I thought you said they didn’t want to be represented by a buffoon.
But also most of the rest of the primaries are winner take all, while the early primaries were mostly proportional. This makes it much harder to split the delegates 3 ways, and markedly improves his chances of getting a full majority.
This may be, but 63% of the delegates will have already been selected by March 22.
Besides, if either Kasich or Rubio or both win their home states, they’ll be in it for a while longer. The moment when consolidation will start working to Trump’s disadvantage keeps on getting kicked down the road.
And as far as this Democrat is concerned, it’s all good anyway. Rubio and Kasich are the candidates that would get squeezed out if anyone does, and that leaves Cruz as the only alternative to Trump. Cruz would almost be certain to lose big if he became the nominee.
The optimal scenario for Cruz may be a Rubio loss in Florida which knocks him out instantly and a Kasich win in Ohio along with poor performances elsewhere which knock him out very soon after March 15. Then the GOP establishment, including Kasich, Rubio Jeb, Romney etc., backs him and conducts a scorched-earth campaign against Trump through June. If Cruz wins most of the late WTA primaries, it may still be possible to prevent Trump from gaining 50% of the delegates.
I agree that Cruz is a weak general election candidate but most GOP interest groups probably prefer losing with him to losing with Trump who threatens both conservative orthodoxy and the GOP brand in ways which Cruz doesn’t.
However the upcoming primaries are in blue states, where Republicans are slightly more moderate and where Cruz is expected to do relatively poorly compared to the southern states.
The best thing that could happen to the Republican party for the long term would be for Cruz to be the nominee and lose in a landslide. Only then might they start listening to the conclusions they made after 2012. If Trump loses in a landslide I’d predict that their take would be that he wasn’t conservative enough. And they’d not change at all for 2020. Will is already saying this.
If they run against Trump, they risk losing Trump supporters, and they lose. If they run supporting Trump, they go down in the landslide. I’d guess that their polling and research show that the second case is even worse than the first.
Yeah, that’s probably right.
My bet is that the GOP is so far down the rabbit hole at this point that if Cruz was the nominee, and lost big, they’d still double down on being as conservative as possible in 2020.
We’re in a vastly different world from 1964, and particularly the forces acting on the GOP are so different from then. The infrastructure pushing the GOP in a Goldwater direction - well, there wasn’t any, really, besides the Goldwater campaign itself. After the electoral debacle of 1964, the party elders didn’t face a major source of resistance as they tried to pull the party back towards the center.
But now you’ve got Fox News and talk radio and conservative white evangelicalism and a ton of outside groups that have already pulled so many of the voters themselves to a place where any compromise is heresy. Even if all those groups wanted to walk that back (and most of them won’t), they’d still have to move the GOP voters back as well.
It’s not gonna happen. The GOP is what it is, and won’t learn anything if Cruz is the nominee and loses 58-42.
Maybe they’re seeing their reflection in the snow-covered hills. 
Agree completely. The Party is now hostage to Fox, Limbaugh, et al UFN.
OTOH, that situation seems to be delivering a lot of statehouses and a decent percentage of congressional majorities. And is likely to do for a long time after the national demographics move hard enough against them to deny them the Presidency.
Their nirvana state is to roll back federal power in a series of states rights cases, then proceed to live again in a modern echo of the 1950s South while remaining free from Northern aggression.
The corresponding D goal is to prevent those states rights cases from clipping federal wings.
For what it’s worth, my mom, an Ohioan and lifelong Democrat, is planning on voting in the Republican primary. She doesn’t like Clinton at all, but she says that Trump is the first candidate in her nearly 60 years of voting who actually scares her, and she wants to do as much as she can to ensure that he doesn’t win.
Yeah, yeah, anecdote not data. But there are certainly going to be at least some crossovers in there, and who they’re crossing over for is probably going to be Kasich.
So she’s voting Kasich then? SlackerInc will be disappointed in her. 
My brother in law (a young guy w/ a college degree, but who is working blue collar in the auto industry) lives in Ohio and is a big Trump supporter.
Josh Marshall, 3/15/2016, after today’s results came in: [INDENT]I’m skeptical of all this talk about brokered conventions or any talk of denying Trump the nomination if he’s close to a majority and has far more delegates than anyone else. I’m not saying it won’t happen. I make no predictions. But I don’t think modern American political parties overrule their voters in choosing a presidential nominee. They can. They certainly have big incentives. But there is an immense structural, bureaucratic and legitimacy inertia against doing so. The signs I see from key Republican elected officials - as opposed to activists and operatives and pundits - look more like a slow, pained accommodation. [/INDENT] So at every level, GOP officials will have to make some choices now. [INDENT]…the more I watch this play out the more I think the current Republican party - by which I mean the Republican coalition that we’ve known for almost four decades - will not survive this crisis. The Republican party won’t go anywhere. The R-D two party system has survived for 150 years with a number different versions of each party operating under those labels. But I’m skeptical that we go back. **And when there’s a break down in one party’s coalition that almost always destabilizes the other party too. **[/INDENT] Emphasis added. Woah. I didn’t think of that. But it’s obvious: if you have 2 parties sharing an electorate and one party shuffles the deck then mathematically the other party will go through some profound changes. There’s no way around it.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/reckoning--3
ETA: GOP leadership’s missed chances to derail Trump: Donald Trump is Republican leaders' fault - Vox
Be something if Cleveland turns into an echo of Chicago '68. Trumpers acting out, getting clubbed by riot police. Got my first post all ready: “Nothing wrong with those Cleveland rioters couldn’t be fixed with a haircut, a bath and a job!”
Been waiting for this chance for a long time.
I can imagine your frustration. It must be difficult indeed trying to locate Republicans in need of a haircut, a bath and a job. 
Look in any trailer park.
Duck Dynasty, anyone?
I’m looking forward to WrestleMania Cleveland when the frustrated Trumpians start smashing up the place after a 7th ballot loss to Paul Ryan. Reporters being hauled away by thugs, tear gas flying in the arena, booing during Ryan’s acceptance speech. Then the Trumpians sit on their hands during the election and Hillary carries 50 states.
Curly Haugland, a Republican National Committee rules member, on Wednesday said the political parties choose their respective presidential nominees, not the primary voters or caucuses goers:
I can’t wait for the GOP convention. Chaos outside, chaos inside.
Lantern wins the Cassandra award for March 15!