Ted Cruz has a problem that a win in Indiana Tuesday may or may not be able to fix.
Not only might he be unable to stop Donald Trump from winning the 1,237 delegates needed to win the Republican presidential nomination on the first ballot, but Cruz is now so far behind Trump that it will detract from the credibility of a contested convention choosing anyone else even if he is still able to force one.
The Tea Party senator from Texas is well ahead of John Kasich, but is now in Kasich territory. He will likely need hundreds of delegates to switch in order to push him over the top.
That’s not really what Republicans had in mind.
Most reasonable contested convention scenarios assumed a certain degree of closeness in the race. “Donald is going to come out with a whole bunch of delegates,” Cruz explained in February. “We will come out with a whole bunch of delegates.”
Cruz is now 431 delegates behind Trump and 672 short of a majority. He has won 3.2 million fewer votes while Trump’s tally is now higher than Mitt Romney’s at the end of the 2012 primaries.
Are Republicans really still contemplating handing Ted Cruz the nomination in Cleveland? Or worse, Kasich who has won only Ohio? Or some white knight who has received zero votes?
“Those are the rules!” anti-Trump Republicans exclaim. In widely misinterpreted comments, Marco Rubio argued that as a private organization it’s up to GOP delegates to decide the nomination.
“That’s the meaning of being a delegate,” he said, “is choosing a nominee who can win.”
But the delegates’ role in the nomination process has largely been a formality for forty years. The American public has come to understand their primary votes’ as deciding the major party nominees. And in practice, that is how it has now worked for decades.
Winning candidates sometimes pad their margins with parliamentary maneuvers designed at getting more delegates. Protest candidates like Ron Paul have used delegate accumulation to try to increase their influence on the convention.
Those machinations don’t really alter the outcome of who walks out of the convention with the presidential nomination, however.
There’s a reason Trump has been railing against the “rigged” Republican nominating process.
Like most things Trump says, many of his complaints are exaggerated and even dishonest. The rules were certainly not written to harm his prospects (the convention rules may turn out to be another story).
In fact, Trump has been helped as much by the system as he has been hurt by it. The Acela primaries are a case in point.
He is now in a much better position to get to 1,237 because these Democratic Northeastern states are delegate-heavy and winner-take-most, usually to the benefit of the establishment candidate.
Trump has a bigger percentage of delegates than he has won of the popular vote. So even though Cruz has been eating his lunch at the state and local GOP conventions that are essentially delegate-gathering fests, Trump has been able to wipe those gains out by winning most of the big primaries.
There’s also a whiny quality to many of Trump’s process protestations. My personal (least) favorite is when he says it’s “unfair” that he still has to run against two candidates while Hillary Clinton has only one major challenger.
But Trump’s argument is much closer to the average American’s understanding of how elections are decided. And his margin over Cruz is now so big that it really would require a bigger deciding role for delegates than we have generally seen in the modern, small-d democratic primary process.
“It’s nice to win the delegates with the votes,” Trump crowed after rolling up over 60 percent in New York.
“Mr. Cruz has no democratic path to the nomination,” the billionaire wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “He has been mathematically eliminated by the voters.”
Initially, this looked like a strategy to counterbalance #NeverTrump support for Cruz. ‘These Republicans are threatening to bolt the party if I’m nominated,’ Trump appeared to be saying.
‘I’m guaranteeing my voters will bolt if I don’t win because I’m going to tell them the whole process was illegitimate.’
With Cruz and Kasich lagging behind, even many Republican leaders are forced to concede that the billionaire would now have the stronger argument.
What would that argument be? CBS News’ Will Rahn gave us a preview:
The argument from the other side will be much more complicated and obtuse: You may not have known this, but the guy who wins the most of everything is ultimately at the mercy of a faceless mass of delegates, some of whom can be essentially bribed, and therefore giving the nomination to another candidate is fair game.
The 1976 contested convention between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan was closer than Trump versus Cruz. And it still was won on the first ballot by the Republican who had entered with the most delegates, most state wins and most votes.
Going back to the pre-1976 method of letting party bosses sort it all out on the convention floor isn’t a small ask.
Maybe it’s not quite as big as Queen Elizabeth II suddenly exercising never formally repealed theoretical powers to veto bills passed by parliament and sack the prime minister.
The United Kingdom has that whole unwritten constitution thing, after all.
Nevertheless, the convention delegates’ role has for decades been as much of a formality as the queen’s in governance.
We live in a much more democratic political culture today. Becoming president without winning the popular vote has always been constitutional, but it would now be controversial even without Bush v. Gore or Ralph Nader as spoiler.
In 2008, Democrats engaged in complicated arguments about cumulative primary popular vote scenarios involving Clinton and Barack Obama that had never previously been understood to matter at all.
The delegates would regain their power at the precise time faith in the Republican establishment is at an all-time low and its preferred candidates were all rejected by the voters. Some GOP voters don’t even like the alleged Cruz-Kasich alliance.
And it would all clearly be happening because influential Republicans didn’t like the outcome of the election.
Yes, Trump is at risk of a contested convention because he is a weak front-runner. He is facing higher than normal intraparty opposition at this phase of the campaign.
The alternative is to nominate candidates from other factions of the party that have demonstrated that they are even weaker, people who have been rejected by an even higher percentage of Republicans.
For all the talk of Trump’s inability to win in November, national polling shows Trump with comparable support to Clinton on the Democratic side, with Cruz and Kasich not doing as well as Bernie Sanders.
There are only two reasons that anyone still seriously discusses a contested convention. First, many Republicans regard Trump as an unworthy and un-conservative potential president. And the polling data suggests he would likely be a big loser in the general election against the Democrats.
Both are good arguments for opposing Trump, though the second would seem to limit the damage of the first.
Yet the perception that party leaders don’t listen to Republican voters is why Trump, who may not even need Indiana anymore, is winning in the first place.
A contested convention will require Cruz to make the primaries much more of a contest.
