

4. The Democratic race remains where it was before, with future nominee Hillary Clinton fending off a spirited but unsuccessful challenge from Bernie Sanders in New York, as she has done in the contest at large. Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver attracted some attention last night by suggesting on MSNBC that Sanders will remain as an active candidate all the way to the July convention, pressuring superdelegates along the way to deliver him the nomination even though he will fail to receive a majority of pledged delegates. I wouldn't make too much of this, though. All political campaigns insist that a path to victory remains in sight, no matter how long the odds, right up until the moment of concession. Ultimately, the decision about what to do after the primaries are over will rest with Sanders himself, and there is no reason to believe that he will necessarily continue to contest the race once the voting ends. Some Democrats are worried about lasting divisions in the party if Sanders does not immediately rally around Clinton, but experience demonstrates that wounds incurred during the nomination season will be a distant memory by the time that the November election occurs.

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.

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?

The State of the Race: Clinton vs. Sanders, Trump vs. Math

Since the night of the Iowa caucuses, the Democratic presidential nomination race has been a competition between two candidates: Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. The Republican contest, however, has now become a closely-matched battle between a single candidate, Donald Trump, and the number 1,237—a sum representing the delegate total that a Republican candidate needs to win in order to be nominated at the party’s national convention this July.

Last night’s primary elections in Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio clarified the status of both parties’ nomination races. On the Democratic side, Clinton’s victories in all five states, including a 2-to-1 popular margin over Sanders in Florida, gave her a virtually insurmountable lead in the national delegate count. Sanders will presumably fight on into the spring, but his campaign cannot realistically overtake Clinton’s numerical advantage among pledged delegates—and he is even further behind when the heavily pro-Clinton population of superdelegates is added to the arithmetic.

For the Republicans, Tuesday’s election results extended Trump’s lead over the other remaining candidates who nominally represent his political competition. Even more importantly, however, they increased the probability that he will prevail over what now looms as his most formidable opponent: the requirement that presidential nominees win an overall majority of delegates.

Trump benefited from a Republican party rule that allows states voting or after March 15 to allocate delegates to candidates via non-proportional formulas. (In contrast, the Democratic National Committee imposes a uniform proportionality requirement on all state primaries and caucuses.) His decisive victory in Florida received particular attention in the news media for ending the presidential candidacy of Marco Rubio, who was favored by many Republican leaders and campaign professionals. But it was also noteworthy for significantly bolstering Trump’s position in the delegate hunt, since the state awards all 99 of its delegates to the winner of the statewide popular vote.

In Illinois and Missouri, most Republican delegates are allocated in a winner-take-all fashion at the level of individual congressional districts. This procedure also favored Trump, who tends to attract a broadly-distributed geographic base of support. Trump received 41 percent of the statewide popular vote in Missouri—edging out rival candidate Ted Cruz by less than 2,000 votes—and 39 percent in Illinois, but appears to have accumulated as much as three-quarters of the delegates from both states.

Trump lost Ohio, and its 66 delegates, to John Kasich, but even in defeat the news was not all bad for the front-runner. Kasich had indicated that he would fold his campaign if he lost his home state, but the results in Ohio keep him in the race for now. Kasich’s continued presence as an active candidate will reduce the share of delegates won by Trump in upcoming state primaries that continue to employ proportional allocation formulas, but the likelihood that Kasich and Cruz split the anti-Trump vote may allow Trump to gain substantial numbers of delegates from the larger number of winner-take-all states even if he falls short of an overall popular majority. In any event, the delegate allocation rules from this point forward provide the leading candidate with a clear structural advantage; as long as Trump keeps winning states, he will receive a disproportionate share of the remaining delegates.

It is yet impossible to predict with certainty whether or not Trump will succeed in reaching the magic number of 1,237 delegates by the end of the primary season, which is still nearly three months away. But Tuesday’s results virtually ensure that Trump will at least come close to that milestone—absent a spectacular and unprecedented collapse in his popular support—and will be able to claim more state-level victories, more popular votes, and more delegates won than any other Republican presidential candidate.

Trump has made it clear that he will demand the nomination even if he only achieves a plurality, arguing at the March 10 debate in Miami that “whoever gets the most delegates should win.” But the members of the Republican Party who cannot accommodate themselves to the Trump candidacy—a faction led unofficially by 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney—have staked their hopes on stopping Trump short of a majority and maneuvering in a contested convention to award the nomination to somebody else.

