Kasich has wide enough appeal to the elites that if he was to cause a brokered convention to occur, he could win the nomination. From what I’ve read, kasich is counting on a brokered convention.
Plus if you’re trying to stop Trump and you don’t think Rubio can do it on his own, denying Trump the winner takes all states while he scored 30-40% in proportional states probably denies him the first ballot nomination.
So you think The Establishment will advance from simply reflexively opposing the Democrats to opposing their own voters? Might as well wave the white flag already.
If a sane (assuming Kasich even is one) could have won, he *would *have won.
You seem not to have noticed that it has *already *happened, and that the Establishment does not have the strength to prevent it.
Yes, the fracture is already clearly open, and widening. The people grasping at straws right now are the Republican establishment types hoping for a brokered convention to thwart Trump.
The RNC has already said that embattled Senators can distance themselves from a nominee Trump as they deem necessary, even run attack ads, in their states, against their own party’s Presidential candidate. So it seems that whether Trump emerges with the nomination or not, some segment of Republicsn voters is going to be treated this way by party elements.
Yup.
The least unlikely path for the GOP to blocking Trump now is a contested convention, preventing an outright majority despite a clear plurality, then deal-making between more traditional candidates. Kasich winning Ohio as Rubio loses Florida is not so impossible, would elevate him as the anti-Trump at least on par with Rubio from there, and IF end of day Trump does not have the majority puts him on reasonable footing to make those deals. Maybe even emerge as the least weak traditional candidate.
Of course a Trump so denied would result in many of his supporters staying home, and maybe lead to an outright split of the party. But y’know the Democrats eventually survived the bolting of the Dixiecrats and that was all the way to the other side. It might not be a bad thing for the party’s and the county’s health long term. And some elites may view it as the least poor option given the divergent nature of the groups in their clown car and that they have lost any control of the steering wheel.
Agreed. But …
Recall that in many past elections with an incumbent president running for a second term, his party’s electorate is often less-than-enthused with the sitting President.
So often Congressional candidates from that party run on a platform that says essentially, “Love me; love my party; try to ignore the guy in the White House.”
An example was Obama in 2012 where a lot of Democratic Congressmen & would-be Congressmen in swing states really didn’t want Obama campaigning for them.
There are plenty of earlier examples from both parties.
My point here is not that Obama was evil like Trump is. Because Obama’s not & Trump is.
My point is that congressional election politics often diverges from presidential election politics. Congresscritters distancing themselves from their own party’s presidential candidate is less than ideal from the party’s POV, but hardly unusual.
So IMO it’s wrong to make too big a deal out of the RNC’s early whispers about this. What’s behind it, the ideological schizophrenia of the current R electorate and the likely consequences, now that’s a big deal.
Please explain your second paragraph. I can’t parse it at all.
Who is “you” and how does the presence or absence of Kasich deny Trump the WTA states? To win a WTA state you just need to come first, not break 50%. I don’t see how Kasich’s 10% (or 20% if you’re really drinkin’ the Kool-Aid) changes anything.
Color me confused. 
(And light blue I guess)
The problem with that argument is that there aren’t that many proportional states. There are about as many WTA states as proportional ones, so it’s not like Trump can easily be denied all of them. And there are a lot of variations on winner-take-most, and more states seem to be doing some kind of winner-take-most than either proportional or WTA.
Take tomorrow’s primaries, for instance: the six SEC states (AL, AR, GA, OK, TN, TX) plus VT are all winner-take-most, mostly (in the SEC states) as a result of the winner in each congressional district getting at least 2 of that district’s 3 delegates, while VA and MA and some of the caucus states are proportional.
The other thing is, with Trump polling as high as 49% nationally (CNN/ORC - and hey, what happened to the ceiling??), he’s likely to do better than 30-40% in some of those proportional states, and he’s certainly likely to win a bunch of WTA states.
I don’t know if you follow Big Ten football but allow me to suppress my inner Spartan and channel Buckeye fans chanting in answer…
O - H - I - O!!!
Kasich has a real chance to win at home.
Ohio has 6.8% of all convention delegates. To get a majority and avoid a brokered convention Trump would need to win 56.7% of all the other delegates if he loses Ohio. The delegate math for Trump is even worse when you consider the 7% unpledged delegates that aren’t bound by state results. At a minimum Trump losing in Ohio lengthens the primary bloodletting and makes all the later WTA/WT Most states more critical. It certainly raises the odds of a brokered convention by a good chunk. An ugly brokered convention could have some big effects on both the general election and the party as a whole. Kasich with small delegate totals elsewhere and Ohio is a power broker that could sway both the nomination and the longer term intra-party issues.
Ohio, if nowhere else, is how Kasich potentially changes quite a bit.
Yeah a lot of people here don’t seem to be clueing in to the delegate math here. The 2 big states, TX (155 delegates) and GA (76 delegates)are both winner take most. That means it’s very likely the 3rd place guy and almost definitely the 4th place will get nothing. So a very possible approximate outcome from those 2 states alone we’ll see Cruz get 100, Trump 100, Rubio 25 and Kasich 0.
Or put another way, on Tuesday Trump will possibly pick up close to 2/3 of the delegates up for grabs, almost guaranteed more than half of the about 600. So Trump will come out with say 300-400, Kasich with 15-20 if he’s lucky. How can Ohio’s 66 make Kasich a reasonable second choice?
