This means the delegates really matter in and of themselves in SC, since an advantage of 40-50 delegates over your rivals is not trivial. For the most part, the early states are about appearances - how you finish, and how good you look while doing it - but 50 delegates that will all or almost all go to one candidate, that’s real.
ETA to CarnalK: It’s complicated, isn’t it? Kinda like some D&D-style game - spend more time figuring out the rules than actually playing.
Aren’t you forgetting a third, more likely scenario: Trump is campaigning for the base in the primaries, so he’s accentuating the qualities that they like, and will veer centrist for the election in November. He then becomes a showy but adequate President.
For sure, RTFirefly. But if you don’t know the “house rules” for each state then you can’t really see the real path to the nomination. I bet most people don’t realize just how close to WTA South Carolina is. I can’t imagine Kasich’s team doesn’t know. His or any establishment guy’s only chance is to blitz his best looking district and get a plurality there to come out with anything.
To be sure there are other intermediate scenarios. Of which yours is one.
But the point of my scenarios was to say that from the POV of e.g. Jeb! or Kasich the idea of an R win who’s not them is not an unalloyed good while a D win is not an unalloyed bad. There are many scenarios wherein their negative primary campaigning, even as it makes a Hillary win incrementally more likely, in fact serves their longer-term interests as intelligently defined. I meant no more than that.
Speaking to your scenario:
I always wonder about the common “veer centrist” argument.
So lets say Trump does repackage himself as soon as his nomination is locked up. The veer immediately raises the question: “Is he lying now, or was he lying last week when he said the opposite?” There’s no safe answer to that question.
Particularly in the age of social media where everything is recorded for all posterity for all to see, retrieve, and re-post, flip-flopping carries much higher damage than it did in 1955 (or even 1985) when different audiences could be given very different speeches and most people would be none the wiser.
This argument can be made about any veering politician. But the more extreme the initial position, the more likely the veer is not believed to be genuine. Or if by a miracle it is seen as genuine, it comes at the cost of severely disillusioning his current backers, the mob with pitchforks. “Trump’s a sellout” would be a very corrosive idea once it got into his base’s collective psyche.
So IMO the veer, if any, will be soft. And that presupposes Trump is a disciplined actor, not a bombastic ego-hound unable to stick to his script. I don’t know the man well enough to say for sure, but there’s a lot of evidence over a lot of years that leans towards the latter.
Second comment:
“Trump as showy but adequate President”. Certainly a plausible outcome. If that happens it will really throw both parties for a loop. Even by the 2018 Congressional elections there will be a new “third way” in US politics. It won’t be as severe as my proposed scenario #1, but it still shakes both parties pretty thoroughly. And may well lead to a new Peronist (Trumpist?) party.
That party will draw from the disaffected low-social-status members of both left and right. But I predict it would be more effective on the right, and thereby more harmful to the mainstream R than mainstream D.
We shall see.
Historically true, yes. But in this election it’s clear that there is going to be Trump, Cruz, and an establishment guy. They all have enough money, support, and desire to fight until someone gets enough delegates to win.
His long shot chance is to stay in the top tier of the not Trump or Cruz lane into March 15, and then hope that he does well enough there to become the anointed one of that lane from there - ceding FL to either Rubio or Bush but taking the WTA in OH and getting solid shares in the proportional and hybrid style states of IL, MO, and NC, while Cruz does well enough with Texas and a few in the South to prevent Trump from running away with it.
That then leaves Trump, Cruz, Kasich, and either Rubio or Bush (only one comes out of FL) in the game, with the first two somewhere around 800ish each. He accumulates more than the surviving Bush/Rubio from there and Cruz prevents Trump from having enough to win outright. Enter a contested convention with Kasich having the most delegates of the not Trump or Cruz lane and willing to deal for VP with Rubio/Bush survivor.
Long shot scenario but his best crack. Otherwise he hopes that he can do well enough before 3/15 that that plus Ohio allows him to bargain for VP in a contested convention.
