Where stands the Republican race after March 8, when Donald Trump won the Michigan and Mississippi primaries and the Hawaii caucus and Ted Cruz won the Idaho primary?
Obviously it was a good night for Donald Trump, much better than the five Saturday/Sunday contests in which he narrowly won two states (Louisiana primary, Kentucky caucuses), lost two by wide margins to Ted Cruz (Kansas and Maine caucuses) and was shut out in a third dominated by Marco Rubio (Puerto Rico primary).
By my count, that means that in the March 5-8 contests Trump won 124 delegates, Cruz 124, Rubio 41 and Kasich 27. My guess is that in the March 10 contests in the Virgin Islands (9 delegates) and the March 12 contests in Guam (9 delegates) and D.C. (19 delegates), Cruz, who has been organizing the territories, and Rubio, who is strong inside the Beltway, will win more delegates than Trump.
Thus Trump’s authentically good showing March 8 does not guarantee him the 1,237 delegates needed for the nomination. And there is evidence that his support falls well short of a majority in the most recent national polls from NBC/WSJ (30 percent) and ABC/Washington Post (34 percent). The question is whether the potential anti-Trump majority can be rallied to stop him visibly short of 1,237.
The Mitt Romney strategy — vote for the strongest anti-Trump candidate in your state — certainly could do that and there is evidence that many Republicans are voting accordingly (the fall-off from poll standings of Marco Rubio in Michigan, for example). But Ted Cruz is not cooperating. He is running ads against Marco Rubio in his home state of Florida and this morning rolled out Carly Fiorina to endorse him in Miami). And Cruz has this going for him: significant second places in the NBC/WSJ and ABC/WaPo polls as well as in the Michigan and Mississippi primaries.
The focus now shifts to the March 15 primaries, starting with the winner-take-all contests in John Kasich’s Ohio (66 delegates) and Marco Rubio’s Florida (99 delegates). The RealClearPolitics average of the three March polls there have Trump at 39 percent, Kasich at 34 percent, Cruz at 15 percent and Rubio at 7 percent.
If you look at the 2012 Republican primaries, Ohio was the toughest Great Lakes state for Mitt Romney; he won by just 1 point, 38 to 37 percent over Rick Santorum. That’s because the Ohio Republican primary electorate tends to be more downscale than those of its neighbors; the state has had very little population growth over the past 40 years and its affluent suburbs and exurbs are a relatively small percentage of its population. #NeverTrump advocates are lucky to have a candidate like Kasich, who with his modest background, ethnic ancestry and local popularity is a better fit for the state than Rubio or Cruz. He looks to have a good chance to win, although finishing 8,000 votes behind Cruz in the race for second place doesn’t help.
In Florida the chances of #NeverTrump are dicier. Recent polling shows Trump, with 40 percent, farther ahead of Rubio (24 percent), with Cruz not so far behind (17 percent) and Kasich just hanging in (8 percent). Anti-Trump super PAC ads, which started in force after Super Tuesday March 1, will have a longer time to penetrate than in Michigan, but anti-Rubio ads are already running and the well-organized Cruz campaign is clearly competing, even at the risk of having 99 delegates go to Trump. There is talk that Rubio might withdraw before March 15, and his campaign didn’t send out its usual stream of upbeat emails as the March 8 results came in. The danger that his recent failures to make threshold will lead to evaporation of his vote, which would presumably help Cruz. And even if he wins, his delegate total will be well below Cruz’s.
If Rubio loses Florida and Kasich loses Ohio, they’re out of the running. Even if they technically stay in, their votes would dwindle to nothing. If they both win, they’re competitors for the upscale (high-education/high-income) demographic which was the basis of Romney’s 2012 nomination victory and among which they’ve both scored well.
We’ll have an idea of which one is stronger there from the returns of Illinois’s primary, also on March 15. Upscale Republican voters dominate the 12 congressional districts in metro Chicago; downscale voters are stronger in the six Downstate districts. Most delegates are allocated by district, and the Chicago Tribune poll, the only one taken in March, showed Rubio strength there. If Kasich wins and Rubio loses or (less likely) vice versa, the survivor will be in line to win among those upscale voters with no stomach for Trump or Cruz — and will be a placeholder with 66 or 99 delegates that could determine whether or not Donald Trump gets to 1,237.
North Carolina, which awards its 72 delegates entirely proportionately, and Missouri also vote on March 15. Cruz seems likely to be Trump’s main competitor there and has the potential at least to cut any Trump delegate advantage down toward zero.
If Kasich and Rubio both lose on March 15, it will be a Trump-Cruz contest, with Trump having the advantage of the 165 winner-take-all delegates from Florida and Ohio. Polling suggests Trump can be beaten one-on-one, and Cruz has some chance to take the winner-take-all April primaries in Arizona and Wisconsin. But he doesn’t have the ideal profile for big states like New York (April), Pennsylvania (May) and New Jersey and California (June 7).
So it ain’t over. Trump is doing well, but is not the inevitable nominee.
