A contested convention is now the only plausible path for stopping Donald Trump from gaining the Republican nomination.
Tuesday’s wave of large primaries has clarified this reality: Sen. Ted Cruz, Trump’s closest rival, cannot realistically win the majority of delegates needed to capture the GOP nomination outright. But while Trump is in the best position to capture the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination, he could be prevented from doing so.
Here’s a bit of math. As of now, the Associated Press estimates that Trump has 621 delegates, Cruz has 396, and Gov. John Kasich has 138. But those numbers don’t include any delegates from Missouri, which was so close that the outcome has not been finalized, and only includes some from Illinois, where Trump won but the final congressional district totals haven’t been sorted out. Just for the sake of this exercise, let’s say that these delegates go 60/40 for Trump. (This will not be precise, but it will be a close enough approximation that it won’t affect the overarching point of this post. I will update as those numbers firm up.)
So, taking all of Missouri and Illinois into account, that would bring Trump to 679; Cruz to 435; and put Kasich at 138. There are only 983 delegates up for grabs between now and June 7, the final day of the primaries.
Even if you give Kasich all of the remaining delegates, he’d still be 116 short the required majority. In other words, he has no chance mathematically barring a contested convention.
Cruz isn’t mathematically eliminated, but he would have to win roughly 82 percent of remaining delegates to get to the majority. Put another way, that would mean that Cruz would have to hold Kasich and Trump to a combined total of 181 delegates for the remainder of the primary season. With contests still to come in New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and New Jersey — all states that should be strong for Trump and potentially so for Kasich — it would be very implausible.
For Trump, the path to 1,237 is within closer reach, but by no means guaranteed. Under the above scenario, he’d need to win about 57 percent of remaining delegates. (Other estimates have him needing just above 54 percent.) Either way, it’s more than he’s averaged to date.
There are two schools of thought as to whether he’ll be able to achieve that. One school says that the remainder of the map is more favorable to him than Cruz, the upcoming states include more winner-take-all (or winner-take-most) contests, and that with fewer candidates in the race it will be easier for him to exceed the 50 percent threshold that triggers winner-take-all rules in several states. In addition, most of the remaining contests are primaries, in which Trump has tended to do better than in caucuses.
The other school says that Trump has yet to crack 50 percent anywhere, that now Cruz will be in a better position to consolidate the anti-Trump vote, and that Kasich may deprive him of delegates in the northeastern states.
There are a few additional complicating factors. One is that, as my colleague David Drucker has reported, most of Sen. Marco Rubio’s 163 delegates are now unbound following his decision to drop out of the race, subject to rules governing individual states. There are also a few states that don’t have formal presidential preference votes, instead electing delegates who could be swayed to support different candidates. In some places, delegates have been elected that are “uncommitted” to any specific candidate. In addition, there are 168 delegates made up of Republican National Committee members (three for each state and territory). Though they are bound to the state winner, if they don’t show up to the vote on the convention floor, that winner is deprived of delegates. So, that does allow for some degree of horse-trading.
Of course, even if Trump fails to crack 1,237, he’ll likely go into the Republican convention with a substantial delegate lead. The question is whether Republican regulars will be willing to risk a backlash by Trump’s voters to deny him the nomination.
Another tricky part confronting anti-Trump conservatives is that there’s been talk of a third party challenge if Trump is the nominee. The idea would be to give anti-Trump Republicans a candidate to support, both for moral reasons and to provide them a reason to show up to the polls in hopes of saving the House and Senate. But the longer they wait, the harder it will be for anti-Trump Republicans to mount a credible third party effort, given ballot access requirements. It would be, for instance, likely too late if they waited for the end of the primary season on June 7 and definitely too late after the convention in late July to mount a challenge. So there may be a parallel effort to ready a third party bid the same time Republicans try to deprive Trump of a majority to win the nomination.
Setting that asside, what’s become clear is that as far as the Republican nomination is concerned, it’s now contested convention or bust for the anti-Trump movement.
