Donald Trump’s romp through the Republican presidential race has defied conventional political thinking, but I thought at least one basic electoral rule still rang true: in order to win, you need to get more votes than your opponents.
Alas, even this simple math no longer applies. As the Nevada caucus results rolled in, before second place was officially decided, the losing campaigns fired off memos accusing each other of being the biggest loser. (And they say that Trump is the only candidate with his own reality TV show.)
Ted Cruz’s camp taunted Marco Rubio: “Nevada, Rubio’s Firewall: The Place Where He Would Win Big.” Rubio, according to a December National Review story, “is going all in to win Nevada.” Oops!
Not to be outdone, Rubio’s team shot back, “Cruz Went Big In Nevada.” How big, Team Rubio? Over $800,000 between the campaign and a Cruz-aligned super PAC, comes the reply. “Check how much Senator Cruz and his allies invested into Nevada for the past year in the air and on the ground, only to be rejected yet again.”
John Kasich’s campaign didn’t want to be left out. “Marco Rubio stock is the ultimate insider bubble,” wrote Kasich senior adviser John Weaver, a veteran of the Jon Huntsman and John McCain 2000 juggernauts.
“Contrary to what his campaign is trying to portray, Senator Rubio just endured another disappointing performance despite being the highest spending candidate in Nevada,” Weaver added. “He also missed an opportunity to back up the notion that he can bring new people into the Republican Party or succeed above expectations in a diverse state. Republicans are now left to wonder whether investing in Marco Rubio is throwing good money after bad.”
Keep in mind that these missives were fired off before we even knew whether Cruz or Rubio had received the most votes. We were aware that they both received far fewer votes than Trump, that the winner of their race for second place was likely to have a victory margin of less than 1 percent, and that Kasich was going to finish behind Ben Carson, much less Rubio.
The campaigns’ outside supporters on social media had even less shame, flooding Twitter to demand that their opponents drop out to allow the party to coalesce around an anti-Trump alternative.
Seriously? This goes beyond normal expectations game trash talk.
Yes, there are good reasons to think Rubio or Cruz could beat Trump one-on-one. Some polls say so. (Kasich is a bit more of a stretch.) There are also reasons to doubt it.
But the idea that one candidate who is losing to the front-runner by 20 points should defer to another candidate who is losing by about the same margin because of minor differences between them that have varied state by state is laughable.
Cruz’s campaign has its problems. He appears headed for his third consecutive third place finish. He has now twice underperformed with evangelical and very conservative voters. That’s not good for a candidate whose entire strategy for winning not just the nomination but also the general election is predicated on rolling up big margins among these voters.
At the same time, Cruz has also won a state. Cruz received more votes in Iowa than Trump did. Rubio has beaten Trump nowhere. The Floridian trailed not only Cruz but Kasich and the dearly departed Jeb Bush for fifth place in New Hampshire. Rubio finished 0.2 percentage points ahead of Cruz in South Carolina.
On that basis Cruz is supposed to close up shop and endorse Rubio after only four states have voted? This seems particularly premature given that we don’t know which of the two senators is likelier to beat Trump in their home states or whether South Carolina is an anomaly for Cruz in the Southern primaries.
Earlier polling showed Cruz more competitive with Trump in the South. Maybe Bush dropping out changes that. But Rubio won’t get 100 percent of Bush’s votes and in some states the former Florida governor didn’t have that many to give.
All this is especially rich given that the whole reason we started chattering about Marcomentum in the first place is that Rubio finished third in Iowa. Now third place is disqualifying if that’s where Cruz winds up?
A Cruz-Rubio circular firing squad will certainly make life easier for Trump. But why believe either of these candidates can definitely unite the party against Trump if they can’t even separate themselves from each other in any significant way?
The way to win elections isn’t to exhort all your opponents to drop out. Even in the bizarro world in which Trump is the Republican front-runner, winning elections still requires you to get more votes than your opponents.
