The last Texas polls are all over the place. All the way from a tie (not just the Emerson one) up to Cruz +15.
Clearly Rubio needs to change his strategy and initiate an all-out attack on Trump starting with today’s debate. Then he and outside groups need to follow it up with a big negative-ad campaign against him along with an orchestrated campaign against Trump in the right-wing media.
I still think Trump is vulnerable but someone needs to take the fight to him. I am baffled by the GOP’s tactics against what is a big threat to their basic constituencies: the donor class, the theo-cons and the neo-cons. Cruz has attacked Trump from time to time and there have been attacks from the National Review, Lindsey Graham etc. but there hasn’t been a concerted response remotely commensurate with the threat.
I suspect the Cruz and Rubio reasoning is that they have a better chance of beating Trump if one of them can take out the other, rather than confront Trump directly. They hope to reap the supporters of the other, thus win more delegates than Trump.
Or something.
I think a few things have happened:
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There were some early negative ad buys against Trump that didn’t move the needle at all, some big donors have indicated this makes them skeptical of throwing more money at that strategy
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Trump has a massive social media following and media following, and he has gone personally after the big donors who have spoken out against him. A few haven’t seemed to care (like the Ricketts family) but some big donors do not like being the focus of attention from someone with such a huge megaphone
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Trump’s attacks against other candidates have, largely, worked pretty well throughout the campaign. The candidates themselves aren’t hitting him hard now because, essentially, they’re afraid the bully will hurt them.
Those three things can all be summed up as: fear, the Republicans are afraid of Donald Trump. I think in spite of their fear, they do need to try a more aggressive tack, he’s already winning, so it can’t actually get much worse, him not winning would be changing course from the direction it’s going in so the risk analysis suggests risking some damage to try and take him down is necessary.
The idea of attacking other to “consolidate” against Trump is a failed strategy. Especially in a Rubio/Cruz fight, Trump is the #1 2nd preference among Cruz supporters, so his candidacy collapsing could easily push Trump up near 50% total support.
@Lantern:
What attack ads do you see working? All Trump’s “liberal” past is pretty out in the open. And even if we found the proverbial dead hooker in his hotel room, Cruz is probably going to pick up more Trump defectors than Rubio will. Rubio’s only hope was that Bush dropping out would coalesce the non-crazy vote to him - garnering Bush supporters and siphoning a lot off still fighting Kasich - and pulling some from Cruz now that the liar/evil shit thing is starting to stick . That doesn’t seem to be happening.
Cruz likely wins Texas, but it’s proportional (as all the GOP 3/1 states are) and he likely won’t win by more than 5%, so the delegate margin advantage is small. There’s a chance Rubio won’t win a single 3/1 state, and if he then loses Florida I don’t see a path to for him. Rubio needs to win a few 3/1 states, Virginia is a good bet, and there’s a few where he’s been campaigning heavily that I haven’t seen much polling for where he might win, but if he doesn’t win a single one and loses Florida on 3/15 I honestly suspect that you’ll start to see the elites get behind Trump. At that point they’ll realize they cannot stop him, so they have to get behind their nominee.
Maybe the eminent domain stuff, although that has been tried, but with only limited money behind it. I honestly don’t know–Trump has a fanatical and devoted base, and the percentage of Republican voters who say they will “never support Trump” has gone down like 20 points since he first declared his candidacy (down to the 50% range, which believe it or not is similarly to how Cruz or Rubio look in some of those polls.)
Also it’s worth noting at least a chunk of these 3/1 states have early voting, back to when Bush was in the race and maybe earlier. A lot of Trump votes have already been cast.
Texas isn’t actually proportional, it’s “winner take most”*. The at large delegates and each individual district delegates are awarded 2/3 to the winner, 1/3 to second unless the winner gets over 50% in which case he gets them all. So it actually will be a big swing of numbers. So in this case you can estimate 100 to Cruz, 50 to Trump, 0 to Rubio if the polling holds and is consistent in each district.
*Georgia is a similar system.
I just don’t see it. I bet Trump would pick up a lot of Cruz supporters, it’s not like the guy isn’t just as crazy. And Rubio/establishment supporters probably hate Cruz just as much as Trump.
The problem w/ Rubio going hard after Trump is that Trump’s supporters will more likely go to Cruz than Rubio. Rubio needs to take Cruz out if he’s going to have a chance at bringing Trump down.
Hmm, I had thought all the states holding primaries before 3/15 had to be proportional (like Iowa/Nevada/New Hampshire) other than South Carolina, but it appears this isn’t the case. In fact my quick look at the Green Papers suggests most of the 3/1 states are using the system you describe in Texas. This is actually really bad for efforts to stop Trump, since he’s going to win almost all the 3/1 states, and some by large margins. Looks like Alabama uses the same system as Texas. Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee use a modified system that still gives the winner disproportionate votes,
Alaska, Massachusetts, Virginia, Vermont use straight proportional, Minnesota uses a sort of proportional.
