“I think March 1 is already cooked,” said Scott Reed, the Republican insider now the senior political strategist with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in a phone conversation Monday afternoon. “It’s going to be a great day for Donald Trump.”
“The people I talk to sort of take for granted that [Trump] will win most of the March 1 states,” added Charlie Black, another veteran of many Republican campaigns.
Trump has already finished second in Iowa, won New Hampshire by a landslide, and taken South Carolina by double digits. And on March 1 come GOP primaries in Texas, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Vermont, Minnesota, and Massachusetts. Trump is leading in several of them.
If, as the experts predict, Trump can add a bunch of victories to his total, stopping him would become an enormous and unprecedented task. And there won’t be much time to do it, if it can be done at all.
So I wondered if there is just one week, just seven days before those March 1 “SEC Primary” contests, to stop Trump. The answer from the leaders of the Republican establishment is no.
“There are three weeks, through March 15, to get it right,” Fred Malek, another Republican stalwart, told me in an email exchange.
Yes, most see it as too late to stop Trump by March 1. For one thing, early voting has already begun; about one-third of the SEC primary votes will already have been cast by the time election day dawns. That, the thinking goes, helps Trump, not only because he leads in most of the polls but because early voters are casting votes in the glow of Trump’s South Carolina win.
For another thing, the field is still too big. Even after Jeb Bush’s withdrawal, there are still John Kasich and Ben Carson keeping the race from narrowing to a three-way contest between Trump and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. “Until the GOP race gets down to three candidates, and two end this vanity tour, Trump is like a locomotive roaring down the tracks,” Reed told me in an earlier email exchange.
So far, Kasich and Carson have shown no inclination to leave their “vanity tour.” As far as Carson is concerned, it’s fair to say that few completely understand his motives for staying in. But Kasich still has a “plausible” path forward, said Black, and will likely stay in through the Michigan primary on March 8 and, possibly, his home state of Ohio on March 15.
“You’re not going to convince anybody who’s still in to get out now,” said Black.
Given that, insiders don’t see any chance to stop Trump on March 1. The real deadline is March 15, with the Florida and Ohio primaries and the beginning of the GOP’s winner-take-all phase.
Of course, that’s still not a lot of time. One might think there would be a super-duper top priority, all-hands-on-deck, 24-7, stop-Trump effort going on right now, with lots of meetings and game plans and check-writing.
Or maybe not. “There’s no organized move that I’m aware of,” Malek told me. “Just a lot of folks surmising after South Carolina that we have only one alternative.”
That alternative, of course, is Rubio. And as Malek sees it, the job is not to destroy Trump but to build up a better option. “There is a sense of urgency, not to take anyone down, but to mount a concerned effort behind a candidate who has the proven capacity to govern effectively, and also the ability to win the general election,” said Malek. “Most activist Republicans and leading donors are skeptical of Trump or Cruz’s ability to triumph in November, and therefore want to see unity behind a single alternative.”
It’s a risky strategy, but it’s all the establishment has at this point. Back in 2008, when the protracted Democratic primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was beginning, Obama won Iowa and South Carolina while Clinton won New Hampshire and Nevada. Each had good reason to keep going.
Now, if Trump wins Nevada, it will be a pretty lopsided race. Nevertheless, the GOP veterans don’t see him prevailing in the end. “My only prediction is that Donald Trump has a long way to go to get the nomination,” said Charlie Black, “and I don’t think he’s going to get it.”
