One of four people — Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton — will probably become the next president. But as of today one can make a better case for why each likely will not be elected than will. Were he anyone else, Donald Trump, who has won New Hampshire by 21 points and South Carolina by 10 while losing by only five points in Iowa, would be described as being the runaway winner. But he isn’t exactly a usual candidate, and this isn’t a usual year.
Trump has a high floor of followers who will follow him anywhere. But his high floor isn’t getting any higher even as his low ceiling gets even lower. While he usually scores in the mid to low 30s, 39 percent of all Republicans say they will never support him, a number that has doubled most recently. Even while winning, he is being rejected by 65 percent to 70 percent of the voters, and he loses in polling in one-on-one matchups with Rubio and/or Ted Cruz.
When Cruz hit the ground running in 2013, he decided to bind deeply conservative voters to him by waging war on their less-than-conservative brethren, having listened a little too much to talk radio, which keeps on insisting there’s a sleeping, intense, deep red majority just longing to drink RINO blood. Unfortunately, it did not say that Republicans can’t win on the national stage without uniting the very and “somewhat” conservatives, and one shutdown later, Cruz found that the “somewhats” had vanished.
Rubio started out with a plan to finish three-two-one in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, his problem being that this turned out to be three, five, and two, which is less than impressive. He remains the only one of the other big four contestants who has not yet won a state. On the plus side, he is the one of the four who is not hated by millions, and the only one for whom a lot of bad things have begun to stop happening fast.
He had a near-death experience from which he rebounded, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie are out of the running, the attacks from the Bush PAC have stopped and endorsements and money are coming his way. He is the only one of the four who seems “nice,” — which means in this context not out-and-out vicious — which may turn out in the end to be a mixed blessing. How it is taken will be up to him.
“Nice” is the last word anyone has ever called Hillary Clinton, to whom the words “inauthentic,” “wooden,” “untrustworthy,” “inept” and “conniving” surely more aptly apply. Even her fans now think her dishonest; her capacity to blow a lead and dispirit an audience are matters of legend. The eight years since her last attempt to win power have done her no favors, linking her to Obama’s failed Middle East policies, the conflicts of interest with the Clinton Foundation, and of course with the server, the ticking time bomb which led to the FBI fracas, which may blow the whole thing to bits.
If the Republicans live with their own possible nightmare — that Trump may lose and storm out, taking his followers with him; or that he may win, causing his foes to defect or perhaps go third party — Democrats have to live with the possibility that a critical outcome, even without an indictment, could let her survive as the nominee but go into the general election too wounded to win it; or force her to leave at the very worst moment, with few valid options available. The scripts for the parties could barely seem bleaker. Who “wins” in this instance is anyone’s guess.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