This plan has always faced significant obstacles, from the inherent difficulties in coordination among a large population of party officials and delegates to the certainty of outraged protest not only by Trump but also by Cruz, the probable second-place finisher in the delegate race, who is unlikely to represent the Republican leadership’s favored alternative prospective nominee. But perhaps the most powerful force working against the stop-Trump movement is the widely-accepted norm of democratic legitimacy awarded to the leading candidate in an electoral competition. Even the recipient of a mere plurality can claim to be the people’s choice, at least in comparison to any other single individual, and Trump, as a near-certainty to place first in the delegate count, will surely do so with no little vehemence.

Tuesday’s results indicate that Trump could well achieve an outright majority of delegates by the end of the primary calendar—and will otherwise fall short by a relatively modest margin. Republicans dedicated to blocking his ascent must not only mobilize to develop a procedural plan to take control of the nomination process on the inside, but must also begin to persuade the American public that denying the prize to the leading Republican candidate is not an unfair and illegitimate use of power by party elites. Otherwise, the conflict and rancor that we have seen so far in this campaign will pale in comparison to what lies ahead.

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.

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?

The Republican Race After Super Tuesday II

By a staggering coincidence, the logic behind the stop-Trump forces in the Republican Party abruptly shifted from pushing to narrow the competition (in order to concentrate the anti-Trump vote behind a single alternative) to tolerating, and even encouraging, a multi-candidate field immediately after last Tuesday—just at the point when it became clear that Ted Cruz, not Marco Rubio, was best positioned to be the only plausible non-Trump nominee. Over the past week, anti-Trump Republicans, led by Mitt Romney, have indulged in the comforting idea that Cruz, Rubio, and John Kasich would join together with a strategically savvy anti-Trump electorate to form an A-Team dedicated to defeating Trump on multiple fronts in multiple states, denying him a first-ballot delegate majority and allowing the convention to throw the nomination to Rubio, Romney, Paul Ryan, or some other hero of the Republican elite class.

This scheme, though not impossible, has many under-acknowledged deficiencies—not the least of which is that Cruz has no incentive to play along unless he is assured of getting the nomination himself. But last night's primary and caucus results in four states show how it can backfire even as an electoral strategy. The problem is that Rubio and Kasich are such weak candidates that they cannot reliably attract enough votes to place above most states' minimum threshold for winning delegates (usually 15 or 20 percent of the total popular vote in the state). For example, Rubio received 16 percent of the vote in Idaho, 9 percent in Michigan, and 5 percent in Mississippi—netting zero delegates in all three states. Kasich won 24 percent of the Michigan vote (and received 17 delegates there), but won just 9 percent of the Mississippi vote and 7 percent in Idaho.

The continued presence of Rubio and Kasich in the race thus drains anti-Trump votes away from Cruz without denying Trump significant numbers of delegates. There is no evidence that either Rubio or Kasich can actually defeat Trump in any upcoming states except their own home states of Florida and Ohio (and perhaps not even there). Normally, presidential candidates who had achieved either one victory (Rubio) or none (Kasich) over 23 state primaries and caucuses would not still be running active campaigns. But the lure of playing kingmaker (or, better yet, being crowned themselves) at a contested convention has prompted them to soldier on instead, encouraged by Romney and other members of the "Never Trump" brigade.

Despite a lot of hype (perhaps inspired by wishful thinking), it seems that Trump's losses over the weekend in Kansas and Maine (and narrower-than-expected victories in Kentucky and Louisiana) did not reflect a broader decline in his electoral support. A national poll released yesterday had also given heart to Trump's opponents by suggesting that the race was tightly bunched among the four remaining contenders, especially in the states that have not yet held Republican primaries. But the actual election results, both last night and previously, are impossible to reconcile with the results of the survey. Trump may have sufficiently limited appeal to be vulnerable to defeat in a one-on-one race, but he holds a clear and geographically broad advantage in the current four-candidate field, with no sign of imminent collapse.

