Things have changed since my last post on this. Last time, I thought it was relatively certain that Trump would be the Republican US Presidential nominee. I am not so sure now. First, we had Mitt Romney’s extraordinary, unprecedented excoriation of Trump. Then we had that unheard of event: the Trump gaffe machine gun finally fired a round which rebounded on him – I refer to his rapidly recounted suggestion that women who have abortions should be punished (which, lest we forget, was followed by a casual grunt to confirm that he thought it inconceivable that the men involved should even be considered for equal treatment).
The maths behind the Republican nomination race is interesting. What appears to be happening, is that, as the field narrowed from Snow White, the seven dwarves, Uncle Tom Cobbly and all down to just three candidates, Trump has carried on getting about forty percent of the vote in states where he needs more. In other words, he has reached a ceiling which is just not high enough for him to sew up the Republican nomination before the national convention. His Waterloo, in retrospect, may turn out to have been Wisconsin. It’s a state where they make a lot of cheese and a lot of people of Norwegian descent live. Those canny Scandinavians were having none of Trump.
And indeed, Trump is exceptionally unpopular across the US populace. But he has managed to do fantastically well by running, interestingly, an “insurgent’s” campaign where he “ripped up the playbook”. If you’re interested, I would encourage you to read this article in New York Magazine, which describes the Trump campaign at length. I love this bit:
I was well aware that Trump runs a bare-bones operation, but college-newspaper offices have more robust infrastructure than his national campaign headquarters—to say nothing of Hillary Clinton’s 80,000-square-foot headquarters in Brooklyn Heights.
One of the article’s conclusions was interesting:
One explanation for all this raggedness is that the Trump team is simply burned out. People who know Trump say they’ve never seen him so tired.
Ted Cruz has stashed away enough delegates for the convention, so that it seems Trump could be stopped. It looks increasingly unlikely that Trump will win enough delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot at Quicken Loans Arena, Ohio. Then delegates become “unbound” and anything could happen. But those couple of sentences don’t do full justice to the labyrinthine, amorphous, shape-shifting beast known as “the Republic convention rule book”.
Ted Cruz also seems to have the edge in getting his delegates on the slates for key states. In the last few days, Trump has been outmanoevred in Indiana, before a vote has been cast in their primaries. In addition, CNN reports:
…the Texas senator is dominating the complex, behind-the-scenes race for delegates at state conventions like the recent one in North Dakota. Colorado’s state convention appears to be following that pattern.
It’ll get extremely messy. Trump won’t go quietly. I give you Roger Stone – practictioner of the Black Arts of politics, who worked on the Re-elect Richard Nixon campaign (see Watergate). He’s a Trump ally or “surrogate”. He’s threatening to disclose the hotels and room numbers of delegates who help to nobble Trump’s chances. He’s also threatening that Donald Trump will go round to some of those rooms with his “hairdryer”. All this nonsense will send the Republican party into even more turmoil. The whole Tea Party rump will feel, if it’s possible, even more angry. It won’t end prettily. Some form of schism or civil war seems likely.
By the way, if you’re tempted to sign an open Guardian-advertised letter about Trump, don’t even think about. Remember Operation Clark County?
* Paul Walter is a Liberal Democrat activist and member of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.
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14 Comments
Yes but who will save the world from Ted Cruz? The problem with the endless focus on Donald Trump, aside from the obvious one that it is once again really the media focusing on itself through the cults of celebrity and outrage, is the lack of scrutiny of the other candidates. The real problem for the democrats and arguably for the world is that Hilary Clinton isn’t really trusted or that popular and could well be beaten by Cruz or Trump.
If people think Trump is bad, we ain’t seen nothing yet with Ted Cruz…
Glenn,
If either Trump or Cruz were to beat Mrs Clinton, I really would believe that the world’s only superpower (just) had finally gone bonkers. Now, if a new republican candidate were to be found (the smart money appears to be going on Paul Ryan), we might be in a whole different ball game.
But if it isn’t Trump it’s Cruz. And Cruz is – if anything – a worse prospect than Trump. Fivethirtyeight recently had a graph that showed his positions put him well to the right of Barry Goldwater.
More alarmingly, while Trump is handily beaten by Clinton in national opinion polls (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_presidential_race.html) she is in a virtual dead heat with Cruz and some way behind the (comparatively) moderate Kasich – who might be a good outside bet in the event of a brokered convention as everyone’s second choice.
