With a likely loss tonight in Wisconsin it seems that Trump is starting to lose some momentum. A contested Republican convention is beginning to look more likely. Who do you all think would emerge as the Republican nominee this year from such a convention? I think the most likely person to emerge is John Kasich.
If Trump is over 1190 delegates, then probably Trump IMO.
Kasich has one win, his own home state. Trump and Cruz will lock him out. It’ll be Trump unless he goes into free fall. If he does, it’ll be Cruz.
The GOP can’t afford Trump as a candidate, and I’m pretty sure they know that. That really leaves only one viable candidate who’s close enough to swing the delegates: Cruz.
Trump (or maybe Cruz), because sooner or later, the GOP would realize that sure they could nominate Kasich, but then they’d permanently destroy the GOP (and Trump would see to it either via 3rd party run or encouraging supporters to abstain or vote Hillary as vengeance) rather than just lose an election and bounce back later. Also, its not like Kasich was a close runner up; he’s a distant third and will continue to be.
The reason I think it might be Kasich is because of the one on one polls against Clinton. Kasich does better against her than either Trump or Cruz.
It would only be contested if the NeverTrump coalition actually has a majority. Then it becomes the most presentable candidate, other than the hopeless Trump or the dreadful Cruz, who also does not have the Big Loser label stuck to him. That leaves out the other candidates from this year, as well as Romney. So I have to go with the incomprehensibly-not-yet-hated Paul Ryan, who as the last VP nominee would let the party regulars exercise the traditional Next Man’s Turn rotation.
The *right *answer is, of course, Who The Fuck Knows?
If it’s remotely close to 1237, then Trump. If it’s far enough away that the GOP thinks it can finesse the voters sufficiently to avoid all out rebellion of the Trump voters, then Paul Ryan if they can convince him he has a chance, but more likely Cruz.
The latter is high risk/high reward. If it’s just Trump, then they essentially concede the presidency for four years, and try to stem the Congressional losses; limited long term damage.
If they take the nomination away from Trump, they run the risk of permanently angering 30-40% of their voters (not to mention making an enemy of Trump who will take every opportunity to go in front of cameras to delegitimize the new nominee) and doing real long term damage to the GOP in the future, and run the risk of a third party springing out entirely from within their existing party. Plus, with Cruz, they’ll still probably lose, so it might be for nothing.
In the case of no one reaching 1237, I’ll put 70/15/10/5 (Trump/Cruz/Ryan/Someone else (Kasich, Bush or Romney)).
The Republican elite dislike Cruz almost as much as Trump. If the convention fails to nominate a candidate on the first ballot, giving the party rulers an opportunity to try to nominate almost anyone, I don’t believe they’ll go with Cruz.
I’d lean towards them picking Ryan.
It’ll be very interesting, that’s for sure.
I hate Trump even more than the next guy, but he’s going to have the necessary delegates to close this thing up before it starts. Yes, it’s possible that he won’t, but I don’t see any convincing evidence that this will be the case. It’s not like Cruz has a giant voting block out in California or New York. Trumps needs about 45% of the remaining delegates and his overall polling puts him above 50%.
Don’t they have a rule that they can only consider candidates who won 8 states? I think it will be whichever of Trump and Cruz had more electors, which means probably Trump.
That is the 2012 rule. It can be changed by the rules committee before the balloting at the convention.
They can change that as easily as they passed it - which was for the last convention, to shut out Ron Paul from getting a prime time speech.
I picked Cruz, given the current rules, although I’m not pleased with myself in doing so. If Trump comes in over 1,100 votes (90% of a majority), it’s going to be very hard to come to a convincing rationale for anyone else…it will depend where the “powers behind the throne” in the RNC want to take it and how they forsee the damage in the future. And even then, Murphy will have a hand in this game.
Damn, President Obama is rueing the Amendment that doesn’t allow for a third term; he could beat this bunch (Dem and Rep) with taking a deep breath.
Much as I’d prefer Kasich, I think it’ll be Cruz if there’s a contested convention. Plenty of the GOP establishment have begrudgingly placed their support behind Cruz. I think they want, very badly, for Trump to stop being associated with the GOP, even if his third-party run costs them the election in November. Going with Cruz is probably the most doable, given he’s in second place for delegates, and least likely to make voters feel like they’re being completely ignored.
No, but Cruz is a smart guy and so are his handlers. He could quite conceivably pull out enough to prevent Trump from hitting 1237. And Kasich, while conceivably pulling more from Cruz than Trump, will still have some effect there.
I predict Brian Sandoval
The time for this kind of calculus was before Cruz racked up a truly credible number of delegates and, therefore, before going with anyone other than Cruz meant throwing out all pretense of running a convention most Republicans would see as being fair.
“Fair” is a [del]worship-word among the Yangs[/del] very important word to people, and being “fair” is up there with liking Mom and apple pie according to LSLGuy in another thread; therefore, anything which fairly reeks of unfairness, as a convention giving the nomination to Kasich would at this point, would lead directly to a large number of Republicans staying home on election eve to punish the GOP.
You can dismiss this as a tantrum, certainly. However, it’s important to understand the basic power dynamic involved, which comes down to the fact the GOP needs votes badly, and a tantrum which denies them votes is going to hurt them worse than it’ll hurt the people throwing the tantrum. Add a number of Trump supporters throwing the tantrum Trump is priming them to throw if he’s denied the nomination, and it adds up to the GOP having every reason to take the possibility of mass tantrums extremely seriously.
My prediction, backed up by FiveThirtyEight, is that unless Trump wins on the first ballot he’s done for, and, due to the reasoning I laid out above, if the convention goes to a second or subsequent ballot Cruz will get the nomination.
They know Trump will be a disaster either way, but in a contested situation I can’t see them giving him the nomination even though it certainly means alienating his base and having him sabotage the election by either running independently or just harassing the nominee for months.
They hate Cruz too; but I think they will swallow that hatred to avoid complete revolt in the party. If they pick anyone else, even Kasich, the party will never be forgiven by the people who believe their votes were stolen from them. Bad enough to just alienate Trump voters, since most of them were not previously dependable GOP voters anyway. But you don’t want to lose the Tea Party and Evangelicals by denying a second-place Cruz his shot (even though he’ll also lose to Clinton).
ETA: Or, what Derleth said while I was typing.
A contested convention with Trump having a clear plurality is the worst of all possible worlds for the GOP, even worse than an outright win for Trump. If Trump wins, then the GOP can try to explain away that he was an anomaly of this election cycle and the current potiical climate (i.e. it’s all Obama’s fault) and so there is nothing they could do.
But in a contested convention, they have a choice of either actively endorsing Trump as a candidate when they had a chance to choose someone else, or else actively acting against the collective will of their constituents moving away from the ideals of Democracy back to the era of smoke filled rooms and party bosses. Neither option is going to be easy to recover from, but I think the second one would be worse than the first, so I voted that Trump would be chosen.