The biggest change in the Republican race over the past two weeks has been a notable increase in popular support for Ted Cruz, who not only achieved his seventh state-level victory last night by winning the Idaho primary but also placed second to Trump in the three other states, finishing far ahead of Rubio everywhere and even farther ahead of Kasich everywhere but Michigan. But Cruz is unlikely to benefit from strong elite support, at least not soon enough to make much difference. (A Politico story today is headlined "GOP Establishment Creeps Toward Cruz," but the fact that 60 percent of the total number of Republican delegates will have been awarded by this time next week would seem to suggest that a faster means of locomotion might be more appropriate.)

The unacceptability of Cruz as a Trump alternative has done much to power Republican regulars' contested-convention daydream machine; note how David Brooks reassured his readers yesterday that "it's not too late" to stop Trump while simultaneously recommending that Cruz's advances be spurned as if he were a seedy barfly at last call. "Hit the pause button on the rush to Cruz," admonished Brooks, preferring "another path" that "doesn't leave you self-loathing in the morning"—to wit, the Romney A-Team strategy that has only seemed so far to benefit Trump.

If Trump wins the nomination and turns out to be such a cataclysmic disaster that he causes a down-ballot implosion and fatally damages the image of the Republican Party for years among Latinos and other racial minorities, future historians will wonder why Republican officials and thought leaders didn't rally around the strongest alternative candidate while there was still time. Brooks's column, and others like it, will be of immense scholarly value in explaining why.

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."

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.”

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.

Super Saturday: Some Things We Learned Last Night

1. One of the most difficult tasks for analysts of election campaigns is distinguishing true turning points in the race from mere temporary bends in the road. It is tempting to view every new event as an example of the former—hence the media's addiction to the endless proclamation of "game-changing" developments—while most turn out, in retrospect, to be the latter.

If we are feeling particularly adventuresome, we might view Saturday's election returns as a notable shift in momentum. Ted Cruz unexpectedly won the Kansas and Maine caucuses by double-digit margins while placing a close second to Donald Trump in Kentucky and Louisiana. The perception of a surging Cruz was further bolstered by the Louisiana results themselves, in which a large Trump advantage in early and absentee voting was steadily eroded over the course of the evening as Election Day ballots were counted. Trump hung on for a three-point victory, but the near-miss suggested that he had been damaged by recent events—perhaps the bizarre Thursday debate?—and the media treated Cruz as the de facto winning candidate of the day.

With Marco Rubio and John Kasich trailing far behind Trump and Cruz in all four states, one could interpret Saturday's results as setting up a two-person race between a newly vulnerable front-runner and a hard-charging second-place candidate—a familiar trope for journalists. The prospect of Cruz, widely detested by Republican Party regulars in Washington, as representing the sole remaining plausible vehicle for the stop-Trump movement also adds an irresistible dramatic wrinkle to the scenario, which will undoubtedly provide journalists with plenty of fodder for choose-your-poison challenges to party leaders in the coming days—if everyone can even hear themselves speak over the gleeful chortling of schadenfreude-afflicted Democrats.

2. But the "Cruz surge" story runs the risk of over-interpreting yesterday's outcome while failing to recognize that most events do not, as it were, change the game. Squinting at the results from another direction, we might conclude that the states voting last night, with the possible exception of Maine, should always have been friendly territory for any Cruz campaign that had pretensions to national viability. Rather than treat the Cruz candidacy as a newly-energized electoral juggernaut, a skeptical observer might point out that Cruz still lost two more southern states on Saturday—one of which abuts his own home base of Texas—and faces much less welcoming territory from this point forward (since few caucuses or southern primaries remain on the calendar).

If Cruz is going to establish himself as a bona fide challenger to Trump's front-runner status, he needs to perform equally well in a metropolitan state primary outside the South. Perhaps the contest will indeed narrow to a two-man race and he will demonstrate the ability to compete with Trump in states like Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. Until then, there is little reason to believe that his improved electoral fortune is seriously threatening Trump's dominant position.

3. Rubio's rather dismal showing, in contrast, is difficult to dispute. Though the cause is not quite clear, he has faded badly as a candidate over the past week. His campaign appears to be directing its time and resources toward a final stand in his home-state Florida primary on March 15, which means that he is likely to suffer further decisive losses in the eight other states voting prior to or on that date. With an overall majority virtually out of reach (Rubio would need to capture 70 percent of the remaining delegates to win a first-ballot nomination), he now seeks merely to rack up enough delegates to force a deadlocked convention and guarantee himself a role to play in deciding the nominee. This is a long shot, though perhaps one worth taking under the circumstances.

