Glenn Beck’s Foolish Case Against a Contested Convention

Ted Cruz’s supporters have been furiously arguing this week that Marco Rubio and John Kasich should drop out of the GOP presidential race so that Ted Cruz can beat Donald Trump in a head-to-head match-up.

From the perspective of anyone-but-Trump voters, there are good arguments both for and against the Cruz position. It mostly depends on whether Cruz in a two-man race would be more likely to defeat Trump in the delegate-rich contests after March 15—most of which are in blue and purple states—or whether a three- or four-man race is more likely to keep Trump from a majority of delegates.

But one argument Cruz supporters have been making in order to chase Rubio and Kasich from the field—that winning the nomination at a contested convention would be illegitimate—is as foolish as it is pernicious to efforts to stop Trump.

On ABC’s This Week program today, talk radio host Glenn Beck, a high-profile Cruz endorser and surrogate, suggested that Donald Trump is a lot like Adolf Hitler in 1929. Beck then argued that the Republican party should roll over and make Trump the nominee even if Trump fails to win a majority of delegates required to win the nomination.

“If [Trump] gets close enough and the GOP tries to play games, I won’t vote for Donald Trump ever, but I will stand with his right, because the people have spoken,” Beck said.

“You just said you don’t believe it’s fair to deny Donald Trump the nomination if he has the lead going in” to the convention, George Stephanopoulous said a little later in the interview. “Of course not,” Beck replied.

Beck argued that “the options of the party playing politics to break us apart at the convention” would lead the party “to civil war on the floor and quite honestly it could lead to civil war in the country.”

Contested conventions used to be routine in American politics. Why exactly should the Republican party hand Trump the nomination if he fails to win a majority of delegates? From where does the principle of electoral pluralitarianism come? Not the United States Constitution.

To become president of the United States, a candidate must win a majority of Electoral College votes. If a candidate fails to get a majority of electoral votes, it falls to the House of Representatives to choose the president from among the top three electoral vote recipients. If in November, Hillary Clinton wins 260 electoral votes and Mitt Romney and Donald Trump win a combined 278 electoral votes, would Glenn Beck say that a Republican-controlled House of Representatives is obliged to make Hillary Clinton the president of the United States? Of course not.

The principle behind requiring a candidate to win a majority of electoral votes to be president is the same principle behind requiring a candidate to win a majority of delegates to become the GOP presidential nominee. A candidate with a plurality will certainly argue that his plurality entitles him to the nomination, but the majority has no duty to bend to the will of the minority.

The decision by Beck and other Cruz supporters to cast a contested convention as dangerous and illegitimate is especially foolish in light of the fact that Cruz himself does not have a realistic path to 1,237 delegates in the primary season.

Cruz has been arguing this week that he is the only candidate who has a path to beating Trump outright in the primary season, but his campaign refuses to spell out Cruz’s path to the 1,237 delegates.

“[L]ess than 50 percent of delegates are awarded, this race is far from over,” Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier told me in an email on Saturday. But which specific states could Cruz win and get to an outright majority? “This race is now about delegates, less than half have been allocated, this race is far from over. I’m not discussing internal strategy, but we are running a national campaign to win, that would mean campaigning in all 50 states, and we will put the resources we need to be competitive in each one and earn the delegates required to win outright,” Frazier replied. It is not yet mathematically impossible for Cruz to win an outright majority but it would require a wildly optimistic scenario in which he wins Florida and runs the table in almost every blue state that votes after March 15.

On Sunday, I asked Cruz’s spokeswoman if Cruz agrees with Glenn Beck that Trump should get the nomination if he wins a plurality of delegates. She has not replied.

It’s obvious why Cruz would want to talk up his chances of being the only candidate who can beat Trump and he may in fact be in the best position to beat Trump. But there’s a very good chance that Cruz and his supporters are making Cruz’s own path to the nomination more difficult by portraying a contested convention as dangerous and illegitimate.

Related Content