Article from 538.com building on (and citing) the above Politico article: It’s Probably First Ballot Or Bust For Donald Trump At The GOP Convention.
Everyone seems to think Trump will run as a 3rd party guy if denied the Repub nomination. Thought I read that most states closed off 3rd parties being on the ballot if not applied for well before the Repub convention. True?
Would Trump then run as a write-in?
We’ve talked this issue a time or two in other threads.
The short answer is most states have late enough deadlines that the calendar isn’t the big obstacle. Texas is an exception with an early deadline, and given it’s huge weight in the electoral college that’s a definite handicap to Trump running 3rd party de novo.
The bigger challenge is that to get on the ballot as a 3rd party candidate you have to collect a metric shitload of registered voter signatures in each and every state. The threshold numbers vary by state, but the number isn’t small anywhere.
Collecting all those sigs takes a large ground organization. It takes much more than just a website. Trump mostly lacks the sheer number of organized bodies spread out across the country to do the job in the (adequate but not generous) time available. Him starting to set that organization up would also be a huge tell to the Republicans that he’s about to bail on them. Which they might now think is worse than him staying.
All these issues are why one of the other theories is that instead of setting up his own third party to run, Trump will “buy” one of the existing third parties. E.g. the Libertarians are already going to be on all 50 state ballots. If Trump bails from the Republicans to the Libertarians and becomes *their *nominee that solves his ballot access problems.
Whether there’s anything in it for the existing Libertarian rank and file or their honchos is a different question.
Well, attention. Press. Publicity. Shame.
Bumping the thread to cover recent events.
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Cruz has won Wisconsin, 36-6.
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Cruz is now even or even ahead in some national polls.
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As others have recently noted in the thread: Cruz is way ahead of Trump in ensuring that his people are going to the convention as delegates, regardless of who they are bound to, meaning it’s quite implausible for Trump to win unless he gets to 1,237 on the first ballot, and
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He’s not going to. This article is an excellent walkthrough of the road from here on out. A bit overoptimistic for Cruz on the 4/26 races, IMHO but solid on the whole.
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Rule 40(b) will likely stay in place, meaning it’s a two-man race:
“I haven’t heard a whole lot of horsepower out there looking for a change on the rule,” Priebus says. “A few people speaking out in the wilderness, but the truth is there is no, at least at this point, groundswell to start changing the rules at the convention.”
Ergo: the prediction of Cruz on the second ballot is looking better and better.
Probably won’t be posting for a couple weeks. On vacation, and the Rockies in springtime are more fun than politics.
Cruz is apparently winning the groundwork battle in Colorado. (Colorado Republicans did not have a presidential preference in their March 1st caucuses.)
Cruz has won all three delegates from both the 1st and 6th Congressional districts in district conventions. Thursday and Friday have the remainder of the district conventions, and the state convention is Saturday.
Cruz delegates waver as Trump gains momentum
Seems a number of Cruz’s “loyal” unpledged delegates may see it as preferable to avoid a contested convention and vote Trump first ballot. This could bump Trump over the majority if he manages to at least get within a short distance.
Oh, just a tad overoptomistic. Here’s a hint though, when something like this is included:
you can be pretty sure objectivity has gone out the window.
The premise of this thread looks dumber every day.
I certainly wouldn’t call it dumb. In fact his prediction two months ago could be fairly described as the general wisdom of last month, until New York et al. But it took a little wishful thinking to use the word “inevitability”.
That’s because “general wisdom” was dominated by normie shill neoliberals and inverse-Trotskyite neoconservatives who refused to look at what the polls plainly indicated which showed that outside of the moralistic Upper Midwestern/Plains/Mormonland states, TRUMP had an overwhelming advantage and instead indulged in their anti-democratic and elitist fantasies of Zorro-excuse me I mean Ted Cruz-riding in to save the day.
Well thanks for the politco crap verbiage, but the reason it was the general wisdom was actually because TRUMP!‘s path to 1237 was tight until New York and Cruz was definitely beating him in the delegate fights. So while it may make you feel smart to vomit a bunch of jargon it doesn’t make you look smart. Just sayin’.
Then let me put it in the simplest language possible. The election only appeared “tight” because the states that were voting were states that demographics and polls indicated were good states for Cruz. At the same time, polls were already showing TRUMP had a good lead in New York and other Mid-Atlantic states.
So you are predicting that Trump will blow way past 1237? Where do you think he’ll end up?
Yeah, the inverse-Trotskyite neocons. Those guys! :rolleyes:
Maybe you should try reading your posts aloud before hitting submit?
You can’t trust those guys.
The primary has never appeared “tight”. It’s been quite a while since anyone has thought that Trump would not win a healthy plurality of the pledged delegates.
What has been in question is whether he could win a first-ballot majority, and despite your desire to appear too cool for school, up until very recently that has been “tight”. Cruz’ groundwork in having unpledged delegates selected who would support him in the first round, and having delegates selected who are pledged to someone else in the first round who would support him in later rounds, was really excellent.
Now, following Trump’s smashing victories in the Northeast (which were expected, but not 60%), it’s not so close. Cruz and Kasich needed to hold Trump under 50%, and to take many more districts than they did. Many of the unpledged state delegates from Pennsylvania have said they’ll vote for Trump. It is only now that one can see the Republicans moving past denial, anger, bargaining, and depression into acceptance.
To argue that Trump’s nomination was a foregone conclusion two months ago is simply ludicrous, no matter how much you try to put a party dress on it.
Maybe. But the arguments made in the OP were easy to criticize even then and hindsight shows us that such criticism was not exactly unwarranted.
In point of fact, top-down planning may give new impetus to the pilot exercise in quality circles which should facilitate the current cohort in expunging the worker-mouse parasite paradigm. tRUMP, with the sub-regional dimension should be a negative regulating mechanism on the emerging meganomics syllabus.