Of course if Cruz completely craters then the divided other lane leaves Trump to win without a contested convention.
OH!
Just found a great resource for handicapping this! Lists the states dates and thresholds!
SuperDuper Tuesday 3/1 hard to see Kasich picking much up what with 5 states having a 20% threshold, 2 having a 15% threshold, one 13%, leaving only three that have 10% or less. In a crowded field you really could see only Trump getting over 20% in GA and TN and splitting it with Cruz in Texas.
3/5 some reasonable thresholds.
Super Tuesday 3/15 … winner take all for state-wide delegates in IL then by district. If Kasich takes it in addition to Ohio then he is in position to fight or broker a deal with the Rubio/Bush survivor.
The rest of the race may be more friendly to the leader of the establishment lane with some significant winner take alls.
That’s not long shot, it’s fantasy land. It looks to me that he’s not going to pick up any more delegates in the next two carve out states. He will be hard pressed to make the threshold for most of the March 1st primaries - no chance at all for most of them. The last poll up for Ohio on RealClearPolitics has him dead last, behind Carson!
Kasich’s only chance is if Bush and Rubio are caught having buttsex behind the tomb of the unknown soldier.
Any poll done before NH is pretty meaningless. Top of the establishment lane in NH will get him a serious consideration in other states that he never had before.
In SC he jumped from 1% before NH to 9% in the first two polls after, into the scrum with Rubio and Bush for the leader of the so-called establishment lane. He’ll get about as many delegates out of SC as either Rubio or Bush. If any of them get any. Trump will take the bulk.
There are a few debates before the 3/1 slew, debates in which he may actually now get some speaking time. As 538 put it, Kasich is the anti-Trump. He is an experienced governor and not coarse, not angry. Those who want the outsider and to vent their anger are splitting between Trump and Cruz (mostly Trump); Rubio has shown himself to be too inexperienced, and for whatever reason voters just dislike Bush. Unfavorable rating increasing consistently, trend at unfavorable +23 and rising, worse than Trump’s more stable unfavorable +18, let alone Hillary’s +10. The big question is if the backers decide that Rubio and Bush are each too damaged of goods to pull it off and decide to pile funds into Kasich instead, pulling the plugs on the Floridians.
I doubt it. But I have throughout the cycle feared him as the GOP nominee the most: he has the best chance of beating Hillary and would crush Bernie horribly. And while he plays a moderate well he is in fact quite conservative. My GOP political operative friend early on told me that his politics align best with Cruz but that he, like everybody else, just cannot stand the jerk, and that he was supporting Kasich because he’s the one who would win a general.
Damn that’s some sweet alliteration there. It just slides off the tongue so joyfully. 
Great find. Thank you.
Overall I agree with your analysis on Kasich’s best path forward and on how very, very slender a shot he has. And that he’d be the most dangerous opponent for Hillary in a conventional general election. If only (from the R’s POV) he could get from here to there.
The biggest open question in my mind is how conventional the general will be.
Many pundits and many Dopers seem to be saying things about like this: “These primaries are full of crazies and rabble and extremes and extremists, but the sober honest mainstream citizens of America will appear in their multitudes in November to calm the tempest and inject sanity, nay conventional boringness, into the outcome.”
To which I tentatively answer “You wish! Maybe in years prior, but not this time.”
Kasich may be the least bad R president for this D voter.
But anger is a powerful and heady emotion. And if the angry vote in their multitudes this will be an unconventional election, perhaps won by an unconventional candidate.
Here’s a thread I started last month on a tangential topic that didn’t get much traction at the time. Impact of Widespread Early Voting - Politics & Elections - Straight Dope Message Board. I think it identifies another channel for unconventional results. One the mainstream ignores at their peril.
I guess we’ll see. I still contend it’s fantasy land. Doing decent in NH is not going to give him all sorts of momentum, especially when as you say the best he can hope for in the next 2 will be about the same as Rubio or Bush. Then he gets demolished in the SEC primaries.