4. The Democratic race continues to mosey along with little drama. Sanders holds a clear advantage in caucuses and rural areas outside the South, though the Clinton campaign—learning from its mistakes in 2008—managed to hold down his delegate margins sufficiently in these constituencies to prevent him from cutting into her numerical advantage nationwide. The race may tighten a bit once Clinton's regional base in the South is done voting on March 15, but Clinton has built a virtually insurmountable lead in delegates, and Sanders will be forced at some point in the near future to acknowledge the unforgiving reality of the arithmetic. He will probably remain an active candidate for the remainder of the primary calendar, but risks being viewed as a spoiler if he continues to attack her directly after the race has been effectively decided.

Debate Recap: How's "Never Trump" Supposed to Work?

The Republican presidential debate held last night in Detroit will be remembered most for the moment that the front-runner for the presidential nomination of a major American political party made reference to....well, you already know if you're reading this. But it also revealed the difficulties that the anti-Trump faction of the Republican Party face in preventing Trump's nomination, even as Trump himself was knocked around by a sustained blast of attacks from fellow candidates and Fox News moderators alike.

Now that the field has narrowed to four remaining contenders, each candidate receives enough debate time to establish his distinct political persona. Trump, of course, is already well-defined and sui generis. Marco Rubio is the candidate of the Republican Party regulars—ideological conservatives who are also mindful of team spirit and electability. Ted Cruz is the leader of the conservative purists who are frustrated with the institutional leadership of the Republican Party, especially in Congress, for failing to engineer a conservative policy revolution during the Obama presidency. John Kasich is the chief spokesman for can't-we-all-get-along Republicans who are tired of conflict and intra-party attacks.

Each of the remaining three non-Trump candidates personifies a different case against Trump, ably expressed in their rhetoric last night. According to Rubio, Trump's main flaw is that he's a charlatan who lacks moral character and exhibits serious flaws that will make him a weak general-election candidate. According to Cruz, Trump is primarily unacceptable on ideological grounds—he's a phony conservative who once supported Democrats and can't be trusted to respect right-wing principles. For Kasich, Trump's main deficiency is his slashing style and tone, though Kasich hewed to a "nice guy" strategy by contrasting himself with the front-runner implicitly rather than attacking him openly.

Republican Party voters are thus being presented with a diverse set of grounds for expressing opposition to Trump. In theory, this fits well with a stop-Trump effort within the GOP that has moved from anointing a single non-Trump alternative to simply trying to block his first-ballot nomination at the Republican convention. Perhaps, the thinking goes, three different flavors of anti-Trumpism are better than one at keeping him from winning the delegates he needs for a majority.

But the debate also illustrated the limitations of this strategy. It's difficult to rally Republican voters, activists, and donors around three different candidates at once. No single anti-Trump can dominate the debate or the ensuing media coverage as long as the attention focuses mainly on Trump and is otherwise divided three ways. While most of the delegates will be chosen by the middle of March, the nomination process itself stretches on for three more months; is it really plausible that more than one non-Trump candidate can survive in the race until June?

The more likely eventuality is that the field will narrow further after March 15, when both Rubio and Kasich are in danger of losing their home states. The anti-Trump sentiment in the party will become more concentrated, perhaps with Ted Cruz as its only remaining vessel in the primaries, but the delegate arithmetic will become even more daunting. Unless there is an earthquake-level change in the race, it seems clear that this election is headed straight in the direction of Trump Tower.

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.

Super Tuesday: Some Things We Learned Last Night

1. The media coverage of last night's results focused on Donald Trump's seven state-level victories, but the more important story is the delegate count. Trump did well there too, of course. But the absolute pasting taken by Marco Rubio is possibly just as consequential. By my reckoning, Rubio got about 22 percent of the total popular vote but only 16 percent of the delegates awarded on Tuesday—while Ted Cruz turned 30 percent of the vote into 37 percent of the delegates, thanks to allocation rules in Texas that were particularly favorable to him and a series of first- and second-place finishes in the other southern states. (Trump won about 35 percent of the vote and 43 percent of the delegates.)

