How ‘Never Trump’ failed

Where Mitt Romney had to deal mainly with disaffected social conservatives supporting Rick Santorum and the libertarian armies mobilized by Ron Paul, Trump was opposed by top party leaders like Romney himself.

Yet Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee, knocking out his primary opponents before Hillary Clinton could put away Bernie Sanders. So why did #NeverTrump fail?

Let’s give some credit where it’s due: Trump read the Republican Party’s current mood well and had the element of surprise, since he had never followed through on his previous threats to run for president.

By stroke of luck or stroke of genius, Trump was right on two big questions: a famous person can get his message across with earned media rather than paid television ads; organic popularity can overwhelm methodical campaign organizations.

Little about the campaign went as planned. There was supposed to be an establishment primary and a conservative primary. The winner from each camp would be the two candidates for the Republican nomination, according to the theory.

Jeb Bush no doubt expected he would eventually win the way most establishment candidates do, especially once his allies raised $100 million early. Most everyone else thought they would run as an insurgent against Bush or some other establishment figure.

Trump upended all of this. Only Ted Cruz was nimble enough to come up with a plan B, which consisted of cozying up to Trump until he fizzled out and then capturing his base of supporters. But when Trump never imploded, this became like a strategy for getting the bear to eat you last.

The donors and Rolodex men who could have funded massive anti-Trump efforts early when they might have done some good also thought Trump was going to collapse on his own as late as December.

Consequently, the first anti-Trump super PACs were relatively low-budget operations run on the fly by Republican operatives who found the billionaire especially offensive to their sensibilities. With a few exceptions, reinforcements didn’t come until later, after Trump had already gotten a head start in the delegate hunt.

Another reason anti-Trump money and activism sat on the sidelines: disagreement over the best alternative. Cruz was often in the best position to stop Trump, but many prospective #NeverTrump backers either liked Marco Rubio better or regarded him as a much stronger general election candidate.

These Republicans were reluctant to do anything that would indirectly help Cruz and hoped that Rubio would rise instead. But some of them were too beholden to Bush, who lingered long past the point when it was clear his candidacy was a nonstarter, to do much to proactively help Rubio improve his position.

Rubio lost Florida, failing to do his part to stop Trump there. John Kasich won his home state of Ohio, but his activities were generally unhelpful to stop Trump efforts elsewhere, when they mattered at all.

When Cruz was finally the last man standing, the establishment’s support was still equivocal and often counterproductive. His sudden attacks on Trump seemed insincere after his past praise of the billionaire.

Before Cruz was mathematically eliminated from winning in the primaries, there was a fear that #NeverTrump was just using him to stop the reality TV star and would promptly dump him at a contested convention. (This wasn’t purely conspiratorial thinking — Cruz was definitely someone much of #NeverTrump never liked.)

Once Cruz was finally mathematically eliminated, his negative goal of keeping Trump below 1,237 became less appealing than actually voting for a candidate. His process-related arguments about delegates resonated less than Trump’s argument that the voters should decide the nomination democratically.

Ask Ron Paul: when you are talking about gathering delegates rather than winning big primary states, you are usually losing, even if you ultimately need a certain number of delegates to clinch the nomination.

Strategic anti-Trump voting probably padded Cruz’s margins in Wisconsin and Utah along with Kasich’s in Ohio. But overall, it was too complicated to work often enough.

Then there were problems with the anti-Trump advocates themselves, beyond their inability to settle on a candidate or impractical hopes that low-information voters would think more strategically.

They overestimated the extent to which they represented Republican opinion, even when polling and election results began to contradict their claims of speaking for 60-70 percent of GOP voters. They often argued that every vote cast for another candidate was an explicit anti-Trump vote — while pushing for a contested convention to nominate candidates who received an even lower percentage of the vote or not votes at all.

Conservative opinion leaders penning anti-Trump jeremiads sometimes got too personal, insulting not just the candidate but also his voters. All this did was reinforce Trump supporters’ grievances that political insiders, however loosely defined, treated them with contempt and believed they owned the Republican Party.

It was certainly understandable in some cases, because some anti-Trump conservatives were subject to vile and vicious attacks from Trump supporters on social media. But was it effective?

The most idealistic Trump detractors were convinced that the general electorate would be as spellbound by Rubio or Carly Fiorina as they were, despite these candidates’ limited appeal even among Republicans and the poor electoral track record of conservative dream candidates not named Ronald Reagan in the past.

Idealists deserve credit for being sincere in their convictions, at least. Some of the last-ditch anti-Trump efforts seemed less like real attempts to defeat the billionaire than the equivalent of affixing a “Don’t blame me, I voted for Harold Stassen” bumper sticker on your car.

Anti-Trump Republicans aren’t likely to give up their opposition to a candidate they not only disagree with on important issues but regard as uniquely unqualified to be president. While trying to minimize conservative votes and endorsements for Trump, they now need to convince fewer Republicans than they did in the primaries to have a real impact.

Then it will be Trump who won’t be able to afford so many mistakes.