The wide swath of Washington and New York Republicans and Republican-leaning pundits who really don’t want a Ted Cruz or Donald Trump presidency are moving deeper into denial. Their latest fantasy is that John Kasich can still become the GOP nominee. Never mind that Kasich has already been mathematically eliminated in the delegate race; that he has won just 1 of 29 states (his own); and that GOP voters have made it abundantly clear that they want an outsider candidate. In today’s Wall Street Journal, the usually sensible Daniel Henninger offers advice to Kasich on how he can still “win this.”
He can’t. First off, a contested convention isn’t going to result in Kasich’s getting the nomination. The wide swath of Trump and Cruz delegates aren’t going to go along with that. Besides, can you imagine the outrage if, after having made Trump or Cruz the winner of 27 of the first 29 states, and probably all of those still to come, the GOP establishment succeeds in rejecting both outsider candidates in favor of an insider who’s to the left of the party’s center? If you want a recipe for having Republican voters stay home in protest, handing Hillary Clinton the election, and causing the GOP to rip apart, it’s that.
Second, Kasich’s hanging around and prospering (by his standards) isn’t going to lead to a contested convention. It’s going to lead to Trump’s winning the nomination before the convention. If Kasich collects, say, between 20 and 25 percent of the remaining vote, Trump will need to win only about 40 percent of the vote from here out to get to 1,237 delegates, as he will then sweep most of the remaining, mostly winner-take-all, states. Trump has won 37 percent of the vote to date against a highly fragmented field. Is there any doubt he can win 40 percent against just two other competitors?
Trump couldn’t, however, easily win 51 percent of the vote versus Cruz in a head-to-head race. But the Republican establishment and its allies currently don’t seem inclined to test that notion. Instead, they’d rather deny reality and fantasize about Kasich, thus paving the way for a Trump-Hillary race.
Jeffrey H. Anderson, author of “The Main Street Tax Plan,” is a Hudson Institute senior fellow.