There’s a part of me that really hopes Trump wins the Republican nomination simply because I am so utterly horrified by the thought of Cruz coming to power.
Nightmare. Cruz or Trump running the USA and Boris leading the UK out of Europe.
Our children will never forgive us.
We’ll still be in Europe. We’re not about to float off into the mid-Atlantic.
Alderman Beckett,
“Our children will never forgive us.” Nor will we forgive them if they don’t go out and vote on 23 June!
Vote Bernie for the best chance to beat Trump and the best chance to get a radical agenda.
@David Raw – well, yes. That would be the obvious solution as the polling I link above shows (across many polls) that Sanders easily beats all of the Republican contenders. He is also now clearly making significant progress in Latino and African-American communities where Clinton dominated a few months ago.
But the Democratic establishment has decided that Clinton will be the candidate and that seems to be all there is to it. It is now looking increasingly unlikely that she will reach the nomination threshold with pledged delegates by the time of the convention and so will be dependent upon super delegates to tip her over the winning line.
Perhaps before casting their votes those super delegates would be wise to look at the graph of Mrs. Clinton’s favourability rating across hundreds of recent polls: http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/hillary-clinton-favorable-rating and to ponder the significance of that point of inflexion which happens immediately after the Benghazi attack.
I always thought democracy was one vote per person. If most of the people voted as individuals for candidates I think Trump would have long ago disappeared. The US system to me is not a truly democratic one.
Hillary voted for war against Iraq. She singlehandedly got the US (along with the UK and France) bombing Libya. She laughed psychotically when told of Ghadaffi’s death – “We came, we saw, he died.” She gets paid vasts sums for speeches to Goldman Sachs but won’t release the transcripts of what she said.
There’s an awful lot of hand wringing on this forum about”BAME” issues. You don’t seem to be aware that Hillary Clinton was one of those behind the Clinton Crime Bill of the 1990s which began the truly mass incarceration of black men. She called them “superv predators.” in justification. Black Lives Matter confronted Clinton over her words and she laughed them off.
I think Hillary is far worse than Trump on the issue of war. Given her record in the Senate and at the State Department she is likely to get embroiled in some sort of conflict with a nuclear armed Russia. Believe me, whatever your view of Putin, that’s not something you want.
The best thing that could happen in the election is if a new and popular and exciting and mainstream candidate threw their hat in the ring on either side , it is the worst race ever, Romney is a liberal compared to any of the Republicans and really even next to Clinton is only a bit to the right , and in office as Governor was barely that !
Matt Damon for president ?He does not want to .Which is why he would be good !
I think that the people writing off Donald Trump may be making the same mistake again. The last poll I saw in New York has him at 55% with a +/- at 4.5% in terms of margin of error. Trump is way ahead in his home state of New York with Ted Cruz back in third place. The other big prize of California currently has Trump out in front although Cruz’s camp may think that they can do better there. .
It is true that Ted Cruz has the better campaign organisation and it’s also true that Cruz has had a good few weeks. But I would still expect that to change when Donald Trump wins New York which looks likely. Ted Cruz is being especially competitive in the caucus states as is Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side. In the big primaries though, Cruz is not winning (other than his home state of Texas and the success in Wisconsin).
If Trump gets the most delegates, the party would be seriously underestimating the venom within their own electorate if they are to attempt to scupper Donald Trump, should he be leading.
The establishment of the party has tried repeatedly and failed to get their preferred nominee. As Trump said himself, Florida was changed to ‘winner take all’ in the hope of Jeb Bush gaining all of the delegates back before the process began. That didn’t work. Donald Trump has bested Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker who were all loved by the establishment wing of the party. It is hard to believe that at this stage Ted Cruz is going to stop him.
The danger is an apathetic electorate in November. With someone as polarising as Hillary Clinton potentially becoming the Democratic nominee, a Trump presidency could be a more realistic possibility than people would care to imagine. Such a choice between Trump and Clinton is a horrible one to make. Uninspiring, lets say.
Ted Cruz is not loved by the establishment wing of the Republican party to clarify my post but it’s also fair to say that the brass are now hedging their bets on ‘the outsider.’ Which poses the question when people such as Jeb Bush and Scott Walker are backing you, is Ted Cruz still much of an outsider?