So? If he had a real chance at the nomination, that wouldn’t even be in question.
His real chance to lose is greater than his real chance to win.
I went to USC (Go Trojans!) back in the glory days of John McKay & John Robinson. The only thing I recall about Ohio was beating them repeatedly in the Rose Bowl 
That and their fans were overweight. As were their cheerleaders. <zing>
You raise a point I’d not really heard others make: the unpledged delegates are a wild card that *might *be dead set against Trump. If so he’s got a -7 built in before we begin. OTOH, if toadying is the fashion *du jour *by then I’m sure they can be counted upon to do the right thing and slurp from their knees as ordered.
OTOH, as others including **CarnalK **just above have said, most of the WTM states are pretty far off proportional; e.g. come in first with 35% of the vote and walk out with 75% of the delegates. If Trump keeps getting 75% of the delegates in each state then even a 57% threshold to win the nomination is not much of a hurdle.
I think the big structural point we’re all going to see tomorrow is that by pretty much letting the old Confederacy vote as a unit early in the primaries we make US politics a lot more Southern-flavored than Lincoln would have approved of.
All the candidates say they are still in it to win it but their realistic goal is preventing Trump from having an outright majority and then hoping their feverish hopes that they will be anointed (or bargain into being) the strongest anti-Trump that is not Cruz.
And Kasich has an argument to make: Rubio is looking like he is going to lose his own state. His own state! After that date Rubio is toast. Kasich may at that point be way behind in the delegates but WTA Ohio gives him a boost and if the process kept Trump from a majority he might be the anti-Trump at the right moment, going into a contested convention. That is a long long shot but it is a better shot than a Rubio that loses his own home state has I think.
Of course if Trump wins Ohio and Florida it is completely game-set-match.
Maybe, though people tend to discount wins in states where a candidate has a home-state advantage. If Ohio is Kasich’s only win, its pretty hard to see the GOP justifying giving him the nomination. Cruz will probably have a win in his own state, plus Iowa plus at least a few others.
I don’t really see how people think a brokered convention will go to Rubio or Kasich. Trump will have the largest delegate share by far, and Cruz will be second. Trump is the second pick of Cruz voters, and vice-versa, so one assumes the same is true of their delegates. And its almost impossible to see Trump delegates signing on with Kasich, who is basically the furthest from Trump in temperament, no matter how many ballots they go through.
Either Trump or Cruz will win a brokered convention, depending on who manages to snag the most of each-others delegates.
Nate Silver actually has Kasich with almost as good a chance of winning his home state as Trump:
Since it’s winner take all, winning Ohio dents Trump’s chances. And if Kasich drops out, Trump wins Ohio, Period. Rubio ain’t gonna get it done there.
Now if Rubio can also pull out Florida, that’s 100% of Florida and Ohio’s delegates denied to Trump, which would mean he’d probably have to do better than he’s doing now, especially since Trump is also going to lose in Texas. At this point it might actually be better for Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich to stay in the race, at least until the states where they have significant support vote.
Kasich is also running stronger than Rubio in some other states. If Rubio was clearly emerging as a strong candidate to beat Trump, I’d be all for everyone else exiting, but it doesn’t look like Rubio is that candidate. He’s the strongest of the remaining three non-Trump candidates, but doesn’t look like he can beat Trump one on one. So it’s going to have to be three on one and a brokered convention as the only shot we have.
BTW as far as brokered conventions go, predictit gives Paul Ryan as much chance to be the nominee as John Kasich. and it makes a lot of sense. Paul Ryan is sorta viewed as the savior of the party in the House, but he’s not really all that interested in being Speaker. I think he’d take the nomination for President in a heartbeat. And I’d fully support his nomination. I’m a huge Paul Ryan fan.
But you’re not a Trump delegate, whose votes will presumably make up the largest factor in any brokered convention. Or a Cruz delegate, whose delegates will probably be the second biggest chunk.
Yeah, but who knows who the Trump delegates are. That could actually be really important. Are Trump delegates likely to be hardcore Tea partiers? Moderates? Nonideological? People who just admire strongmen? Probably a diverse group from all those viewpoints.
[Bolding mine]
Not necessarily so. Delegates are not the exact same as voters who support the candidates. Many are beholden to the RNC in some form or another, or to local party powers. They care about down ticket prospects (as that impacts their futures the most) and about the party as a whole. Released they can be flipped and their second choice is not necessarily the same as voters’ second choices … assuming that it is true that the Cruz voters’ second choice would mostly be Trump than someone with more real established conservative beliefs (which is Kasich despite the fact that he seems the least batshit of the group).
The premise rests on the hypothesis that 50%+1 of the delegates at the convention would, once released after a failure to have a majority on round one, accept only a candidate who is not Trump or Cruz.
That person does not even need to have been running, theoretically. But odds are it would be the strongest of the not Trump or Cruz line left standing. If Rubio indeed wins no states, up to and through his own, then he is done. Period. He wins nowhere else. Doubtful a contested convention anoints him. Kasich is the least poor choice left.
ETA: that Ryan prospect is interesting. Thing is he’d know that with the bad blood from Trump supporters he’d lose so I doubt he’d do it.