It’s all too much to type out each state’s rules (the green papers have detailed rules for each), but several of the states (both the straight proportional and the others) have minimum thresholds, some high enough that at least one of the “big three” may miss it (except Trump–he’ll pass the threshold in every state.) In any case, Trump will likely get more delegates than his votes would justify in virtually all the states he’ll likely win, and he will win probably every state other Than Texas and perhaps one he will lose to Rubio.
Now that I realize the 3/1 states aren’t straight proportional for the GOP I think the chances of stopping Trump are way lower.
Yeah, I think they just have to not be WTA before 3/15.
I listed some of the threshold numbers in post 614.
It’s starting to look really discouraging. All our young stars who we thought were going to compete for the nomination and Donald freakin’ Trump screws it all up for us.
ETA: Looks like I should have kept reading - ninja’d by CarnalK, with concurrence from Martin. I’ll leave this here for sake of the additional detail, but looks like you guys already got the general idea.
No, you misunderstand how they do it. Texas has 155 delegates: 108 chosen by congressional district results, 44 chosen proportionately by statewide results (among those who clear the 20% cutoff), and 3 automatic delegates (unclear).
So the big thing is the allocation of those 108 delegates tied to the CD winners.
And how that works is:
- If a candidate gets >50% of the vote in a CD, he gets all 3 delegates for that district.
- If nobody gets 50%, then whoever gets the most votes in the district gets 2 of the 3 delegates, and the runner-up gets 1.
(#2 also has a caveat for if nobody gets >20% of the vote in a CD, but with only 5 candidates left, that’s pretty unlikely, even given early voting for candidates who’ve since dropped out.)
Wikipedia describes Texas as a ‘winner take most’ state, and that’s a good way of putting it. A Cruz win in Texas would likely gain him ~100 of Texas’ delegates.
Here’s how I gamed it out in the Super Tuesday thread:
FWIW, the other SEC states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee) that vote on Super Tuesday are fairly similar to Texas in terms of how they allocate their delegates. So the difference between being the 35 or one of the 25’s in a 35-25-25-8-7 split of the votes in one of those states is really quite big.
The key to hurting Trump is attacking his perceived strength of being a great businessman, for example the Trump University attack that Rubio initiated in the debate. Attacks on his use of illegal immigrants also undercut his key strength.
Other lines of attack can be used in particular states, for example his abortion flip-flops in socially conservative states, his lack of electability in more moderate states.
The party also needs to persuade Jeb to swallow his pride ,endorse Rubio and perhaps campaign for him in Florida against Trump. They also need to persuade Kasich to drop out soon and endorse Rubio. The winner-take-all primaries in Florida and Ohio on March 15 are obviously the key to the whole race.
Martin Hyde corrected himself in post 692.
Personally, I just rough estimated that Texas will go 100 to the winner, 50 to the runners up since both statewide and district are split 2/3 winner, 1/3 second. How split up that 50 is depends on whether Rubio can get second anywhere.
A poll out of Georgia has Trump at 45%! Probably an outlier, but they have the same WTA at the 50% mark that Texas has.
It’s the natural result of seven years of being a post-policy party, a ‘party of No’, a party that is against whatever the Dems are for, updated daily.
Knowledge is not needed or even appreciated; the right stances and gestures and alpha-maleness is all that is required.
While it’s true that to a fair extent, Donald Trump is sui generis, that it’s hard to imagine who else could have pulled this off, y’all created the space that he moved into and took over.
Lemme introduce you guys. Dr. Frankenstein, monster. Monster, Frankenstein.
I got to disagree with you again, Lantern. I don’t think hiring Polish illegals 30 years ago or hammering on his well known bankruptcies is going to do the trick.
And I also can’t be confident that Florida and Ohio are the main key. Both those together are only slightly more delegates than Texas. Even if Rubio manages to snag both of those (and he’s waaay behind in polls in both) it’ll still leave him far behind the gains Trump is expected to get Tuesday.
Yeah, I saw that after I’d posted. Hence the ETA up top. :smack:
Yeah, my guesstimate was 96 for Cruz; basically the same place. If Trump and Rubio get about the same number of votes in Texas, then they should divide the other 50 delegates fairly evenly, but if Rubio’s a fairly distant third, then Trump will pick up practically all 50.
And who knows? Survey USA and Monmouth U. are two of the pollsters rated most highly by 538 (A and A-, respectively), but SUSA has C-T-R at 32-32-17 in Texas, while Monmouth has it 38-23-21. And both polls were taken since SC.
The 45% pollster is Survey USA again, so they’ve got cred. Also, another pollster this week had Trump at 41% in Georgia, so 45% isn’t away from everyone else. (The other pollster was ResearchNow - ‘who??’ - but they do at least corroborate SUSA’s result to some extent.)
It’s gonna be fun if Trump actually clears a WTA threshold somewhere. Can I say I’m enjoying the hell out of this GOP primary season, regardless of what I think of the three apparent finalists? Because I am.