When the irresistible force of the “Anybody But Trump” crowd meets the immovable object of the “Anybody But Cruz” crowd sparks are gonna fly. It’s a pretty good bet that T is a charter member of ABC and C is a charter member of ABT.
So it’ll turn into a contest between ABT & ABC forces to sway the deal-making. As **Lantern **said, T & C will both be A) trying to win and B) trying to sell their support to the highest bidder as long as C) that highest bidder isn’t the other of C or T.
The establishment and conventional politics mildly favors Cruz. Trump’s deal-making skills favor Trump. It’ll be very asymmetrical warfare between them.
Shame the smoke-filled rooms won’t be bugged. It would make riveting TV. Disgusting but still riveting.
How many delegates will actually be loyal to Kasich, though? He can ask them to vote for Trump…but they can tell him to eff off. And even if they’d walk over burning coals for him, voting to make Donald Trump the party’s nominee is a pretty big request.
Except that Kasich seems to loathe Trump even more than most of the Republican establishment does.
No, Trump’s deal-making skills favor ABT, since most of the non-Trumps (heck, most of the population) are considerably better at making deals than Trump is.
Trump claims that he hires the best people, makes the best deals, and has the best skills. But he’s shown himself to be an absolute amateur when it comes to making deals with delegates, and the Cruz organization is running rings around Trump’s ‘best people’ at the state level.
And instead of stepping up his game and showing us that vaunted Trump managerial skill, he’s chosen instead to whine and pout about Cruz ‘stealing’ delegates, and has had his surrogates running around physically threatening delegates who might drop Trump after the first ballot.
The guy’s a failure even on his own terms, and he’s failing against someone who never went to Wharton or any other business or managerial school and who never built his reputation on his ability to wheel and deal. He’s getting beaten at his own game by a rank amateur. That tells us something about how much of Trump’s reputation is justified, and how much is just bullshit marketing of a product.
Well, yeah. Trump isn’t much of a businessman, but he’s a pretty good sales guy. He’s fun to watch on TV and he’s probably fun to be around with, even if he’s a bit of a blowhard. Totally inappropriate candidate for the Presidency, but an interesting guy.
I’d be very careful about entering into a business relationship with him as well. Or even buying one of his products without due diligence. Because he’s happy to sell folks down the river, as shown by his failed enterprises Trump University, the Trump multi-level nutritional outlet, and the dubious Baja Mexico real estate deal.
Cruz, OTOH is universally despised by most who know him: he lacks the sort of emotional intelligence that comes naturally to most politicians. He is smart though. I’d expect either of the two to be worse for the Republicans than Jimmy Carter was for the Democrats. Advocating for the gold standard for example is ridiculous.
Cruz’s roommate in college: [INDENT][INDENT]“I remember very specifically that he had a book in Spanish and the title was Was Karl Marx a Satanist? And I thought, who is this person?” Mazin says of Ted Cruz. “Even in 1988, he was politically extreme in a way that was surprising to me.”
…In addition to Mazin and Leitch, several fellow classmates who asked that their names not be used described the young Cruz with words like “abrasive,” “intense,” “strident,” “crank,” and “arrogant." Four independently offered the word “creepy,” with some pointing to Cruz’s habit of donning a paisley bathrobe and walking to the opposite end of their dorm’s hallway where the female students lived. [/INDENT][/INDENT] Ted Cruz at Princeton: Creepy, Sometimes Well-Liked, and Exactly the Same
That said, Princeton is a better college than Wharton, not that it matters at all. Just giving Ted his due.
One thing that article misses is that to get that the Republican party will have to alienate both Trump and Cruz supporters. One of the things that makes me think that Bernie will suffer a lot if he gets nominated are his weird positions from the past and the present. Something that I do think will happen to Kasich too if he is the nominee.
It seems that one factor that is keeping Kasich up in the polls is because most Americans know that he does support immigration reform and supports a path to legalization.
Unfortunately in 2016 it is a Republican nativist base the one we are dealing with here, I do think the biggest about face will have to happen among Republicans if Kasich is the one that will come alive out of Thunderdome.
You hope. Kasich’s lead over Clinton is pretty high. It would take an awful lot of alienation for Kasich to lose to Clinton. And on the flipside, a lot of unity for Cruz to beat Clinton.
Ok, it seems that even you are not clear on what that means, it means that all your past talk about supporting anti immigration efforts has been useless. And I can expect Trump to run as a third party ticket in that scenario.
I have to add also that Kasich has, according to a recent poll, the highest number of voters who still have no opinion of him.
I can not see Kasich not running to the right to appease the Trump and Cruz followers, and I do think a lot of the items that do make Kasich a hard right winger also will come out for many on the left that see him as kinda ok now.
This far out it is very presumptuous to consider Trump unelectable vs Clinton or Comrade Bernie. There is a lot of calendar left. I think Reagan was polling just as bad vs Carter at this time as Trump is vs Clinton.
There are no Reagan-quality talents here. Reagan was able to rise above the media caricatures of him once he had the public’s undivided attention. Trump is not electable.
That’s exactly what they said about Bozo the Chimp’s co-star, isn’t it?
Trump is way more talented than you are giving him credit for. If not, he wouldn’t be leading after passing the entire field from the GOP’s blind spot.
Trump has been spectacularly successful so far by getting very strong support from a small chunk of the electorate while alienating most everyone else. It worked really well in a multi-way Republican primary election. But it’s a strategy that’s extremely unlikely to work for him going forward, if you assume his goal is to win the Presidency. While adaher is wrong to speak in absolutes, he’s right if you tone his comment down one notch to “Trump is extremely unlikely to be electable in a general election.”
Trump seriously stumbled a few weeks ago, but he may be starting to pull out of his nosedive a little. He will do well in NY and probably one or two other states in the Northeast. The momentum will go back to Cruz as the race moves to different parts of the country again. I still think it’s doubtful that he can avoid a brokered convention, but it’s still technically possible.
Having said that, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the GOP power brokers are extremely unenthusiastic about Ted Cruz. And it appears that there’s probably just as much of a ceiling to his poll numbers as there is with Trump. Most of the Senate has yet to really come out and throw their support behind Cruz. The only time any of the major republicans begin speaking even nicely of him is when it looks like Trump is gaining momentum.
I’m not sure Trump is pulling out of the nosedive so much as simply moving to friendlier terrain (perhaps this is what you’re saying.) I think his prognosis is similar to where it has been for the past month+: he’ll go into the convention with a large plurality, but not a majority, of pledged delegates. Whether or not he can get the nomination from that, I don’t know.
It looks to me like with Rubio’s pledged delegates added Trump might cross the line. I doubt very much that Trump could offer Rubio anything tempting enough to take that deal but I would bet that behind closed doors Trump will try.
I guess not officially, but he can certainly urge them to do so… but as I said I think its extremely extremely unlikely Rubio would accept such a deal. He’s unlikely to to attach himself to a probably losing Trump in the general election. Rubio is young, he can run again in 2020 and 2024 and 2028 etc etc