2. Rubio now lags Trump in the overall delegate count by more than 200 (336 to 113, according to FiveThirtyEight this afternoon) with 1,237 needed for the nomination. Even if he were to place first in winner-take-all Florida on March 15—by far his best opportunity to gain a large net haul of delegates all at once—he would make up less than half of this gap. The plausible path forward for him is vanishing quickly. However, he will be encouraged to stay in the race by ABCD Republicans ("Anybody But Cruz or Donald") in hopes of a miracle—or at least a contested convention.

3. Cruz, with 234 delegates, is now closer to Trump in the delegate count than Rubio is to him. However, his position is currently inflated by a home-state effect that cannot be replicated in future primaries, and few prominent Republicans are enthusiastic about attempting to rally around Cruz to block Trump. Such an effort might not work anyway; Cruz has yet to demonstrate significant appeal among Republican electorates outside of southern or rural constituencies. He is ill-suited to compete for most of the remaining large delegate prizes on the calendar: California, New York, Illinois. As the second-place candidate, Cruz has no reason to drop out either at this point, but where does he go from here to get 1,000 more delegates?

4. Some ABCD Republicans can't seem to decide whether it's better for their cause for the anti-Trump faction to be divided or unified now that the goal is shifting from defeating Trump outright in the primaries to merely denying him a first-ballot majority at the national convention. A divided field might keep Trump's delegate count below a majority in states with proportional allocation of delegates, but might also make it easier for him to place first with a plurality in winner-take-all states. This is a legitimate dilemma from a formal strategic standpoint (though it's academic in a sense, given the limited ability of party leaders to control the candidates), but has an unmistakable whiff of denial about it politically, feeling like an intermediate stage before final acknowledgement of Trump's dominant position.

5. Surely the most ignored story of the night was Hillary Clinton's smashing popular success, especially in a series of southern states where her electoral margins resembled those received by a popular incumbent officeholder facing a no-name primary challenger. To some degree, this was understandable; the Republican race is more of a "story" in the eyes of the press and public alike. But it also reflects a strain of media punditry that can be summarized as "nothing good ever happens to Hillary Clinton."

Case in point: though Clinton has been the prohibitive favorite on the Democratic side from the beginning and won the South Carolina primary by 47 points, Jake Tapper of CNN opined on Saturday that the Democratic race was actually more competitive than the Republican race. If that were actually true, of course, Clinton's lopsided victories yesterday should have been the big surprise of the evening. Instead, however, they were largely underplayed when not ignored entirely; somebody (it might have been Tapper again) said on CNN last night that the results were good for both candidates—thus revealing an, uh, "innovative" understanding of how two-person races actually work.

6. Relatedly, the media discussion surrounding the Trump phenomenon contains a healthy dose of "better watch out, Democrats!" that is undoubtedly bolstered further by Clinton's status as his presumptive general-election opponent. It's true that Trump's rise has so far defied predictions, and elements of his political message may prove popular in a general election, but let's not take this too far. If Trump is nominated and defeats Clinton in November, it will be under a scenario in which any other plausible Republican candidate would have done the same, while it's much easier to imagine a case in which Trump loses while a Kasich or Rubio might have won.

The Republican Party is on the verge of nominating a deeply flawed and unpopular presidential candidate while simultaneously tearing itself apart internally. The "hot take" that this is actually a bad thing for the Democrats seems forced, to say the least—and ignoring Trump's considerable deficiencies in a general election contest only undermines the anti-Trump case within the GOP at a time when many prominent Republican leaders and conservative commentators are trying to persuade their party's voters to abandon him. There is always uncertainty in politics, but that doesn't mean that anything is likely to happen. Let's be clear: the presidential ambitions of Hillary Clinton could hardly have been better served than they were by the results in both parties last night.

Debate Recap: A New Phase

The biggest development in last night's debate was that Donald Trump was treated like the front-runner he has become. Rather than fight among themselves to claim status as the #1 alternative to Trump while letting Trump himself off easy, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were much more aggressive in aiming fire at the race's leading candidate. Rubio in particular opened up new lines of attack on Trump, citing his previous employment of illegal immigrants, the foreign manufacture of his signature menswear, and the lawsuit in progress over "Trump University." Cruz mounted more familiar attacks on Trump from the ideological right, repeatedly portraying him as a phony conservative.

