The Case for Cruz, #2
Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog
So first a round-up from last night. On the Democratic side, Sanders beat Hillary in Michigan, which was festive. On the Republican side, there were four states in play. Trump won three of them, while Cruz took Idaho. More relevant to the immediate discussion was the fact that Cruz took second place in Michigan, which was next door to Ohio, supposedly Kasich country. He also took a strong second in Mississippi. In other words, when it comes to delegate counts, both Trump and Cruz had good nights. For Rubio, it was just good night.
Here is the math. The Republican nominee needs 1,237 delegates to be elected on the first ballot at the convention. After last night, Trump is 779 shy of that goal. Cruz is only 878 short. Trump has 458 delegates and Cruz has 359, just 99 behind him. That is a gap that Cruz can readily make up, provided we keep the following in mind.
1. Note that the Rubio and Kasich strategies are necessarily aiming for a brokered convention.
This in effect makes them spoiler candidates, dog-in-the-manger candidates. If Rubio takes his home state of Florida next week, and Kasich takes Ohio, they are both still way behind. In other words, the best case scenario leaves both of them barely alive. And even if by doing this they were successful in keeping Trump from crossing the finish line, does Rubio honestly think that a brokered convention would give the nomination to the man who came in at a distant third?
2. In contrast, Cruz is aiming for a clean win in the primaries themselves. Last night I heard one commentator say that because Cruz was making a strong play for Florida, simply to deny Rubio a win in his winner-take-all home state, he was being “dastardly.” But as another commentator noted, “this ain’t beanbag,” and I would argue that since Rubio has not been willing to face up to his #NeverTrump duty, Cruz needs to make him face up to it. This needs to be a two-man race, asapronto. The sooner it is a Trump/Cruz race, the more likely it is that Trump will be denied by someone who is fighting him fair and square. If Trump loses fairly, he has no plausible ground for a spoiler third party run, and if his ego makes him attempt it anyway, he could conceivably be challenged and defeated on that ground. But if Trump is sneeveled out of something that was arguably his (e.g. he was leading the delegate count because of Rubio and Kasich), then a spoiler campaign from him would have that much more energy.
3. Apart from the 1,237, and apart from any attempted shenanigans at the convention, we have to face up to the need to do something about all the people who have joined up with Trump, along with their reasons for doing so. Where can they go? Could they conceivably go to Cruz? Yes, I believe so, because they would be moving from an inarticulate protest movement to an articulate protest movement. But I do not see any other reasonable place where they might land. People who are mad about X might join with those who are mad about XYZ. But they are not likely to join with those who are perpetrators of X. Put another way, add up all the Cruz votes and all the Trump votes and you have a “really angry with Washington” contingent. What this means is that Cruz is the only realistic unity candidate, not Rubio.
4. Rubio’s “Gang of 8” problem was not — for me at least — a problem with his actual position on immigration. Different approaches to the immigration problem are not foundational in the same way that views on abortion are. The difficulty with Rubio was the sense of being double-crossed that many of his early supporters had. Establishment Republicans specialize in thimble-rigging, and when Rubio and Cruz went to Washington as newcomers, it certainly looked as though Rubio was rather quickly starting to go native. He was blending in with the thimble-riggers, while at the same time it looked as though Cruz was making every last one of the thimble-riggers very, very angry.
And this year, that’s the selling point.
No comments:
Post a Comment