Wisconsin take-aways: Time to bet on Cruz to become the GOP nominee
Yesterday’s Wisconsin primary might well go down in history as the day Donald Trump lost the Republican nomination. As with all of my take-aways columns, my designation of winners and losers is not based specifically on the percentage of votes or number of delegates won in yesterday’s Wisconsin primary, but rather on the progress each candidate made towards his long-term campaign objectives.
Ted Cruz: Yuge winner – Yesterday Ted Cruz defeated Donald Trump by over 15 points in a state that demographically seemed tailor-made for Trump with its large population of white blue-collar voters. Part of the importance of this result is that it indicates that Ted Cruz is becoming more broadly acceptable to mainstream voters and that those who are not already supporting Trump are unlikely to decide late to do so. But of even greater importance is that Cruz winning 33 of Wisconsin’s 36 delegates makes it very unlikely that Trump will be able to secure a majority of the delegates before the convention, which means that I now consider Cruz to be the most likely candidate to emerge as the Republican nominee.
Yes, I know that Trump still has a significant lead over Cruz in delegate count and will likely continue to have a lead over Cruz going into the convention. But in order to win the nomination, a candidate needs an outright majority of delegate votes at the convention. This year’s primary season has mostly been a referendum on Trump. The non-Trump delegates will be willing to support other non-Trump candidates on a second and subsequent ballots, but most of them will never support Trump. So, if Trump does not have an outright majority of delegates locked up on the first ballot, the only remaining question will be which not-Trump candidate will become the consensus candidate to secure the not-Trump majority and become the nominee. Ted Cruz holds the most leverage in that regard because (1) he will have, by far, the most delegates among the not-Trump candidates, and (2) some of his delegates, especially from the early primary states, are more motivated to support an “outsider” than a mainstream Republican candidate. This means that many of Cruz’s delegates, unlike delegates supporting the other not-Trump candidates, might actually switch to Trump if Cruz releases them. This fact gives Cruz the leverage to say at the convention that if we don’t want Trump, the nomination must go to him. That’s why the people saying that Cruz can’t become the nominee because he can’t reach 1,237 before the convention are wrong. Cruz doesn’t have to get to 1,237 before the convention. He just has to stop Trump from doing so. Cruz’s trouncing of Trump in Wisconsin very likely accomplished this objective, which, in my view, now makes Cruz the most likely candidate to win the nomination at the convention.
Donald Trump: Yuge loser – And yes, I love saying that. After months of Trump blocking out any possibility of a serious adult discussion of serious issues in this race for the most powerful office in the world, it is a yuge relief to finally be able to say that Trump is not likely to become the Republican Party’s last presidential nominee. Yes, he is likely to win New York, but his margin over Cruz there is shrinking and is likely to shrink further as Cruz maintains his momentum. If Cruz can keep Trump below 50%, it become even more likely that Cruz will win the nomination at an open convention. After all, Trump has yet to win a majority of the votes in any of the three-fourths of the states that have had their primaries or caucuses to date.
John Kasich: John Who? – Once again Kasich’s showing was so anemic that it wasn’t a factor. After coming in 4th in a 3-man race in Arizona two weeks ago, he came out of Wisconsin with no delegates. None. Zip. Zero. Nada. This from the guy who has been saying all along that we just needed to get to the Midwestern states for him to show his strength. The only person who thinks John Kasich is still in this race is John Kasich, and I’m not completely convinced that even he believes that.
The Democrats: Bernie Sanders just won his 7th victory out of the last 8 contests, and he has momentum headed into Hillary Clinton’s “home” turf of New York. But the fact remains that he can’t beat her unless he can convince the large majority of superdelegates to switch their allegiance from Hillary to him. Given that the whole reason the DNC has superdelegates is to prevent popular passions from saddling their party with an unelectable nominee like Sanders, it seems unlikely that this will happen. So Sanders has won great moral victories, but I continue to believe that those victories are Pyrrhic and that Hillary Clinton has the Democrat nomination locked up. The real question is how badly Hillary winning the nomination by virtue of superdelegate votes will divide and fracture her party.
What now? The next Republican primary is in New York in two weeks. Trump has a home-field advantage, and this presents his best, and maybe only, opportunity to win a majority of the votes in a state. That said, Cruz has been narrowing the gap in New York, and with the momentum of having trounced Trump in Utah two weeks ago and in Wisconsin yesterday, it is possible that Cruz could keep Trump to a mere plurality in New York as well. The following week sees primaries in five Northeastern states where Kasich once again claims to have strength. It will be interesting to see if he’s even a factor in those states by the time those elections are held. The bottom line is that Trump needs to win convincing majorities in all of the remaining states to secure the 1,237 delegates that he needs to win the nomination on the first ballot at the convention. It is highly unlikely that he will do so. That loud flatulent sound you’re hearing is the hot air coming out of Donald Trump’s deflating campaign.
