Ted Cruz: No, thanks, on a contested convention

As I write this, Ted Cruz has just won the caucuses in Kansas and finished a pretty good overall Saturday in which he inched to within 83 delegates of Donald Trump in the nomination race. The count now stands at 378 for Trump and 295 for Cruz, with Rubio still lagging way behind at 123 and John Kasich barely registering at 34. Strategically, that might explain why Cruz is the only Trump rival who is rejecting any notion of a contested convention to take the nomination away from Trump - if it comes to that. When Cruz says the only real way to beat Trump is to beat him at the ballot box, the numbers tell you pretty clearly that he's the only candidate who has any chance of doing that.

But that doesn't mean Cruz is insincere. It's hard to argue substantively with a word of this:

"Any time you hear someone talking about a brokered convention it is the Washington establishment in a fevered frenzy. They're really frustrated because all of their chosen candidates, all of their golden children, the voters keep rejecting. And so they seized on this master plan," Cruz said mockingly at the conference in Maryland. "We go to a brokered convention and the D.C. power brokers will drop someone in who is exactly to the liking of the Washington establishment. If that happens we will have a manifest revolt on our hands." The strategy, floated by Republican elites such as as Mitt Romney and supported by many Republican strategists, involves starving Trump of delegates by encouraging voters to support rivals best-suited to win particular states, such as Rubio in his home state of Florida and Governor John Kasich in his home state of Ohio. Cruz wasn't sold. "If you want to beat Donald Trump here's how you do it: You beat Donald Trump with the voters," he said.

---

Former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina made a similar argument. "If we want to defeat Donald Trump, we cannot turn to the establishment once again and ask them to guide the citizenry to the right answer," she said in prepared remarks. "If we want defeat Donald Trump, we must defeat him at the ballot box, by offering citizens conservative solutions to the problems in their lives."

He's right. First of all, if we got to a brokered convention, there's no guarantee Cruz or any of the other existing choices would get the nod. It's entirely possible party leaders might try to foist someone like Mitt Romney on us. (By the way, while I was as unimpressed as Rob with Romney's attempted takedown of Trump, I like Romney overall and think he would have made a very good president. But there is clearly no support for him among Republican primary voters and trying to shove Romney down people's throats would clearly be a disaster.) Second, if Trump supporters feel that Trump earned the nomination fair and square only to see it yanked away from him by the dreaded "establishment," you'll see the biggest exodus of would-be Republican voters in the history of presidential politics, and yes, that would make Hillary president. And need I remind you yet again, we do not want that. Third, there is plenty of time left for Cruz to overtake Trump in the delegate race. Look what he was able to do just on Saturday with a relatively small amount of activity going on. But there are differing views on how it gets done. The party establishment and D.C. pundit types seem to be coalescing around a strategy that says Cruz, Rubio and Kasich should all stay in so as to deny Trump delegates wherever possible, thus preventing him from winning a clear majority of 1,237 via the primary/caucus process. The success of that strategy means Kasich wins Ohio and takes the 66 delegates that could have gone to Trump, while Rubio does the same with the 99 delegates in Florida. And so on and so on. And here's the problem with that: There's no guarantee either one happens. As of now Rubio is trailing badly in Florida. And if either man fails to win these states where his job is supposed to be to deny Trump delegates, then the likely winner in said states - as a result of the splitting of the votes - is Trump. And even if the strategy does work, you still could end up with Trump holding a plurality going into the convention. What then? A brokered convention - the very thing Cruz rightly predicts will lead to a mass revolt. I don't know if the establishment insists on this strategy because they don't really like Cruz all that much, or because they want to control the outcome of a brokered convention, or both. But Cruz is right. The best way to defeat Trump - and the one most likely to work - is to make it a two-man race between Trump and Cruz. Of course, if that happens, then the GOP establishment is accepting that bad boy obstructionist Ted Cruz is their guy, and Lindsey Graham really needs to shut up about how other senators wouldn't object to his murder. The GOP is very screwed up right now, but that has to do with a lot more than just Donald Trump.

---

---