A total of 172 delegates are at stake in Tuesday’s primaries in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware and Maryland. That is as many as in California, and many more delegates than were up for grabs in recent closely-watched contests in Wisconsin and New York. Donald Trump is expected to win most of them.
Chad Sweet, chairman of the Cruz campaign, admitted as much in an on-the-record conference call with his national security team Sunday afternoon. “We recognize it’s going to be a tough stretch for us on Tuesday,” Sweet said. “We knew all along … that this particular stretch of states in the Northeast was going to be probably the low point of the campaign in terms of our ability to win delegates.”
In particular, Sweet conceded that Pennsylvania, with 71 delegates the biggest prize on Tuesday, “will likely go mostly for Trump.” Trump is ahead of Cruz by 19.5 points in the RealClearPolitics average of Pennsylvania polls.
That was Sunday afternoon. A few hours later, Cruz announced an audacious strategy — a joint enterprise with rival John Kasich to try to move past coming defeats and stop Trump in primaries in Indiana, Oregon, and New Mexico on May 3, May 17 and June 7, respectively. Kasich will pull out of Indiana, to open the way for Cruz to have a clean shot at Trump, while Cruz will pull out of Oregon and New Mexico to give Kasich a clean shot there.
“To ensure that we nominate a Republican who can unify the Republican Party and win in November, our campaign will focus its time and resources in Indiana and in turn clear the path for Gov. Kasich to compete in Oregon and New Mexico,” Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe announced Sunday night. “And we would hope that allies of both campaigns would follow our lead. In other states holding their elections for the remainder of the primary season, our campaign will continue to compete vigorously to win.”
“Due to the fact that the Indiana primary is winner-take-all statewide and by congressional district, keeping Trump from winning a plurality in Indiana is critical to keeping him under 1,237 bound delegates in Cleveland,” Kasich campaign manager John Weaver announced in a near-simultaneous statement. “We are very comfortable with our delegate position in Indiana already, and given the current dynamics of the primary there, we will shift our campaign’s resources west and give the Cruz campaign a clear path in Indiana.”
Kasich, who has won just one state (his home state of Ohio), has amassed 148 delegates (1,089 short of the nomination), and has won 267,263 fewer votes than Marco Rubio, who quit the race more than five weeks ago, has long been mathematically eliminated from any chance at winning the nomination before the GOP convention. Cruz, who has won 11 contests, amassed 559 delegates, and has won 2,382,967 fewer votes than Trump, will be eliminated by all counts on Tuesday. Their new pact is an attempt not to win but to keep Trump below those 1,237 delegates he needs to win the nomination going into Cleveland.
Trump immediately labelled the new Cruz-Kasich pact a desperate move. “Wow, just announced that Lyin’ Ted and Kasich are going to collude in order to keep me from getting the Republican nomination. DESPERATION!” the frontrunner tweeted Sunday night.
Trump has repeatedly charged that the Republican nominating system is rigged, that the rules allow a trailing candidate like Cruz to try to poach Trump delegates in case there is more than one ballot at the convention. Now, the candidate who calls the system rigged faces two opponents, neither of whom has a chance to win outright before the convention, joining together in a scheme to stop Trump. It didn’t take Trump long to issue a statement pressing his case. “Because of me, everyone now sees that the Republican primary system is totally rigged,” Trump said in an email sent just before 1:00 a.m. Monday. “When two candidates who have no path to victory get together to stop a candidate who is expanding the party by millions of voters, (all of whom will drop out if I am not in the race) it is yet another example of everything that is wrong in Washington and our political system.”
Meanwhile, leaders of the #NeverTrump movement were happy to see the new anti-Trump alliance. “Encouraging,” said Tim Miller of Our Principles PAC. Rory Cooper, of NeverTrump PAC, said, “Whether you support Ted Cruz or John Kasich, a second ballot at the convention is imperative to stopping Donald Trump. We’re happy to see the Kasich and Cruz campaigns strategically using their resources to deny Donald Trump delegates where they are in the strongest position to do so.”
The developments raise new questions about Cruz, Kasich, and the #NeverTrump effort, which seem to have effectively merged into a single entity, at least for the moment. Politicians always say voters want to hear what a candidate is for, not what he’s against. But now, Cruz-Kasich-#NeverTrump, with no chance of going to Cleveland a winner, are pursuing an entirely negative goal: to keep Trump below 1,237. What do they promise voters if they succeed? Who knows? They’ll figure that out later.
And to pursue this entirely negative goal, Cruz-Kasich-#NeverTrump propose to rely on the chapters of the Republican Party rulebook that are the least representative of the voters’ will. Already, polls suggest that a solid majority of Republican voters believe that, if no one reaches 1,237 going into the convention, the nomination should go to the candidate with the most delegates. Cruz-Kasich-#NeverTrump pledges that if delegates keep Trump short of 1,237, something good will happen, delivered at some point in the future by some candidate who may or may not currently be running.
Maybe it will work. Or maybe it is the biggest too-clever-by-half operation in the history of American politics. In the meantime, the new Cruz-Kasich-#NeverTrump united front gives Trump the opportunity not just to slam the system as rigged, but to offer the only positive message in the campaign at this moment: Join us. Come with us. Together, we’ll make America great again.
Maybe you believe every word of it, or maybe you think it’s all BS. But it’s a real invitation, at a time when the other candidates are all about strategy.
