The Establishment GOP could try to use lawsuits to run Trump off long enough that he’s missing important deadlines and/or debates such that he no longer has a real shot at the GOP nomination. This would be sleazy and unethical and a blatant delay tactic, but it would work.
However, if he had a shot at the GOP nomination to begin with, that would hurt the GOP a lot more than it would hurt Trump, because it would validate Trump as The Man The Establishment Fears, and make the GOP The Frightened Establishment What Hates Your Freedoms. Trump could run as an independent and make a better showing than Perot did in 1992, possibly beating the GOP. After that, the GOP would be finished, because losing an electoral fight to Trump is only a shade better than losing a game of Operation to Michael J. Fox.
So a party is never in a real position to try and run someone off: Either the party is big enough that the someone isn’t a threat, in which case why bother, or the someone is a big threat, in which case running them off will only make them a worse threat.
More likely to happen is that Trump loses the nomination to say… Jeb Bush, and then runs anyway as a Republican.
What’s the recourse in that situation? Would the GOP have to basically mount a PR campaign to actively disavow him and push Jeb Bush as the “real” candidate, or could they get some sort of court order without a suit to have him cease and desist calling himself a Republican candidate?
(I have to figure that the second part is true, otherwise one party or the other would run some kind of horrid child-molester candidate under the other party’s name in hopes of discrediting them)
If Trump runs as an independent, the Democrat wins. Period. There’s nothing the GOP can do except try to keep him off the ballot, which IMO, is shady. Just accept that either party can be Nadered at any time and live with it.
He’s not talking about running as an independent. He’s asking about running as a Republican, though not the party’s candidate. To which the answer is “you can’t do that.” You can hold yourself out as a Republican who is a candidate, but the party could obtain an injunction requiring you to desist from calling yourself the Republican candidate. See California Democratic Party v. Jones cited by Billdo above.
“IF” Trump won the nomination, (or whomever won the nomination,) they would be the parties candidate. Why would anyone assume that a political party wouldn’t support it’s own, chosen during it’s political convention, candidate?
That would be like the Democrats not supporting a majority-vote-getting Bernie Sanders just because Bernie is better looking, and certainly more trustworthy, than Hillary. If Bernie won the party convention’s vote, Bernie is the party’s candidate.
Sure. But Trump would receive fewer votes in a general election than a bag of turnips. It would be like Ben Affleck winning the Democratic nomination. It’s entirely possible that the party would at least consider abandoning him for someone electable.
You are incorrect in your analysis. In Jones the right of association issue was letting people not a member of the party vote for for a party’s candidate. Basically the Republican can prevent a Democrat from voting in the Republican primary.
In past elections the party national committees (or by-laws committees, or some such) have modified the election rules for a variety of reasons. In addition to the delegates elected in the primaries and the caucuses, there are At Large delegates and Superdelegates that are selected through a variety of methods and can be used to steer the nomination. In the 2008 Democratic Convention there were approximately 20% Superdelegates voting for the nomination. If Trump were threatening to garner enough delegates to win the nomination you might see some additional Superdelegates created.
There was a little thing called the Civil Rights Movement, which was heavily focused on voting in Democratic primaries and having those votes counted. Laws passed in the wake of that era make it essentially impossible to ignore the wishes of the primary in setting a candidate. There is no “board of Republicans” that can just pick someone in the back room, and if it could be proven that they were trying, they would be in federal court.
The Democratic Party did manage to strip delegates form multiple minor candidates in 2012 for violations of Party rules. There’s still a gap where the party can exert some control in a way that presumably can stand up in court. The candidates losing delegates were effectively running their campaign from their spare bedroom (or literally their prison cell in one case.) A candidate like Trump who can afford to hire professionals is probably less susceptible to harsh scrutiny turning up rules violations that result in stripped delegates. A candidate with money would probably also increase the risk of politically ugly litigation if there was debate about the application of those rules.
The DNC hasn’t managed to keep Willie Carter, who’s basically a fundamentalist Democrat, off ballots going back to 1988.
Here’s a related question. I realize that anyone can run as a Democrat, but I wonder why the DNC doesn’t demand that Sanders change his official Senate affiliation to Democrat. Last I checked, news stories still refer to him as Sanders(I-VT).
How and why would they do that? By running as an independent, a popular candidate is convinced to keep running every six years, and the voters are convinced to support him. The Democrats still get the full benefit of his presence as he votes with them when it matters. You can’t force someone to change their political party. I guess they could try to entice him by offering a key committee chairmanship if he switches (this does happen when the Senate is 51-49 and the minority party is trying to do anything it can to make one person change) but for the prior reasons, why bother?
The independent schtick is disingenuous and I think the media would be justified in not playing along, especially since he runs in the Democratic primary in Vermont (but then declines the nomination after he wins), but is there actually an official Senate affiliation other than who he caucuses with?
In that case isn’t a party’s brand identity trademarked and therefore registered to someone who would be in a position not to license candidate X to use it, and to sue them if they tried to?
Of course, if whoever such a person or body is did that, and the primary system and conventions went ahead and nominated candidate X, you’d presumably have what Europeans (and indeed Canadians) would understand as a party split, and one or the other would either cave in or form a separate party.
Surely there are multiple mechanisms the Republican Party apartniks could use to expel Donald Trump from the Party but right now unless The Donald says something offensive about black people or drops a child molestation joke, it would be ill-advised.
One, he is scoring well in the polls and an expulsion could end up with Trump running as an Independent or third party candidate saying he isn’t a politician, and “look at what those Republican insiders did to me”, taking crucial votes away from the Republicans, delivering the White House to Hillary Clinton. Trump would be made to look like a victim.
Two, what a punching bag for other Republican candidates. If I was Jeb Bush or any of the other candidates Id be begging the Republican Party to make sure Trump was at every debate, so I could prod and poke him into saying something really stupid that would crash his campaign.
Finally, Trump isn’t going to enter any primary, anyway. He will drop out in September citing some bullshit reason, claiming he would have won the nomination and the election, but either business, personal or some other horse’s ass shit reason made him dropout. Remember, the guy is a professional con.
I’m not asking about expelling him from the party. I’m asking about keeping his name separate from the Republican Party banner on a ballot.
There was a comment upthread suggesting that there might be TWO Republican candidates for president – assuming Donald loses the nomination but still insists on running, and still called himself a Republican rather than an independent. This is something I doubt would be allowed, though I’m not sure how it would be stopped.
There have been past incidents of factions large enough to run another campaign refusing to endorse their party’s nominee and forming temporary splinter groups.
In 1872, Republicans who didn’t support Grant’s second term bolted and formed the “Liberal Republican Party.” Their efforts at being the “second Republicans” were somewhat dampered when the Democrats cross-endorsed their ticket, so effectively they just became opposition voters.
A more obvious example is 1948. Southern Democrats who perceived the Truman ticket as too sympathetic to civil rights formed the States Rights Democratic Party, popularly known as the Dixiecrats, and ran Strom Thurmond.
George Wallace’s 1968 campaign was essentially the same thing, but didn’t use “Democratic” in its name.
If Donald Trump wins the nomination and Jeb Bush’s supporters want to form the Moderate Republican Party or whatever, they can. They would still have to start from scratch on ballot access, because Trump would enjoy all of the automatic privileges that Republicans earned by meeting thresholds in past elections. Trump would still be the nominee of the “Republican Party” on the ballots.
Trump isn’t going to win anything, by the way – his candidacy is propped up by Democratic editorialists who like making fun of the most mockable Republican on the scene. He doesn’t have any real supporters and none of the above is going to happen. But that’s how it would play out if it did.