The change in approach reflected a new urgency in the Republican race, as the other candidates have suddenly realized that they can no longer wait for Trump to go away on his own. There is always risk in making attacks in a multi-candidate contest (John Kasich, who conspicuously declined to join in, obviously hopes to gain support from conflict-weary voters by remaining above the fray), but Cruz and Rubio have both concluded that Trump has become a serious threat to their candidacies. Though they may still view each other as one another's chief rival for votes, a Trump sweep over the next three delegate-rich weeks would put them both out of the running. At this stage, simply playing for time is a sensible strategy.

The collective joy expressed by the news media when Rubio went on the attack reveals the pent-up frustration within the political world with the lack of obstructions that have been placed between Trump and the nomination. But it will take more than one debate to derail Trump's candidacy. In fact, if both Rubio and Cruz turn out to benefit from the debate, the prospect that one of them will soon fold his campaign grows slightly dimmer, to Trump's strategic advantage. The race is by no means over, but the anti-Trump case will have to be made more forcefully—perhaps via some negative ads?—than it has so far.

Iowa: Some Things We Learned Last Night

1. Donald Trump clearly underperformed his poll numbers. Some have suggested that he was hurt by skipping the debate last week, but it's more likely that polls systematically overestimate his support, especially in low-turnout, organization-dependent caucus states. (And don't be misled by all the talk about record turnout—in comparative terms, the participation rate in the caucus was still much lower than in most primaries.)

2. The evangelical-vs.-non-evangelical divide was somewhat overstated going into Iowa. Cruz benefited from the evangelical vote, but did not win it overwhelmingly. Similarly, he was not as dominant in the western, Steve King-represented section of the state as expected, but made up for it by running surprisingly strongly in the eastern cities and suburbs.

3. Ethanol is no longer the "third rail" of Iowa politics. My guess is that American politics has become strongly nationalized in the era of the Internet, national media, and partisan polarization, reducing the electoral importance of parochial interests.

4. Rubio was smart to declare victory after running a close third, and will benefit in the national media from the perception that he's best positioned to actually win the nomination. The unresolved question is whether he gets a bigger media bounce from coming in third than Cruz does from placing first—particularly in the conservative media that most Republican primary voters consume. If so, he could be well-positioned in New Hampshire to consolidate much of the non-Trump vote.

5. There really isn't a "Paul wing" of the Republican Party.  Ron Paul won 10% in Iowa in 2008 and 21% in 2012, suggesting that there was a significant bloc of libertarian-minded, non-interventionist Republicans that might become established as an enduring faction within the GOP.  Rand Paul, though a senator, only got 4% this time.

6. Bernie Sanders is a very talented politician with an attractive message and manner in the eyes of many Democratic activists and voters. Though his chances of actually winning the nomination remain quite remote, it's very surprising in retrospect that he did not seek a national political profile before this election.

Debate Recap: Important Things That Went Unsaid

Last night's Republican debate was perhaps the least strategically interesting of the season, and not just because one of the more strategically interesting candidates declined to attend. With a few minor exceptions, the remaining candidates did not engage each other extensively, and the moderators frequently lobbed single questions at specific candidates before moving on without asking others to respond. Marco Rubio continues to be engaged in a two-front war with Ted Cruz on one side and Jeb Bush on the other, but that was already obvious before the debate (especially for those of us living in a media market that encompasses the state of New Hampshire; if you thought you'd never see an ad suggesting that Cruz was actually a closet socialist, prepare to be surprised).

One brief moment, however, struck me as revealing—not about any of the candidates in particular, but with respect to the Republican Party as a whole. Bret Baier asked Chris Christie about his plans to cut federal spending, noting that many Republicans promise to shrink the size of government on the campaign trail but fail to do so once elected. "Can you name even one thing that the federal government does now," Baier asked, "that it should not do at all?"

Christie adroitly chose to answer by pledging to eliminate federal funding of Planned Parenthood, a currently popular conservative objective, and responded to Baier's followup query of "anything bigger than that?" by arguing that nothing could be bigger than "thousands upon thousands upon thousands of children being murdered in the womb." But Baier's question raised perhaps the central chronic difficulty that Republican politicians face: how to fulfill conservative demands for a smaller, less onerous government without cutting programs and policies that most voters like, and Christie's answer did not fully address this dilemma. (Whatever the other merits of defunding Planned Parenthood, doing so will not itself balance the budget.)