And he’s spent a big chunk of his money in NH. So if he thinks he’s doing better in some of the upcoming states he’s just guessing because there haven’t been a lot of published polls and he can’t really afford to run his own.
I think that if any of the mainstream candidates are to win the nomination, it’s a necessary condition that he both win one of Florida or Ohio, and at least come in ahead of the other two mainstreamers in the other. And that’s still far from a sufficient condition, mind you.
Yeah, a bad scenario for the establishment lane is Rubio and Bush have their Wild West Showdown in Florida and one of them wins–the loser likely leaves the race. Then Kasich wins Ohio. Those are two big states with large numbers of delegates, enough to matter, and they’ve just been “split” between two establishment lane delegates.
Reality though? If Trump stays in the mid-30s (and a poll out Friday actually had him at 44% nationally, but I put low weight on it because it’s not from a mainstream/established pollster and no other national polls are out to compare it to) nationally, and Kasich stays sub 10%, it’s not impossible Kasich fails to win Ohio and Trump wins it. Locality is important, but those national polls represent something as well.
If you look at Florida, for which polling is available, a series of January/February polls showed Trump polling anywhere from 31%-48%, Cruz from 12%–16%, and Rubio from 12%–20%, and I believe at least 3 of the 4 were pre-Rubio bitch slapping by Christie. So Trump as of now is ahead in FL. Further, the only poll that really showed him below 30% was a poll from Florida Southern College and only had a sample size of 269 registered voters, a YouGov poll a week before with a sample size of over 900 had him at 41%.
Bush is in bad trouble in Florida, he left office with very high approval ratings there, but apparently almost none of that has left him with much institutional support–across all these polls he is under 5%.
Well, ARG has Kasich first among the establishment guys in their poll:
Actually, 2nd overall, ahead of Cruz, which would be stunning if it pans out.
ARG apparently has a pretty poor track record. Even if it works out, Santorum ended up with 17% and Paul got 13% in 2012. That netted them both 0 delegates.
True, but momentum still matters in the establishment lane. A second consecutive 1st place finish among the Bush/Rubio/Kasich group, especially in SC, would be huge for Kasich. Beating Cruz would be even huger, even if Trump wins all the delegates.
I’m curious: despite the media depiction, I don’t think of Rubio as establishment. Until his gang of 8 move he was total Tea Party. And even if all Tea party abandoned him for that he overlaps Cruz for a religious conservative voter. If Rubio dropped out tomorrow, do you think that his supporters would only get split up between Bush and Kasich? I sure don’t. Cruz is getting a bunch of it, maybe some to Trump.
That’s part of Rubio’s appeal. He’s Tea Party, but the establishment likes him too. He’s not the only Tea Partier with a leg in both camps. Mike Lee and Pat Toomey are as well.
In term of simulating the pseudo-proprtionality of the first batch of primaries in a divided field - Sam Wang had taken it far into the weeds with a computer simulation. The upshot is that in a divided field a candidate who averages “a 30% level of support in current polls could reasonably be expected to yield 50% of delegates between now and Super Tuesday. That means that if the field were to remain divided, Donald Trump is currently on track to get the Presidential nomination on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.”
The problem with that analysis as I see it is that the race is frontloaded with races that should be more favorable for him. If it shakes out after that to one of Bush/Rubio/Kasich then continuing to get 50%+1 would be tough although he’d clearly go in with a plurality of delegates (and possibly 30 to 35% of the popular vote).
Wang’s more recent take concludes it’s Trump unless the feild narrows fast:
Again, I think he fails to account for the fact that Cruz in takes away from Trump some and that anything other than 50%+1 delegates across the finish line means a brokered convention and deals that are impossible to do simulations of.
I didn’t get the sense he’s failing to take that into account. That’s why the percentage number is so low to win, isn’t it?
His deadlines, though. I can’t see any world where SC and NV knock out three of Bush, Rubio, Kasich, and Carson.