Donald Trump is no Julius Caesar. At best he’s kind of a comic-book version of a Caesarist-wannabe. Had he been born two millennia ago as Donaldus Trumpum, he would have dodged the Gallic Wars, hired a ghostwriter to pen a memoir about them, and spent his time producing entertainments for the circuses while hatching schemes to deprive hardworking citizens of their bread. But the Ides of March may help determine his electoral fate, as they marked the end of Caesar’s temporal one.
On March 15 we pass the halfway mark in votes cast and delegates selected in the Republican presidential nominating race. On that historically momentous day, we have the first two of nine winner-take-all contests, Florida and Ohio. If Trump sweeps those, he is the likely (though not certain) nominee. If Trump loses both, he’s very unlikely to be the nominee. If the states render a split verdict, we go on with a competitive race between the Caesarist-wannabe and the real Republicans (in both senses of the word).
Where does the race now stand? Voters in 15 states have weighed in, as we write after Super Tuesday, accounting for fewer than 30 percent of the delegates that will ultimately be awarded. Trump has won about 34 percent of the votes cast to date, leading Cruz at 28 percent, Rubio at 22 percent, and Kasich at 7 percent. This has translated into Trump’s winning about 46 percent of the delegates so far, to Cruz’s 32 percent, Rubio’s 15 percent, and Kasich’s 4 percent.
These trends probably won’t change much in the contests over the coming week—which will bring us to the fateful primaries of March 15. Then, 367 delegates will be selected, the second-biggest haul of any day (after Super Tuesday), with 99 of them in Florida and 66 in Ohio awarded on a winner-take-all basis. Marco Rubio is a senator from Florida. John Kasich is the governor of Ohio. They need to be given a clear chance to defeat Trump in their states—which means Ted Cruz and Kasich should not contest Florida, and Cruz and Rubio should step aside in Ohio.
This seem may seem a bit unfair to Cruz, who has to yield in two winner-take-all states, but it isn’t. While Rubio and Kasich perforce focus their time and resources on victory in their home states, which is necessary both to stop Trump and to continue their own campaigns, Cruz can hunt delegates in North Carolina, Missouri, and Illinois, all of which also promise substantial delegate hauls. Cruz has as much stake as Rubio and Kasich in stopping Trump, and the only way that happens is if Trump loses Florida or Ohio—and preferably both.
If the Ides of March go well, Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich can and will battle on, both against Trump and among themselves. There will be many acts to follow, with twists and turns in the plot. After all, Shakespeare dispatches Caesar near the beginning of Act 3, and important things happen after that. We won’t test the reader’s patience by further developing the analogy between our politics and Shakespeare’s play, though readers are invited if they wish to compare our candidates to the famous conspirators—Rubio to the high-minded but at times ineffectual Brutus; Cruz to the wily Cassius, he of a lean and hungry look; and Kasich to Trebonius, who plays a minor but key role in making success possible.
We emphasize that, of course, our Ides of March is an election day, not, as in Rome, the culmination of a conspiracy. Conspiracies are what happens when a republic has already decayed, and they do not save the republic. We are fortunate that the fate of our republic remains in our hands—and right now especially in the hands of the voters of Ohio and Florida. Let them choose wisely so that, at the end of our drama in July in Cleveland, the chairman of the Republican convention will bang the gavel and say,