Even Ted Cruz, who portrays himself as the conservative conscience of the Senate, responded to a subsequent Baier question about health care by sidestepping the issue of whether his plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act would deprive millions of Americans of the coverage expansion provided by the law. Cruz mentioned several conservative health care reform ideas—selling health insurance across state lines, expanding health savings accounts, severing insurance from employment—but policy experts do not believe that these measures would expand coverage to most of the citizens who gained insurance under the ACA. Cruz, too, recognizes the political dangers that lurk in committing oneself too explicitly to the revocation of existing government benefits.

It's too bad that this debate, just like most of the other Republican debates this year, devoted so little time to the issues of taxes, spending, health care, and other forms of domestic policy, given their centrality to the interests of voters and the actual responsibilities of the federal government. But if the current rise of ideological purism in the Republican Party is at least partially due to the gap between the ambitious campaign promises and modest governing record of GOP officeholders, the current set of candidates seems unlikely to resolve this tension by applying their general anti-government rhetoric to the specific government programs that constitute the bulk of the federal budget.

Is It Better to Try and Fail Than Not to Try at All? Not in Politics!

With apologies to my friends and colleagues in the Party Decides camp, you don't need a bunch of political scientists to tell you that most Republican leaders would rather see their party nominate someone other than Donald Trump for president. If the resiliency of a front-running Trump campaign is the shock of the year in American politics, surely the second-biggest surprise is the response of the Republican regulars—or rather, like the dog that didn't bark in the Sherlock Holmes mystery, the non-response. Trump seemingly represents a potentially serious threat to the party's interests in nearly every conceivable fashion, from his idiosyncratic policies to his controversial rhetoric to his debatable qualifications for the office he seeks. Yet Republican senators, governors, and other elected leaders have not collectively mobilized to counter Trump's ascent, even as the first events of the primary season rapidly approach.

The currently trendy interpretation of this apparent indifference to, or even acceptance of, Trump's rise is that it reflects Washington Republicans' white-hot hatred of Ted Cruz. Recent news stories like this one and this one, in which various Republican graybeards like Bob Dole, Trent Lott, and Rudy Giuliani express a preference for Trump over Cruz, have been treated as a remarkable indication of Cruz's unmatched unpopularity among party regulars and the dim view that they take of the Texan's chances in a general election—to the point that they regard the unknown quantity of Trump as worth the risk in comparison. Perhaps these figures view the nomination as already narrowing to a Trump-Cruz race and have reluctantly thrown in their lot with Trump as the lesser of two evils; more likely, they are merely trying to build Trump up temporarily in order to dispose of Cruz in Iowa and New Hampshire, ultimately increasing the odds of a more traditional nominee such as Rubio, Bush, or Christie.

But if Cruz were not in the race, or not a threat to win, would party regulars have already mounted a broad anti-Trump offensive? There are reasons to be skeptical. Veteran Republican officeholders have faced relentless attacks from the Tea Party and other rebellious purists over the past several years, absorbing considerable damage: the Republican speaker was pushed out of office, the House majority leader was defeated for renomination, fully one-third of the Republican senators who sought re-election between 2010 and 2014 were held to 60 percent of the vote or less in their state primaries (with three losing outright), and non-incumbent congressional candidates favored by national party organizations such as Mike Castle and Sue Lowden were upended by Tea Party opponents.

Republicans in Washington may feel as if they have enough trouble convincing GOP voters to support their own campaigns without attempting to influence the outcome of the presidential contest as well. And a failed intervention into presidential politics comes with a serious potential cost, risking future retribution from supporters of disfavored candidates—or even the candidates themselves. Moreover, while in other contexts it is rational to attempt to prevent a potentially disastrous event even if the chance of victory is low, most politicians do not like to risk looking ineffective by throwing their influence around unsuccessfully unless they believe that they will be rewarded for doing so. Regardless of what our parents may have told us, in politics it can be worse to try and fail than not to try at all.

