WhatFinger

The numbers don't lie, but egos often reject them anyway.

RCP's Sean Trende: Kasich staying in basically guarantees Trump will be the nominee

By Dan Calabrese ——--March 18, 2016

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I guess this is gut check time for John Kasich's ego. Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics is very good at crunching numbers and analyzing electoral trends, and he's taken a look at what remains of the Republican primary race under two scenarios. One has John Kasich staying in to the bitter end as he has vowed to do. The other has him getting out sooner rather than later. And if Kasich is as appalled as he claims to be at the prospect of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, let's just say his determination to press on is at odds with that position. Or more to the point, nothing does more to cement a Trump victory than Kasich staying in. In fact, according to Trende, it all but guarantees it:
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To see how this plays out, I ran two different scenarios in our delegate calculator. I won’t give you the specifics, but the general idea is this: I generally gave Trump 40 percent of the vote, to Cruz’s 35 percent and Kasich’s 25 percent. In New England, I gave Trump 60 percent of the vote to Kasich’s 25 percent and Cruz’s 15. In West Virginia, I gave Trump 60 percent, Cruz 25 percent and Kasich 15 percent. I also skipped Colorado, North Dakota, and American Samoa, since their delegations are unbound. Now, this obviously isn’t exactly how things will shake out in the real world – Trump would probably win more delegates in New York than the 60 percent estimate above suggests, but I’m not sure he would really run as well in Connecticut or Utah as I’ve assumed. There will probably be some Great Plains states where Cruz will run up the score. The point is to just set some sort of baseline, so that we can get a sense of how these things work. I then re-ran the scenario without Kasich, allocating 70 percent of his vote to Cruz and 30 percent to Trump. The outcome is fairly stark. Under the first scenario, Trump wins 1,296 delegates and clinches the nomination on the last day of primary voting. Under the second, Kasich-less scenario, however, Trump has 1,125 delegates, while Cruz collects 899. Given that under the second scenario, Cruz rattles off a string of wins at the end, and given the fact that Rubio’s and Kasich’s 300 delegates would probably disproportionately gravitate toward Cruz, this would likely be enough deny Trump the nomination.
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This is how I've seen it for weeks, although I have certainly not done an analysis as detailed as Trende's. This really comes down to what's important to John Kasich. He has a lot to say about how Trump is unfit for the presidency, would be a disaster as the nominee, etc. If that's what he really believes and nothing is more important to him than that, he gets out. Right quick. For all the reasons Trende outlines above. But is that really what Kasich cares about the most? Or does he have just as much disdain (or nearly as much) for Ted Cruz? Or is he eating up all the nonsense about how he's "the adult in the room" amidst all the right-wing crazies? Is his ego so enjoying the oh-so-high-minded newspaper endorsements that he just can't let go of the ghost, even though he has no serious chance of getting anywhere near Trump in the delegate count? Or does Kasich still cling to the idea that he can somehow go into a brokered convention and emerge as the compromise choice for the nomination? Because if that's what he thinks, I'd suggest Trump's riot prediction (which I for one think he meant figuratively) is a lot more likely to come true under that scenario than under one in which Trump had a plurality, but Cruz was close, and a second- or third-ballot decision gave the nomination to Cruz. Then you could at least recognize that the delegates made the choice of one of the strongest contenders. If Kasich is third - and it would likely be a distant third - and is handed the nomination at a brokered convention engineered by party bigwigs, that's when the vast majority of primary voters are going to feel like they just got a big middle finger from the GOP. And yes, that is as likely as anything else to make Hillary president. Kasich really needs to face two difficult facts here: 1. He has no chance of being the nominee except under a highly corrupt scenario in which a back-room deal is cut that enrages the base and seriously wounds the party. 2. By staying in, he is going to make Trump the nominee. If that really horrifies him as much as he claims, then there's only one thing to do. Quit and endorse Cruz. And if Kasich won't do that, then can everyone please stop calling him the "adult in the room"? Because no one is acting more childish than he is.

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Dan Calabrese——

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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