In the roiling, chaotic state of the contemporary Republican Party, officeholders face more than the usual amount of risk in taking sides in internal disputes. Though one might assume that the viability of the Trump and Cruz candidacies would prompt party leaders to act immediately in order to attempt to steer the race to a superior rival, the proportion of top Republicans making formal candidate endorsements is lower this year than in elections past. If the race ultimately comes down to either Trump or Cruz against a more conventional alternative candidate, and if the alternative appears to have a serious chance of prevailing, we might see an coordinated effort at that stage by Republican members of Congress, governors, and other well-known figures to nudge the race in their favored direction. Until then, the risk-averse calculus of politics suggests that personal interests are often better served by staying on the sidelines, even if the result is a battle between Trump and Cruz or an unobstructed Trump march to the nomination.

A Trump-Cruz Race? Not If the Media Can Help It!

The unexpectedly stubborn persistence of Donald Trump's lead in polls of Republican voters—both nationally and in virtually every state except Iowa, including New Hampshire—has begun to produce a perceptible change in the news media's coverage of the presidential horse race. While most analysts still don't believe that Trump will actually be nominated, the conventional wisdom has started to coalesce behind the notion that the competition will ultimately narrow to a two-candidate race in which Trump is one of the remaining contenders. At that point, whether because Trump finally reaches a limit to his appeal or because the entire Republican institutional apparatus mobilizes furiously to stop him, the remaining viable non-Trump candidate will, supposedly, be in good position to consolidate enough support to outdistance Trump in the delegate count.

Ted Cruz has been gaining over the past two months or so in national polls and, crucially, in Iowa, which is favorable terrain for his candidacy and probably a must-win state for him.  More than at any other point in the race so far, Cruz now looks like a serious contender for the Republican nomination. The prospect of the Republican professional and organizational leadership, which almost uniformly detests Cruz personally and views him as ballot-box poison in a general election, being forced to gamely fall in line behind the Texas senator in a desperate attempt to block an even more unthinkable Trump nomination has simultaneously led to expressions of horror among pragmatic conservatives on the right and outright chortling among some observers on the left.

There are reasons to conclude, however, that the race will not easily evolve into a showdown between Trump and Cruz. One important factor is the role of the news media in interpreting the results of early state contests. Candidates deemed to have "exceeded expectations" in Iowa and New Hampshire tend to gain a burst of positive media coverage that inflates their popularity in the next states to vote, even if they do not win outright (examples include George McGovern in 1972, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Gary Hart in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1992, John Kerry in 2004, and Barack Obama in 2008). Would-be nominees benefit from looking as if their campaigns are gaining momentum, which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if the media are giving them large helpings of positive coverage just as voters in subsequent states are tuning into the race and making up their minds.

It's fair to say that most members of the political media are uncomfortable, at best, with the prospect of a two-man race between Trump and Cruz. For the center-left mainstream press, both candidates are highly objectionable on grounds of policy, rhetoric, qualification, character, or all of the above. For much of the conservative media (Fox News in particular), as well as the Republican consultant class that influences Washington-based interpretations of Republican politics, a Trump-Cruz race is like being asked to select one of two passenger cabins on the Titanic. Even if they don't intentionally slant their coverage to attempt to influence the outcome, many journalists and commentators will be unconsciously open to any evidence that a third candidate remains viable and is gaining strength.

Let's say, for example, that Marco Rubio places third in Iowa, behind Cruz and Trump, with 18 percent of the vote. This was Howard Dean's showing in 2004, and was widely deemed such a disappointment that it proved fatal to Dean's campaign. In today's context, though, I think a large share of both the conservative and mainstream media would choose to interpret Rubio's performance in a very positive light. Stories about how Rubio was starting to catch on would start to appear. Voters in New Hampshire and other states would be told that Rubio was gaining traction. He and his campaign staff would suddenly receive a lot of Fox News bookings. Pundits would openly breathe sighs of relief that someone had appeared in time to save the Republican Party from itself. In such an environment, it's easy to see how Rubio could benefit more from coming in third than Cruz could from winning Iowa—especially if Cruz's margin of victory is smaller than the pre-caucus polls predict, thus failing to meet expectations.

None of this is guaranteed—Rubio has to put together an effective campaign to be in position to capitalize on any potential advantage, and the latest round of warnings about the health of his campaign organization are worth paying attention to. But the fact remains that a lot of people with direct access to voters' eyes and ears will be rooting against a Trump-Cruz race early next year, and will be quite likely to reward any other plausible nominees by advancing a generous interpretation of their electoral performance.